THE BOGUS IRAN INTELLIGENCE DEBATE
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2012
To better understand the debate over the state of Iran’s nuclear bomb building capabilities, it helps to talk to someone who has built a nuclear bomb. Tom Reed served as Secretary of the Air Force and head of the National Reconnaissance Office in the 1970s, but in an earlier life he designed thermonuclear devices at Lawrence Livermore and watched two of them detonate off Christmas Island in 1962.
How hard is it, I asked Mr. Reed when he visited the Journal last week, to build a crude nuclear weapon on the model of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima? “Anyone can build it,” he said flatly, provided they have about 141 lbs. of uranium enriched to an 80% grade. After that, he says, it’s not especially hard to master the technologies of weaponization, provided you’re not doing something fancy like implosion or miniaturization.
Bear that in mind as the New York Times reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are sure, or pretty sure, that Iran “still has not decided to pursue a weapon”—a view the paper says is shared by Israel’s Mossad. The report echoes the conclusion of a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran put its nuclear-weapons program on the shelf back in 2003.
All this sounds like it matters a whole lot. It doesn’t. You may not be able to divine whether a drinker, holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker in one hand and a glass tinkling with ice in the other, actually intends to pour himself a drink. And perhaps he doesn’t. But the important thing, at least when it comes to intervention, is not to present him with the opportunity in the first place.
That’s what was so misleading about the 2007 NIE, which relegated to a footnote the observation that “by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapons design and weaponization work. . . . [W]e do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.” What the NIE called “civil work” is, in fact, the central piece in assembling a nuclear device. To have sufficient quantities of enriched uranium is, so to speak, the whiskey of a nuclear-weapons program. By contrast, “weaponization”—the vessel into which you pour and through which you can deliver the enriched uranium cocktail—is merely the glass.
It’s for this reason that Iran has spent the better part of the last several years building a redundant enrichment facility deep underground near the city of Qom. And thanks in part to the regular reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world doesn’t need to rely on spies or shady sources to figure out just how much uranium the Iranians have enriched: At last count, more than five tons to a 5% grade, and more than 100 kilos to 20%.
In other words, having a debate about the quality of our Iran intelligence is mostly an irrelevance: Iran’s real nuclear-weapons program is hiding in plain sight. The serious question policy makers must answer isn’t whether Iran will go for a bomb once it is within a half-step of getting one. It’s whether Iran should be allowed to get within that half-step.
That is the essence of the debate the Obama administration is now having with Israel. The president has stated flatly that he won’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Good. But Israelis worry that Mr. Obama will allow them to come too close for comfort (or pre-emption). Israel cannot be reassured by the administration’s apparent decision to make its case through a series of media leaks, all calculated to head off a possible Israeli strike.
On Monday, the Times published the (leaked) results of a “classified war game” in which an Israeli strike on Iran leaves “hundreds of American dead,” perhaps through an attack on a Navy warship. That isn’t exactly the subtlest way of warning Israel that, should they strike Iran, they will do so forewarned that American blood will be on their hands, never mind that it’s the Iranians who would be doing the killing.
Is this outcome likely? Maybe, though it assumes a level of Iranian irrationality—responding to an Israeli attack by bringing the U.S. into the conflict—that top U.S. officials don’t otherwise attribute to Iran’s leaders. But the deeper problem with this leak is that an intelligence product is being used as a political tool. It was the same story with the 2007 NIE, whose purpose was to foreclose the possibility that the Bush administration would attack Iran.
It should come as no surprise that an intelligence community meant to provide decision makers with disinterested analysis has, in practice, policy goals and ideological axes of its own. But that doesn’t mean it is any less dangerous. The real lesson of the Iraq WMD debacle wasn’t that the intelligence was “overhyped,” since the CIA is equally notorious for erring in the opposite direction. It was that intelligence products were treated as authoritative guides to decision making. Spooks, like English children, should be seen, not heard. The problem is that the spooks (like the children) want it the other way around.
