Unthinkable (36 page)

As a result, the United States could attack far more sites than the Israelis, with much greater certainty that they would be destroyed. Whereas the Israelis probably could go after no more than about six of Iran's most important nuclear facilities, the United States could attack dozens of other targets: secondary nuclear sites, ballistic missile production plants
and bases, leadership targets, even research facilities that support both the nuclear and missile programs.

These forces also give the United States a wide range of options for how to attack Iran. Washington could decide to employ only stealthy forces to effectively eliminate the problem of Iranian air defenses. In such a scenario, the United States would target Iran's aboveground, unfortified nuclear facilities (like the Esfahan uranium conversion plant and its various centrifuge and ballistic missile manufacturing facilities) with scores of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles launched from B-52 bombers and Navy ships in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. The United States might complement this attack by targeting key leadership sites or small facilities located in populated areas with UAV-fired weapons. Iran's large and heavily fortified sites—such as Fordow, Natanz, and Parchin—would be left to B-2 bombers carrying bunker-busting munitions including the MOPs. If necessary, the B-2s could even be escorted by stealthy F-22 fighters. Such an operation would be small, perhaps consisting of no more than several hundred cruise missiles, UAVs, and manned aircraft sorties. Conceivably, it might take place all in one night. However, an attack such as this one might only be able to destroy a dozen or more of Iran's highest-value nuclear and ballistic missile sites, which might not set back Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability much more than an Israeli strike would.

If a stripped-down operation can't do the job, the United States has almost limitless options to go bigger. Larger campaigns would sacrifice stealth for brawn, but could hit many more targets and have a far greater certainty of destroying them. Larger, more comprehensive air campaigns would likely be structured and sequenced somewhat differently from scaled-down versions. In the first wave of sorties, some strikes might be directed against key Iranian nuclear facilities, especially those containing assets believed to be easy for Iran to move. But this type of campaign would likely focus its initial efforts on destroying Iranian air defenses, including radars, surface-to-air missiles, and fighter aircraft, to establish air supremacy. The initial waves would be followed by attacks against Iranian
nuclear facilities, ballistic missile production and storage sites, research centers, and leadership targets. American intelligence and reconnaissance aircraft (and satellites) would monitor the attacks to assess damage while follow-on sorties would restrike targets missed the first time. Some targets, such as Natanz and Fordow, might require repeated strikes to ensure that penetrating munitions could “dig” all the way to the centrifuge halls themselves. Some sorties might be directed—or held in reserve—against Iranian air and naval forces along the Strait of Hormuz to prevent them from attempting to close the Strait in retaliation for the American strikes.

A large air campaign would likely involve thousands of sorties and cruise missile attacks, and could last anywhere from several days to several weeks. By way of comparison, Operation Desert Fox—a three-day air campaign against Iraq in 1998 that sought to destroy thirteen purported Iraqi WMD facilities and nearly fifty “regime-protection” and leadership targets—required 650 manned aircraft sorties and 415 cruise missile strikes.
¹⁰
American aircraft and munitions are more capable today than they were then, and we can rely on UAVs to perform some of the missions for which we once had to use manned aircraft, but Iran's air and air defense forces are somewhat more formidable than Iraq's, and the United States might want to destroy more targets than during Desert Fox.

An American air campaign is likely to do more damage to the Iranian nuclear program than an Israeli strike. An American air campaign could potentially do
much
more damage to the Iranian nuclear program than an Israeli strike, especially if the United States opted to mount a large, sustained operation involving thousands of missiles and air strikes over days or weeks. Beyond that, predictions get murky. Cordesman and Toukan concluded in their study of an American air campaign against Iran that “[d]epending on the forces allocated and duration of air strikes, it is unlikely that an air campaign alone could alone [
sic
] terminate Iran's
program. The possibility of dispersed facilities complicates any assessment of a potential mission success, making it unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on Iran's nuclear facilities.”
¹¹

As an example of the uncertainties surrounding an American air campaign, the United States believes that the MOP bomb can destroy the Fordow facility, but no one is sure. Repeated strikes on Fordow with MOPs almost certainly would render the facility unusable by collapsing tunnels, sealing entrances, closing off air shafts, and the like. But this would mean hitting the facility with quite a few of these enormous bombs, which can only be carried by the B-2, including restrikes over several days to be certain that the facility was sufficiently damaged.
¹²
The most cogent pro-air-campaign argument yet presented acknowledged that the MOPs might not be able to destroy Fordow, and recommended striking before it was fully operational.
¹³

Then there is the constant problem of secret Iranian facilities. The IAEA and the Western powers are all combing Iran for any sign that Tehran is building secret facilities. This probably makes it less likely that the Iranians are hiding something from us, but we don't know what we don't know. We assume that because we have found several secret Iranian facilities, that means that it is unlikely that the Iranians could hide other facilities from us. Yet in almost every case, it took about three years from the time that Iran began work on a secret site to when we discovered it. Are there sites in Iran that they began one, two, or even three years ago that we simply haven't found yet because they have not reached a stage of completion that we can detect? Are there other sites out there that are near completion or even fully operational that we just never found? Even if we suspect that there aren't, we cannot be certain, and given our history, we should not be. In the 1980s we found several secret nuclear facilities that the Iraqis tried to hide from us and that too made us confident that we knew where all of Iraq's hidden nuclear sites were, only to find out in 1991 that we didn't. Former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Hayden has publicly dismissed the notion of an American
(or Israeli) strike on Iran, because he doubts that the United States (or Israel) knows where all the key targets are and he fears that attacking would instead ensure a desperate Iranian push for the bomb.
¹⁴

