Iran and the Israeli card

I have posted almost nothing about what to do about Iran and The Bomb because I have no idea what to do. I have neither criticized nor affirmed any of the admittedly minimal steps the Obama administration has taken because I have no better ideas.

If you looked up "intractable" in the dictionary, a photo of Iran's nuclear-processing plant would be right there.

The fact is this: there are no good options, which is to say, none that show reasonable promise of getting Iran to stop working toward The Bomb.

The WaPo's Jackson Diehl discusses this.

The Obama administration's positive tone following its first diplomatic encounter with Iran covers a deep and growing gloom in Washington and European capitals. Seven hours of palaver in Geneva haven't altered an emerging conclusion: None of the steps the West is considering to stop the Iranian nuclear program is likely to work.

Let us recognize that "the West" is not considering air or missile strikes on Iran's nuke sites. Europe can't do it - literally cannot, they don't have the strategic throw to get there. Remember, Europe could not even bomb Serbia in 1999 unless the US led the way.

There have been a number of voices in America calling for our air and naval forces to strike Iran. Here's Gerard Van der Leun's plan, for example:

This may seem snarkily humorous, but it's no strategy. Fantasy, perhaps. There is no one - and I mean no one - in the Defense Department or the military services who thinks that attacking Iran is a remotely good idea. As President Lincoln admonished Secretary of War William Seward, who wanted to add England to the Union's enemy list, "One war at a time." Well, we have two wars going on now, and that's plenty for a defense establishment as small as we have.

Furthermore, I do not understand the continuing glue snorting that an air campaign will solve all our problems. This canard has been promoted since Italian General Giulio Douhet convinced most west European governments that bombers made armies unnecessary. History has proved him bloodily wrong. "Surgical strikes" are as mythical as unicorns. That aside, the United States simply cannot take on another war.

Sanctions? It is to laugh. They didn't work against Saddam Hussein's Iraq because Saddam didn't care and because the United nations and several powerful member states cheated like card sharps. Today, Russia and China won't even agree to them.

As Diehl explains, the best we can do now is come up with some sort of policy combining some sort of sanctions regime with containment of Iran.

[Kenneth] Pollack, a former Clinton administration official, says there is one obvious Plan B: "containment," a policy that got its name during the Cold War. The point would be to limit Iran's ability to produce nuclear weapons or exercise its influence through the region by every means possible short of war -- and to be prepared to sustain the effort over years, maybe decades. It's an option that has been lurking at the back of the debate about Iran for years. "In their heart of hearts I think the Obama administration knows that this is where this is going," Pollack says.

The problem is that containment of the USSR depended on the USSR's leaders being rational actors and therefore deterrable by threat of nuclear war. They counted on the same thing for us, too. This was known as Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, and worked out so that the United States was contained by Russia as much as Russia was contained by us.

Even a nuclear-armed Iran, though, would not be near the peer power to the US that the USSR was (and that Russia still is in nuclear arms). But we are not the focus of Iran's nuclear hostility like we were for Russia's.

It is Israel, as Iran's leaders have made abundantly clear.

The next steps of the Iran drama depend almost solely on two actors, for whom the USA, Russia and pretty much everyone else are mostly spectators. Iran is one, obviously. Israel is the other.

Israel very existence is under direct threat by Iran. Israel's civilian and military leaders understand the limits of air strikes as well as we do. But they have no other choice, literally. US defense secretary Robert Gates has said that air strikes will do nothing but buy time. He's probably right, but the Israelis know they've been buying time since, oh, 1948. If they can buy some more by taking out Iran's present ability to make The Bomb, they darn sure will. And if Iran reconstitutes its capability several years from now, the Israelis will have bought those several years and be willing to buy several more.

Israel holds the cards. They will play them. We just don't know when.

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