Unthinkable

Map: Iran and the Middle East

Introduction: Coming to the Crossroads

Part I: Reality and Hyperbole

1. Iran From the Inside Out

2. The Iranian Nuclear Program

3. The Threat of a Nuclear Iran

4. Proliferation

Part II: Prevention

5. Setting the Scene

6. Bigger Carrots, Bigger Sticks

7. Regime Change

8. The Sword of David

Map: Iran and Israel Military Dynamic

9. A Return to Arms

Map: The U.S.-Iran Battle Space

Part III: Containment

10. The Strategy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

11. Deterrence and Extended Deterrence

12. The Problems of Containment

13. Making Containment Work

Conclusion: Choosing the Least Bad Option

Acknowledgments

About Kenneth M. Pollack

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

For Barry Posen and Stephen Van Evera,

Who taught me how to think

S
ince 2002, when the world learned of Iran's progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, the United States has endured a protracted crisis with the Islamic Republic. It has been painful and frustrating, as all interactions with the Iranian regime typically prove. There have been moments of success. The United States has helped forge a broad coalition of states that have imposed unprecedented sanctions, isolation, and other forms of punishment on Iran to try to convince it to negotiate an end to its nuclear program, albeit to no avail. Iran today is weaker, poorer, and more friendless than ever. Yet for all its successes, the policy has not achieved its ultimate goal and may never do so. In spite of all the pain Iran has suffered, its leaders remain determined to acquire the capacity for nuclear weaponry—and perhaps to field an arsenal once they have done so. There may still be some options for the United States, short of war, to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, but their number is dwindling, as is the likelihood that they will succeed.

This presents us with a dilemma over what to do next. Having tried the easy options and many hard ones, too, it looks increasingly likely that we will soon have to make the hardest choice of all: whether to contain a nuclear Iran or go to war as the final option to prevent one.

That decision is the principal focus of this book.

The debate has already begun. Many on the right have already begun to advocate for an attack on Iran. Others who recognize that America's war-weariness after Iraq and Afghanistan makes it politically impractical to call openly for war with Iran have instead begun to argue that no alternative to war is viable. Meanwhile, many on the left are pleading that war is unnecessary or that it would be disastrous. Some have begun to argue that containment offers a better alternative.

Both sides know the ultimate fork in the road of America's Iran policy is approaching. We are not there yet, but we may be there soon. It is time to begin to consider those choices so that we can make the best one, rather than having one forced upon us. None of the options we have left when it comes to dealing with Iran's nuclear arsenal are good ones. Events overtook the good options long ago, leaving a bunch of difficult long shots. If our last chances all fail, as seems distressingly likely, we will have only the two worst options left: war or containment.

I believe that going to war with Iran to try to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear arsenal would be a worse course of action than containing Iran, even a nuclear Iran. However, I do not believe that the military option is foolish, and I believe that there are much stronger arguments in its favor than was the case even a few years ago. I simply believe that it entails more costs and risks than containment—except in some very specific circumstances. I will explain why in the course of this book.

Although frequently misrepresented, at its heart, containment is a strategy that seeks to prevent Iran from expanding beyond its current borders or destabilizing the Middle East until the regime collapses of its own internal contradictions. It is the strategy that the United States has employed against Iran since the earliest days following the Islamic Revolution. It is not appeasement. It does not mean simply acquiescing
to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, let alone to its dominance of the Persian Gulf region. Indeed, there are many varieties of containment, some more passive, some very aggressive. If we continue to pursue containment toward Iran in the future, one of the most important questions we will have to address is when to employ a more assertive brand of containment and when to hold back and focus more on its defensive aspects.

I also recognize that containment is nothing but the less bad of the two final options. Perhaps more important than which option we choose, the worst thing of all we could do would be to refuse to think through our choice beforehand. Frequently, a politically expedient denial of reality has left us unprepared for unfortunate choices. On those occasions, we have stumbled into one policy or another, and the result has often been disastrous.

Many Americans believe that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was our nation's greatest foreign policy mistake since Vietnam. That war was born of the failure of our efforts to contain Saddam Husayn's Iraq in the 1990s, and that failure was itself the result of our unwillingness to recognize the
need
to contain Saddam's regime for the long term back in 1991. At that moment, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, America's leaders assumed that Saddam would be overthrown by his generals. They designed U.S. policy toward Iraq based on this assumption without any consideration of backups or alternatives. When Saddam survived, the United States was forced into a containment policy for which it had not planned. When that policy crumbled less than a decade later, it left the American people with the worst choices of all and convinced President George W. Bush (and the majority of the American people, who supported him at the time) to invade Iraq. Yet the worst decision was not the decision to invade, but the insistence that it was not necessary to plan or prepare to occupy, secure, and rebuild Iraq. And that mistake stemmed from the Bush 43 administration's willful denial that such a massive undertaking would be necessary.

How we handle Iran is likely to be every bit as consequential as how we handled Iraq. This time, we need to do it right. That can only mean
considering our options and preparing to implement them with a clear-eyed resolution, rather than the rose-colored ignorance that plagued us in Iraq.

Defining a new policy toward Iran has two inherent, unavoidable problems. First, there is too much that we do not know. It is too often the case that we just don't know what the Iranians are doing and thinking. It is not that we do not have any information, only that the information is incomplete and open to multiple interpretations. Therefore, much of our decision-making about Iran must of necessity be based on assumptions. And the assumptions we make determine which policy options we favor or dislike. If you assume that the Iranians will use nuclear weapons once they get them, you will prefer war over containment, and vice versa. How we choose to fill the gaps in our knowledge is often more important than the knowledge we have.

The second unavoidable problem in making policy toward Iran is that there is no “best” strategy to pursue. We have tried lots of different approaches to Iran. None has worked and the Iranians are getting close to having the capability to quickly build nuclear weapons—a point that most people believe could change our relationship and our policy options with Iran. Every path we might take, every policy we might adopt, both before and after we reach that point, entails both significant costs and frightening risks. Deciding which strategy the United States should adopt is a matter of deciding which costs and risks are more or less acceptable. And every individual will weigh those costs and risks differently depending on his or her own perspectives, preferences, and assumptions.

This book is meant to serve two purposes. First, it lays out my own thinking about how the United States should handle the current crisis over Iran's nuclear program. I have been thinking about and working on this question for more than twenty-five years, both in government and out, and I have a preference for one course of action—containment.
Second, the book is meant to provide a framework for understanding the current crisis over Iran's nuclear program and to help others make an informed choice regarding what the United States should do about it, whether that means agreeing with my preference for containment or adopting the alternative of war.