Another frustrating uncertainty akin to those of an Israeli air strike is over how fast the Iranians could rebuild from scratch. If an American air attack were wholly successful and wiped out the Iranian nuclear program completely, and the Iranians still decided to rebuild, how long would it take them? The United States can wreck Iran's centrifuge halls, mangle the centrifuges themselves, obliterate their power sources, and so on, but we can't remove the knowledge from the heads of their scientists. Most estimates of the degree of Iranian scientific knowledge about enrichment and nuclear weapons indicate that the Iranians have advanced to where they could start from scratch and be back to their current state in somewhere between two and five years, with some willing to go as high as seven. A 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service concluded that Iran could rebuild most of its centrifuge workshops within six months after an attack, after which Iran could start manufacturing replacement centrifuges. The report also warned that neither the United States nor Israel knew for certain where all of Iran's nuclear facilities were located and therefore that it was “unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.”
¹⁵
Perhaps for the same reasons, former deputy secretary of defense Colin Kahl has warned, “Senior U.S. defense officials have repeatedly stated that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would stall Tehran's progress for only a few years.”
¹⁶

While it is not impossible for the United States to wipe out Iran's nuclear program completely, especially if Washington were willing to mount a massive, sustained air campaign, it is more likely that even American strikes would not succeed quite to that level. A major American air campaign against Iran would undoubtedly do extensive damage to the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs, but how extensive? If an Israeli strike would be expected to set the Iranian nuclear program back
by a year or two, how much longer would an American campaign set it back? Eighteen months? Three years? Five? We do not know.

IMPACT ON IRANIAN POLITICS.
Those who oppose air strikes invariably argue that such a campaign would engage Iranian nationalism and latent anti-Americanism and create a “rally 'round the flag effect” that would galvanize the Iranian people to greater support of the regime.
¹⁷
For instance, then–secretary of defense Leon Panetta, in his remarks at the Saban Forum in December 2011, said that one likely unintended consequence of a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be that “the regime that is weak now . . . would suddenly be able to reestablish itself, suddenly be able to get support in the region.”
¹⁸
Those who favor air strikes disagree, insisting that any such impact would be short-lived and would eventually be replaced by deepening popular unhappiness with the regime, because most Iranians would blame the regime for having made the mistakes that provoked the American attack.
¹⁹
In what is probably the definitive article promoting an Israeli strike on Iran, the cannily iconoclastic Iran expert Reuel Gerecht has charged, “An Israeli strike now—after the rise of the Green Movement and the crackdown on it—is more likely to shake the regime than would have a massive American attack in 2002, when Tehran's clandestine nuclear program was first revealed. And if anything can jolt the pro-democracy movement forward, contrary to the now passionately accepted conventional wisdom, an Israeli strike against the nuclear sites is it.”
²⁰

This debate is of more than passing importance. It is part of the question of whether Iran would reconstitute its nuclear program after American air strikes. There is too little evidence and too many unknowns to be certain, but here is how I add up the evidence. I see three factors that bear on this question.

The first is the general pattern of air campaigns and their impact on the civilian population of the targeted country. The evidence is overwhelming and compelling: when people are bombed by another country, they do not blame their own government for provoking the bombing—they
blame the country doing the bombing. From Spain in the 1930s to Germany and Japan in the 1940s, to Vietnam in the 1970s, to Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and Iraq and Serbia in the 1990s, this pattern has held.
²¹
However, there are some important divergent aspects worth noting. In all of these wars, bombing campaigns directed against the civilian population did help cause the populace to tire of the war. Second, the air campaign against Serbia apparently made Slobodan Milosevic concerned that it was turning the Serbian populace against him, and this fear does appear to have been part of his rationale for conceding Bosnia.
²²
Third, at least in Iraq, disenchantment with the regime for bringing about the prolonged bombing and sanctions did not bring about any commensurate increase in popularity of the United States. Most Iraqis hated Saddam's policies and the misfortune they had brought on Iraq, but they also blamed the United States for their misery.
²³

With regard to Iran specifically, several points are relevant. Many Iranians are strident nationalists who have had it ingrained in them that foreign interference is the root cause of Iran's problems and therefore that they must resist any and all foreign interference in Iranian affairs. Many Iranian dissidents have shied away from taking money or other support from foreign governments, and Iranian regimes (and even just politicians, dating back to Mosaddeq) try to discredit rivals by branding them as tools of foreign regimes. In addition, the regime easily crushed the Green Movement in 2009—and prevented it from even mounting protests in 2011. This suggests that popular unrest is unlikely to have much impact on the regime regardless of its inspiration, at least unless some dramatic change takes place. At present and for the foreseeable future, there is nothing apparent that will change the regime's determination to hold power by dint of force whenever it is necessary.
²⁴

Based on all this, it seems most likely that American air strikes will make Iranians angry at the United States, but may not have much impact on their feelings about their own government one way or the other. Those Iranians who support the government will hate the United States even more, and those who dislike their government won't like their government
any more, but they probably will like us less. The regime, I suspect, will play up these sentiments to justify whatever it wants to do in the aftermath of an American strike: arrest even more dissidents and political opponents, withdraw from the NPT, demand greater hardships from the Iranian people in the name of combating the United States, and rebuild its nuclear program.

Moreover, based on the historical pattern of air strikes and the history of Iranian nationalism, if this outcome proves wrong, it seems more likely that it will be wrong in the direction of rallying the Iranians to support their government than in the direction of causing Iranians to turn against the regime. It is not that the latter is impossible. Just that the history does not appear to support it as strongly as the other two possibilities. What's more, even in the best case for the United States, in which our air strikes do rouse the Iranian people to try once again to take action against the regime, I suspect that the regime will be able to crush the unrest once again absent direct, large-scale American military intervention on behalf of the revolutionaries.