Unthinkable (12 page)

Such high-impact, low-probability scenarios have typically proven to be wasteful and even dangerous as drivers of policy, especially in the nuclear era. Throughout the late Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union wrung their hands and spent billions and billions of dollars (or rubles) over the possibility that the other would launch a disarming first strike when neither side ever had the intention of doing so. Looking back on the Cold War, scholars and practitioners now recognize that the fear of a “bolt from the blue” was an enormous waste of time and money, and distorted superpower relations for no good reason because the likelihood was virtually nonexistent.
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SURPRISE ATTACK.
Although it is the scenario that the Israeli leadership warns about most loudly, the least likely scenario is that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons and use them immediately against Israel. The same goes for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and any other neighbor or adversary of Iran. The Iranian leadership understands that Israel could devastate Iran on its own. Tehran also knows that if Iran were to use a nuclear weapon against any American ally in the region, it could face the full fury of the last superpower. The only potential exception to this rule is Pakistan, which also has its own nuclear arsenal.

Since the dawn of the nuclear era, politicians, statesmen, generals, and
people everywhere have recognized that nuclear weapons are unique because their destructive power is so awesome that only a truly irrational or utterly foolish leader could misunderstand the risks of nuclear retaliation.
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There is nothing to indicate that Iran's leaders do not understand this reality, and everything to indicate that they do. The Iranian leadership can be accused of many irrationalities, but suicidal tendencies is not one of them. Nor have the Iranians shown themselves to be inadvertently suicidal, like Saddam Husayn. The Iranians have miscalculated from time to time (a topic I explore later), but even when they have miscalculated, it has been on a more reduced scale than Saddam's colossal miscalculations—such as his invasion of Iran, invasion of Kuwait, his decision to fight the U.S.-led coalition for Kuwait, his bid to kill former president George H. W. Bush, his attempt to re-invade Kuwait in 1994, and his ultimately fatal insistence that the United States would not invade Iraq in 2003, to take only the best-known examples.
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Iranian leaders are aggressive, anti-American, and murderous, but whenever threatened with severe retaliation, they have pulled back. After the Iranian terrorist attack in June 1996 against the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen and injured 372 others, Tehran realized that it had infuriated the United States to the point that Washington was considering military retaliation. The Iranians pulled in their horns and moderated their behavior to avoid getting walloped by an American military they knew could have caused massive damage to their country and their regime.
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Similarly, they have sought to avoid horrific physical damage, the most famous example of which was Khomeini's decision to end the Iran-Iraq War after a combination of Iraqi battlefield victories, U.S. naval intervention, and Iraqi missile attacks on Iranian cities left Iran militarily prostrate and without any hope of victory.
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Nor is it the case, as some postulate, that the Iranian leadership has a millenarian vision that demands that the Islamic Republic take apocalyptic action to prepare for the return of the Mahdi—the Shi'i equivalent of the Messiah. Whatever Iranian leaders may believe, there is nothing they
have ever done that comports with this notion, whereas much that they have done runs against it. Of greatest importance, Iranian foreign policy has been guided by a ruthless combination of pragmatic strategy and Byzantine domestic politics. While that makes Iran problematic for the United States and difficult to read, nothing about its patterns of behavior give any reason to believe that the Iranians would sacrifice millions of their countrymen in pursuit of a mystical vision. Iran with nuclear weapons is going to be difficult enough; the notion that they would use nuclear weapons unprovoked against the United States, Israel, or other U.S. allies in the region is not among those difficulties.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM.
For much the same reasons, it is equally unlikely that Iran would give nuclear weapons (or nuclear material) to terrorist groups. The rationale is simple, straightforward, and compelling: Iran has a long history of support for terrorism, and a long history of having its involvement with these terrorist groups (and specific terrorist attacks) uncovered. From Beirut to Berlin, Delhi to Dhahran, wherever Iran has engineered a terror attack, its role has been discovered, often quickly. While Tehran has too frequently avoided punishment when it has been caught, the Iranians seem to recognize that if the terrorist attack involved weapons of mass destruction, the targeted country (or its inevitable American ally) probably would not feel so constrained.

Iran has supported terrorism and unconventional warfare since the earliest days of the revolution. It has possessed chemical warfare agents since the late 1980s.
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It has a large and active pharmaceutical industry with samples of all known toxic agents that it could have used to manufacture biological warfare weapons, and the CIA believes that “Tehran probably maintained an offensive BW [Biological Warfare] program.”
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Iran has also possessed radioactive materials that could be used in radiological weapons (“dirty bombs”) since at least 2008. However, it has never sought to mix its support for terrorist groups and its possession of WMD. Had it wanted to do so, Iran could easily have passed chemical or biological agents or radioactive material to Hizballah or another terrorist
group tied to Iran to use on a possible target—Israel or Saddam's Iraq in particular. Yet Tehran never has. And for good reason.

Iran would likely face crushing retaliation for any terrorist use of WMD manufactured by Iran, but the Iranians would also have to trust the terrorists to use it as they intended. That's the problem with terrorists: they are not fully under your control. Once you have given them their orders, money, explosives, and the like, it is difficult to know what they will do next. They might attack the target you intended, or they might not. They might do nothing at all, or they might hit a completely different target—one that you might not have wanted them to. During the Persian Gulf War, a long list of Middle Eastern terrorist groups journeyed to Baghdad to receive cash and weapons from Saddam to launch terrorist attacks on the United States. None of them ever did.
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On the other hand, a lot of Saudis gave money to al-Qa'ida, but they did not tell Osama bin Laden to hit the World Trade Center—and many were probably unhappy when he did.

