@@ Bluff-ploy has failed: No military options @@

Carnegie
January 19, 2006

No Military Options

By Joseph Cirincione
joseph[AT]ceip.org

Iran is moving to restart its suspended uranium enrichment program. Negotiations with
the European Union have collapsed and the crisis is escalating. Does the United
States -- or Israel -- have a military option?

The same neoconservative pundits who campaigned for the invasion of Iraq are now
beating the drums on Iran.

Urging us this week to keep military options open, "Weekly Standard" editor JEW
William Kristol (http://tinyurl.com/8newe) said Iran?s ?nuclear program could well be
getting close to the point of no return?.

Writing from the same talking points, Washington Post columnist JEW Charles
Krauthammer (http://tinyurl.com/c4h4m) said, ?Instead of being years away from the
point of no return for an Iranian bomb?Iran is probably just months away?.

Do they reflect the thinking of senior officials closely aligned with these political
currents? No official has indicated that they do. But just one year ago, Vice
President Cheney seemed to be thinking along exactly these lines when he told radio
host Don Imus on Inauguration Day, "Iran is right at the top of the list". Cheney
came close to endorsing military action, noting that "the Israelis might well decide
to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic
mess afterwards".

There is no need for military strikes against Iran. The country is five to ten years
away from the ability to enrich uranium for fuel or bombs. Even that estimate, shared
by the Defense Intelligence Agency and experts at IISS, ISIS, and University of
Maryland assumes Iran goes full-speed ahead and does not encounter any of the
technical problems that typically plague such programs.

This is not a nuclear bomb crisis, it is a nuclear regime crisis. U.S. Ambassador
John Bolton has correctly pointed out that this is a key test for the Security
Council. If Iran is not stopped the entire nonproliferation regime will be weakened,
and with it the UN system.

But it will have to be diplomats, not F-15s that stop the mullahs. An air strike
against a soft target, such as the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan (which this
author visited in 2005) would inflame Muslim anger, rally the Iranian public around
an otherwise unpopular government and jeopardize further the U.S. position in Iraq.

Finally, the strike would not, as is often said, delay the Iranian program. It would
almost certainly speed it up. That is what happened when the Israelis struck at the
Iraq program in 1981.

The Failure of the Osirak Raid

A bit of history: Back in June of 1991, then-Defense Secretary Cheney gave a
photograph of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak to the man who had commanded the
Israeli air force during the raid on the site in 1981. "With thanks and appreciation
for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program in 1981", Cheney wrote,
"which made our job much easier in Desert Storm".

*** Cheney may have forgotten that the Reagan administration condemned the raid when
it took place, as did most nations. And he may not be aware that the Israeli raid,
far from crippling Iraq's nuclear program, actually accelerated it. The raid was a
tactical success but a strategic failure.

After Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor on June 7, 1981, using US-supplied F-16s and
F-15s, the Reagan administration said, "The United States government condemns the
reported Israeli air strike on the Iraqi nuclear facility, the unprecedented
character of which cannot but seriously add to the already tense situation in the
area". Most other nations joined in denouncing the action.

Israel defended the raid by saying that the Osirak reactor "was intended, despite
statements to the contrary, for the production of atomic bombs. The goal of these
bombs was Israel". The Israelis were right, at least about Saddam's plan to use the
reactor to make bomb fuel. He intended to use the research reactor Iraq had purchased
from France in 1979 to irradiate uranium, producing plutonium that could be extracted
for the core of a bomb. The 40-megawatt reactor was near completion at the time of
the raid, but it had not yet been fueled with uranium rods.

The raid was hotly debated in the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin. Many, such as Yehoshua Saguy, the head of the intelligence division of the
Israeli Defense Forces, argued that Israel should continue to try to find a
nonmilitary solution to the threat, as it would take Iraq five to 10 years to produce
the material needed for a bomb. In the end, Menachem Begin went with the worst-case
estimate of a bomb within one to two years and ordered the attack.

The raid, however, speeded up the Iraqi program. According to former Iraqi nuclear
official Khadir Hamza, "Israel made a mistake". Saddam had planned to slowly divert
plutonium from the reactor, which was under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
safeguards. His diversion plan might have escaped detection, but with what we now
know, it also probably would have taken much longer than even the 10 years Yehoshua
Saguy and others estimated at the time.

The program was proceeding slowly and had run into numerous technical problems, while
Iraq's intense war with Iran was diverting resources from the project. The raid,
however, energized Saddam. He launched a new effort to secretly construct gas
centrifuges and other devices (particularly electromagnetic isotope separation units)
to produce weapons-grade uranium. The program went underground and mushroomed. "At
the beginning we had approximately 500 people working, which increased to 7000
working after the Israeli bombing", Khadir Hamza explained to a Washington audience
in November 2000, "The secret program became a much larger and ambitious program".

Lesson of the Raid

Israel had pulled off a remarkable military raid, striking targets with great
precision over long distances. But the bombing set back Israel more than Iraq. It
further harmed Israel's international reputation, later worsened by the ill-fated
1982 invasion of Lebanon, while making Iraq appear a victim of Israeli aggression.

Officials heralded the "Begin doctrine" of preemptive strikes, but the attack made
Israel complacent. In the words of Israeli-born scholar Avner Cohen, author of Israel
and the Bomb, "The operational success proved to be profoundly and strategically
deceptive", as Israel remained unaware of Iraq's new efforts throughout most of the
1980s.

Internally, Saddam's nuclear ambitions went from a side project to an obsession. Ten
years later, in 1991, he was closer to producing a nuclear bomb with uranium than he
might ever have been pursuing a plutonium path through Osirak.

The raid had not, despite *** Cheney's praise, made "our job much easier" but had
complicated an already difficult problem. Saddam dispersed and hardened his secret
new facilities and protected them with air defenses. In the 1991 war, 43 days of
coalition bombing failed to destroy the program, which ended only when UN disarmament
teams methodically destroyed the equipment on the ground.

Today, with Iran, many of my colleagues would like to keep this option open if only
as a bluff believing that we need the threat of military action to force Iran into
compromise. They may feel the need to prove their ?toughness? to the current
administration. But it is a dangerous stick to wave, particularly when you do not
have any real control over it.

The true lessons of the Osirak raid are worth remembering as optimistic plans for
"solving" Iran now come flying out of neoconservative circles.

* Joseph Cirincione (http://tinyurl.com/77ela) is the Director for Nonproliferation
at Carnegie. This article adapts substantial parts of the author?s previous article
?Bombs Won?t Solve Iran? (http://tinyurl.com/7zcnv), published in The Washington
Post, May 11, 2005.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=17922


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