How, then, should people think about the Iran state of play? By avoiding the misdirections of “intelligence.” For real intelligence, merely consider that a regime that can take a rock in its right hand to stone a woman to death should not have a nuclear bomb within reach of its left. Even a spook can grasp that.
IRANIAN RATIONALITY: A LESSON FROM ROBERT MCNAMARA
Tommy Berzi
Jerusalem Magazine, February 23, 2012
Due to their apocalyptic ideology, the rationality of Iranian leaders is disputed. Nevertheless, even if one assumes that the regime is a rational actor, there is no guarantee that it would not make bad decisions, or commit costly mistakes.
In the past several months there has been a dynamic discussion about whether the Iranian leadership would behave rationally in the possession of nuclear weapons. This discussion about rationality comes down to policy implications regarding the possibility of living with a nuclear Iran.
Believers in Iranian irrationality point to the religious factor and apocalyptic worldview in Iranian decision making, and argue that deterrence cannot work because of the ideology of the regime. The return of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, has been a central element in many of [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s statements. He believes that the return is imminent, and is supposed to occur after global chaos. Ahmadinejad even prayed for this to come true in one of his addresses at the United Nations General Assembly: “O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.…” He [also] declared after winning the elections in 2005 that the Islamic “revolution’s main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Mahdi.”
Those who claim Iran would act rationally in the possession of nuclear weapons assume that Western deterrence will be sufficient to handle the threat. Since Iranian leaders are rational, they well understand that retaliation would be devastating.
Fareed Zakariah, for example, pointed to historical parallels in his recent article in The Washington Post: “After World War II, as the Soviet Union approached a nuclear capability, the United States was seized by a panic that lasted for years. Everything that Israel says about Iran now, we said about the Soviet Union. We saw it as a radical, revolutionary regime…determined to overthrow the governments of the Western world in order to establish global communism. We saw Moscow as irrational, aggressive and utterly unconcerned with human life.…”
Zakariah claims the Soviets, the North Koreans and the Pakistanis were all successfully deterred by mutual fears of destruction. He doesn’t see the Iranian regime as less rational…suggesting that just like the US learned to live with Soviet nuclear weapons, so could Israel.
The concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD) with the Soviet Union was first fully described in a speech by former US defense secretary Robert McNamara 50 years ago. The doctrine of MAD assumes that each side has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other side, and that either side has a second-strike capability that would allow retaliation with equal or greater force. The idea of assured destruction means that it would be irrational initiating a nuclear attack since it would inevitably lead to one’s own destruction.
The MAD theory was already put to the challenge in the same year, in October 1962, when the Soviet Union deployed missiles with nuclear warheads to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Many observed that the world never came as close to a nuclear missile war as then.
In 2003, an American documentary film titled The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was produced. The plot revolves around an interview with the former defense secretary. McNamara’s second lesson – “Rationality Will Not Save Us” – was based on his experience during the Cuban missile crisis.
“I want to say – and this is very important – at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today,” [McNamara says in the film.] According to McNamara, the major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis was that the “indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.”
In the documentary McNamara also referred to a meeting in January 1992 with Fidel Castro that took place in Havana, Cuba, when McNamara finally found out about the exact quantity of weapons – 162 nuclear warheads – that were placed on the island by the Soviets. McNamara followed this up by directing three questions to Castro: “No. 1: did you know the nuclear warheads were there? No. 2: if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of a US attack that he use them? No. 3: if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?” According to McNamara’s account, Castro responded: “No. 1: I knew they were there. No. 2: I would not have recommended to Khrushchev, I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used. No. 3: What would have happened to Cuba? It would have been totally destroyed.…”
Even if one assumes that the Iranian regime is a rational actor, there is no guarantee that it would not make bad decisions, or commit costly mistakes. Sometimes decisions can be perfectly rational but based on perceptions, false assumptions by misreading the other side, or on bad intelligence. Hence the expression describing the huge uncertainty during military conflicts: the fog of war. [Neither] rationality [nor irrationality] will save us.