It is easy to understand why Iran has never risked its own safety by giving WMD to terrorist groups, and it seems even less likely that it would do so with a nuclear weapon. Especially early on, when Iran may have only a few weapons, why would it hand one to a terrorist group? If Iran's leaders ever felt the need to have a nuclear device delivered by covert action, their own Quds force and Intelligence Services would be a far better vehicle than unpredictable and uncontrollable terrorists.

Paul Pillar, the former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, has pointed out that, “No regime in the history of the nuclear age has ever been known to transfer nuclear material to a nonstate group.”
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That list includes Iraq, which relied on WMD throughout the Iran-Iraq War, and Libya, which was a notorious state sponsor of terrorism under Muammar Qadhafi. It also now includes North Korea—a regime so opaque, so unpredictable, and so bizarre as to make the Iranians seem bland and transparent by comparison. Seen from the perspective of a nuclear state itself, as opposed to the perspective of fearful rivals, the notion of giving nuclear weapons to terrorists makes no sense. The risks
of horrific retaliation overwhelm any possible benefit from successfully getting away with it. That's why no one has given nukes to terrorists and it's why the Iranians have never given WMD to terrorists.

The one aspect of Iran's aspirations that we can be sure of is that it would want a nuclear weapons capability, if not a full-blown arsenal, to defend itself.
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There is no question that the Iranian leadership is paranoid, xenophobic, conspiratorial. and oblivious to how others read their own actions, all of which has helped the Islamic Republic become internationally unpopular.
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However, as the old cliché has it, even paranoids have enemies. Iran has been a predominantly Shi'i nation since the Safavids conquered Persia in 1501. Until the creation of a (Shi'a-dominated) proto-democracy in Iraq after Saddam's fall in 2003, Iran was the only majority Shi'i country ruled by a Shi'i elite. More than 90 percent of Iranians are Shi'a, but 90 percent of Muslims worldwide are Sunni. As a result, for more than five hundred years, Iran has borne the brunt of Sunni persecution of Shi'ism, which many Sunnis treat as a form of apostasy. Indeed, al-Qa'ida and other violent Sunni extremists hate the Shi'a—and want to kill them—far more than they hate Christians and Jews. As problems between Sunnis and Shi'a have escalated in recent years in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, the Sunnis have tended to blame Iran for the problems.

Piled on top of Iran's religious persecution has been its history of foreign intervention. For roughly two centuries, Iran has been attacked and even invaded by Western powers. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iran was one of many lands fought over by Russia and Great Britain as part of their “Great Game.” By the turn of the twentieth century, the two great European empires dominated or owned much of the key governmental and economic institutions in the country then still called Persia. During World War I, Persia became a battleground for
British, Russian, and Turkish armies, and was devastated by the fighting. In World War II, Iran was invaded by Soviet and British armies, and the Allies jointly occupied and administered Iran, including the Americans after Pearl Harbor. Great Britain relied on Iranian oil and the Allies used Iran's road and rail network to transport more than one-third of all of the Lend-Lease aid provided by the United States to the Soviet Union. After the war, both London and Moscow tried to maintain their joint occupation, only to have the Truman administration force them out. Even still, the Brits made one last bid, in 1952, when they tried to mount a military intervention to topple the popular anti-British prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, only to have U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson and President Harry Truman forbid them from doing so.
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During the period of American ascendancy throughout the Cold War, Washington never invaded Iran—and never interfered in Iranian affairs to the extent that most Iranians believe—but neither was the United States benign. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration helped engineer Mosaddeq's fall and the reinstatement of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran.
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As the Shah's regime was crumbling under the blows of the Islamic Revolution in early 1979, the Carter administration dispatched General Robert E. Huyser to Tehran to try to convince the Iranian military to mount a counterrevolution. (Huyser concluded it was impossible within days of arriving.)
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The United States has had a desultory covert action program against Iran since the 1990s, although that project garnered little by way of resources or attention for most of its history.
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Numerous press accounts suggest that that program has been reinvigorated in recent years as the Bush 43 and Obama administrations have sought to employ cyberwarfare against Iran's nuclear program.
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During the Iran-Iraq War, Iran was infuriated that neither the United States nor any other country made any effort to stop Iraq from employing massive numbers of chemical warfare munitions against Iran. This history could only have reinforced Iran's determination to acquire any and all weapons to defend itself, since Tehran felt it could not count on anyone else's help.
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Of course, what a great many Iranians, and the current regime's leadership,
fail to recognize is that it is Tehran's own hostile actions that have stoked American anger at Iran, fueling the threat of American intervention that the Iranians argue they are trying to prevent. From the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis of 1979–81 to the Beirut attacks of 1983–85 to the Tanker War of 1987–88 to the Lebanese hostage crises of the 1980s and '90s to the Khobar Towers attack in 1996, down through the long history of Iranian-backed attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, and right up to the stillborn plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 2011, Iran has mounted direct attacks on Americans. In most of these cases, there was no hostile act by the United States against Iran preceding it. Instead, the attacks seem to have been triggered by Iranian exaggerations or misperceptions of U.S. actions and intentions. Yet this long list of incidents (among others) has fired up American animosity toward Iran, and, on several occasions, raised the specter of a U.S. military operation against Iran.

Whether real or imagined, the threat from the United States is dangerous for Iran. Although the Iranians claim a willingness and ability to fight the United States and win, their capacity to do so is slight. Iran could inflict some considerable pain on American forces, especially if the United States ever decided to invade the country and overthrow the regime, but it has no hope of defeating a massive campaign by the U.S. armed forces. Given Iran's fear of American conventional military power, it is not hard to imagine that Tehran would want a nuclear deterrent as the only possible way to defend itself against Washington's military power. Indeed, some Iranians now explicitly say that they want nuclear weapons so that they never again have to fear American retaliation.
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