By Paul Van Olson
October 3, 2007
Washington, D.C. (Crime Library) The War Room. As debate over further sanctions continues to percolate at the UN in anticipation of the International Atomic Energy Agency's November report on Iran's nuclear program, both sides have made military gestures to demonstrate the seriousness of the issue.
Last year Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened to close the Persian Gulf to shipments of oil, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised that Iran would strike at U.S. interests around the world in retaliation for any U.S. military action against Iran's nuclear program. In September 2007 the deputy commander of the Iranian Air Force, Gen. Mohammad Alavi declared that Iran would retaliate against Israel with air strikes for any Israeli attack.
The U.S. military, somewhat more obliquely, has demonstrated its preparations by publicizing, as Eric Margolis of The Times of London reported in its Sept. 22 issue, the re-energization of Checkmate, the Air Force study group which planned much of the air campaign against Iraq in 1991, and by drawing attention, as Tim Shipman of The Daily Telegraph reported on Oct.2, to the ongoing joint activities it has conducted with Persian Gulf states sharing the U.S.'s concerns about Iran's ambitions.
On both sides, much of this posturing is clearly only for political and bargaining purposes. The Gulf Arab states who are the closest U.S. allies in the region, such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, are militarily insignificant; their prime value to the U.S. as allies springs from their provision of sites for U.S. airbases. More powerful regional players, like the Saudis, would be delighted to see the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon forestalled, but would be unlikely to take direct action to prevent it. The mention of Checkmate only draws attention to the ongoing planning processes for which all militaries are responsible, developing contingency plans to address evolving political situations.
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| Iran Map |
If publicization of some American military actions has been for negotiating purposes, nearly all of the Iranian military flexing can be similarly dismissed. From an operational point of view, the ability of the U.S. military to eliminate targeted Iranian nuclear or military sites cannot be seriously questioned, Iranian bluster notwithstanding. U.S. air superiority, even by the estimation of the Russian experts who installed Iran's most recent air defense upgrades at the beginning of this year, is sufficient to permit American air strikes on virtually any target within Iran the U.S. designated. The outstanding challenges to the success of a hypothetical U.S. air campaign are classified and largely imponderable: whether U.S. intelligence has in fact identified all sites related to the Iranian program, and whether facilities at those sites are hardened or buried so deeply as to require exceptional means to destroy them.
To a certain extent, though, even concerns about the hardening of Iranian nuclear facilities are overstated. The object of strategic bombing is usually not to eliminate industrial activity completely, which has historically proven to be an elusive goal, even when strategic bottlenecks in the enemy's war industries are identified, but rather to disrupt it and stymie its expansion. The electrical demands of nuclear enrichment, for instance, are great enough that the disruption of the Iranian power grid would present a significant handicap to ongoing work of the program. Even if large numbers of enrichment cascades were hardened and buried so deeply underground that conventional bombing could not destroy them, the power to operate them, supplied either by electrical transmission or fuel supplies to similarly hardened and buried generators, cannot be completely hidden from attack. The easiest way to stall the Iranian nuclear program is to eliminate the infrastructure on which it relies.
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| Mahmoud Admadinejad |
The prospect of attacks on national infrastructure such as an ongoing suppression of the Iranian power grid brings us to the real dilemma confronting the Western powers opposed to the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions. Since complete destruction of the Iranian nuclear program is not a realistic goal, only its suppression, any long-term solution to the problem relies on the complete reversal not only of Ahmadinejad's stated commitment to persist in the current policy, but also statements of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the current environment, a U.S. or Allied military occupation and reconstruction of Iran to completely rebuild the Iranian political system is not a probable outcome, regardless of the provocations or dissimulations of Iran's current leadership. Only a popular reaction within Iran sufficient to shake the hold on power of these two men could cause a permanent reversal in Iranian nuclear policy.
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