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED FAREED ZAKARIA
Clifford D. May
National Review, March 15, 2012
Fareed Zakaria is wearing his “I’m perplexed” face. On his weekly CNN program, he notes that Saudi Arabia did not go nuclear in response to “Israel’s buildup of a large arsenal of nuclear weapons.” So why, he asks the camera, would the Saudis do so in response to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons?
The camera did not answer, so I will: The Saudis are not fools. They know Israel poses no threat to them. They know, too, that those who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran seek to establish hegemony over the Middle East and lead a global Islamist ascendancy.
A nuclear-armed Iran would challenge the Saudi clan’s claim to be the rightful guardian of Mecca and Medina and embolden Arabia’s Shia minority. It would threaten the small states in the region, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain among them. It would dominate Iraq (where its influence has been growing as American forces have withdrawn) and Afghanistan (from which American forces soon will withdraw).
So if the Iranians get nukes, the Saudis can be expected to acquire them not long after (with Pakistan likely providing express delivery). Turkey probably will not trail far behind. Other states may follow suit. In such a situation, the chance of a nuclear device finding its way into terrorist hands would increase substantially—as President Obama and others have pointed out.
“But,” Zakaria asks in his most recent Time magazine column, “would a country that has labored for decades to pursue a nuclear program and suffered huge sanctions and costs to do so then turn around and give the fruits of its efforts to a gang of militants?” The obvious answer is yes—if those militants were planning to kill people Iran’s rulers want killed. That’s kind of what it means to be a sponsor of terrorism, and Iran has been the world leader in this field for a long time.…
Zakaria asserts that “the evidence is ambiguous” as to whether Iran’s rulers “have decided” to develop nuclear weapons—despite the fact that Yukiya Amano, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week that “Iran has engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosive devices.…”
In the same column, Zakaria asserts that Iran is being told to “surrender.” Now he’s got me perplexed: Why is asking Iran’s rulers not to develop a weapon they have not decided to develop a demand for “surrender”?
Zakaria’s commentaries omit any mention of the stated intentions of Iran’s theocrats. Is that because quoting them would make it apparent that this crisis has been caused by them—not by what Zakaria calls a sudden attack of “war fever” whipped up by those addressing the AIPAC conference earlier this month?
Iran’s rulers for years have threatened Israelis with genocide. In the chilling words of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israel is “a cancerous tumor” that “will be removed.” That Iran now appears close to acquiring the nuclear scalpel to perform such surgery makes the problem urgent for Israelis. But it should not be their responsibility alone. That becomes clear when you consider the broader goal declared by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
“We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance and the Islamic world.… Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? You had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.…”
Might the [“moderates”] at least listen to Don Cooke? The youngest of the American diplomats taken hostage in Tehran in 1979, he retired from the Foreign Service this year and went on to recall his experience—which included mock firing squads, manacles, and blindfolds. He and his fellow captives, he wrote, were released only when Khomeini became convinced “that the Reagan administration was committed to end the hostage crisis by any means necessary.” In subsequent Iranian–American confrontations, too, “the success of our response depended both on appearing resolute and on being resolute.”
Today, once again, Cooke argues, Iran’s rulers must be convinced “that we have the capability and the will to end their [nuclear] program ourselves. The irony is that the more clearly we demonstrate that capability and will, the less likely we will need to use them.”
One way to start would be for President Obama to speak directly to the Iranian people. He would say how much he regrets the suffering caused them by the economic sanctions implemented so far and still to come. He would make clear that the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of those who rule Iran, because civilized people cannot turn a blind eye to what they have been doing: supporting terrorism, threatening genocide, illegally developing nuclear weapons, ordering assassinations abroad, backing Assad’s butchery in Syria, and, not least, brutalizing and oppressing ordinary Iranians at home.
He would say without equivocation that he intends to do whatever is necessary to prevent Iran’s rulers from resting their fingers on nuclear triggers.… Belatedly, he would answer the question posed by the protestors on the streets of Tehran in 2009: “Obama, are you with us or against us?” He would say that he and other Americans will always be on the side of those fighting for freedom, human rights, and tolerance. Why would Obama not do this? And why, by the way, does that question not perplex Fareed Zakaria?
(Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
ISRAELIS GROW CONFIDENT STRIKE
ON IRAN’S NUKES CAN WORK
Jeffrey Goldberg
Bloomberg, March 19, 2012
In 2005, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then Israel’s finance minister, made an official visit to Uganda. For Netanyahu, visits to Uganda are weighted with sadness. It was at the airport in Entebbe that his older brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, was shot dead by a Ugandan soldier. Yonatan was the leader of an Israeli commando team dispatched by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in July 1976 to rescue Jewish hostages held by pro-Palestinian terrorists. The terrorists had diverted an Air France flight to Uganda, where the then-dictator, the infamous Idi Amin, gave them refuge.
The raid was a near-total success. The hijackers were all killed, along with dozens of Ugandan soldiers posted to the airport by Amin to protect the terrorists. Only three hostages died; 102 were rescued. (A fourth was later murdered in a Ugandan hospital.) Yonatan was the only Israeli soldier killed.
In his 2005 visit, Benjamin Netanyahu was welcomed by the current president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, who was an anti-Amin guerilla leader at the time of the Entebbe raid. Museveni accompanied Netanyahu to the airport, and unveiled a plaque in his brother’s memory. The Ugandan president told him that the Israeli raid on Entebbe was a turning point in the struggle against Amin. It bolstered the opposition’s spirits and proved to them that Amin was vulnerable. Amin’s government would fall some two and half years later.
Unclothe the Emperor
A widely held assumption about a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is that it would spur Iranian citizens—many of whom appear to despise their rulers—to rally around the regime. But Netanyahu, I’m told, believes a successful raid could unclothe the emperor, emboldening Iran’s citizens to overthrow the regime (as they tried to do, unsuccessfully, in 2009). You might call this the Museveni Paradigm.…
After interviewing many people [in Israel] with direct knowledge of internal government thinking…I’m highly confident that Netanyahu isn’t bluffing—that he is in fact counting down to the day when he will authorize a strike against a half-dozen or more Iranian nuclear sites.
One reason I’m now more convinced is that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are working hard to convince other members of the Israeli cabinet that a strike might soon be necessary. But I also heard from Israeli national-security officials a number of best-case scenarios about the consequences of an attack, which suggested to me that they believe they have thought through all the risks—and that they keep coming to the same conclusions.
All-out War
One conclusion key officials have reached is that a strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out war. This argument holds that the Iranians might choose to cover up an attack, in the manner of the Syrian government when its nuclear facility was destroyed by the Israeli air force in 2007. An Israeli strike wouldn’t focus on densely populated cities, so the Iranian government might be able to control, to some degree, the flow of information about it.
Some Israeli officials believe that Iran’s leaders might choose to play down the insult of a raid and launch a handful of rockets at Tel Aviv as an angry gesture, rather than declare all-out war. I’m not endorsing this view, but I was struck by its optimism.…
Another theory making the rounds was that Obama has so deeply internalized the argument that Israel has the sovereign right to defend itself against a threat to its existence that an Israeli attack, even one launched against U.S. wishes, wouldn’t anger him. In this scenario, Obama would move immediately to help buttress Israel’s defenses against an Iranian counterstrike.
Some Israeli security officials also believe that Iran won’t target American ships or installations in the Middle East in retaliation for a strike, as many American officials fear, because the leadership in Tehran understands that American retaliation for an Iranian attack could be so severe as to threaten the regime itself.
This contradicts Netanyahu’s assertion, first made to me three years ago, that Iran’s rulers are members of a “messianic, apocalyptic cult,” unmoved by the calculations of rational self-interest.… But it does make sense if you believe that regime survival is an important goal of the ayatollahs.
Finally, [Israelis contend] that a strike in the next six months…will set back the ayatollahs’ atomic ambitions at least five years. American military planners tend to think that Israel could do only a year or two worth of damage.
The arguments I’ve outlined here all lead to a single conclusion: The Israeli political leadership increasingly believes that an attack on Iran will not be the disaster many American officials, and some ex-Israeli security officials, fear it will be.…
