Unthinkable (37 page)

WOULD IRAN REBUILD ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM?
As with an Israeli strike on Iran, another critical question is whether the Iranians would try to rebuild after. Here as well, there are some differences from the Israeli case. Proponents of an American strike argue that the fact that the United States had attacked Iran would demonstrate that Washington had the capability and the will to do so, and therefore could do it again in the future. They contend that this would probably convince Iran to give up on its nuclear ambitions altogether, lest it face repeated American air campaigns. Others argue that, contrary to my assessment laid out above, American air strikes will cause such deep internal political problems for the Iranian regime that they will be unable or unwilling to rebuild their nuclear program. These are not foolish ideas. They could be correct.

However, I suspect that they are less likely than those scenarios in which Iran does choose to rebuild its nuclear program. Again, I think it
more likely that an American air campaign would either bolster or at least would not further exacerbate the Iranian regime's relationship with its people. More than that, I expect that the regime would contain any unrest that followed American air strikes. I see the Iranian hardline leadership, particularly Khamene'i, as convinced that the United States is seeking to overthrow him and the whole Islamic Republic. This suggests that American air strikes would only harden his desire to have nuclear weapons to deter another such attack. Finally, I suspect that the Iranians will believe that they could rebuild their nuclear program as long as they evict the IAEA inspectors and act in greater secrecy, employing even greater dispersal and digging even deeper underground wherever possible.

My view seems to echo those who have some insight into this question.
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I have already noted former CIA director Michael Hayden's conclusion that American (or Israeli) air strikes would doubtless prompt Tehran to rebuild as quickly as it could.
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Likewise, Colin Kahl argues, “By demonstrating the vulnerability of a non-nuclear-armed Iran, a U.S. attack would provide ammunition to hard-liners who argue for acquiring a nuclear deterrent.”
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My remarkable colleague Michael O'Hanlon has surveyed the landscape of expert opinion and reached the same conclusion, writing, “Most U.S. (and Israeli) nuclear experts now think that Tehran is so far along with its nuclear program that it would be able to rebuild the entire program in two years. In this light, a successful air campaign would be a Pyrrhic victory—if even that, given the ambiguity surrounding the exact nature and extent of Iran's nuclear facilities.”
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Perhaps the best case for an air campaign so far has been made by former Pentagon aide Matthew Kroenig, yet he too worries that air strikes would only delay the Iranians and would not keep them from reconstituting: “Even if the United States managed to eliminate Iran's nuclear facilities and mitigate the consequences, the effects might not last long. Sure enough, there is no guarantee that an assault would deter Iran from attempting to rebuild its plants; it may even harden Iran's resolve to acquire nuclear technology as a means of retaliating or protecting itself in the future.”
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Saddam rebuilt (and vastly expanded) his nuclear weapons program after the 1981 Israeli attack on Osirak, and he initially intended to do so again even after the massive destruction of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In the first years after the Gulf War, he played ridiculous games with the UN inspectors to try to hide those elements of his nuclear program that weren't destroyed by the coalition air campaign. Indeed, the definitive post-invasion assessment ultimately concluded that right up to the bitter end in 2003, Saddam still planned to rebuild his nuclear program whenever he was able to do so.
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Khamene'i's Iran is not Saddam's Iraq, but Tehran's determination to acquire nuclear weapons (or merely a nuclear weapons capability) and to disregard all manner of sanctions and other hardships to do so appears similar, if not identical.

Recognizing the unknowns, it is still the case that the logic of the circumstances, the historical analogies, and the limited information available all suggest that it is more likely than not that the Iranian regime would try again to build nuclear weapons even after an American air campaign. Of course Khamene'i has every incentive to say so before an attack, but he has indicated that he would continue Iran's nuclear program under all circumstances, declaring in February 2012, “No obstacles can stop Iran's nuclear work.” Because of this likelihood, in weighing whether to launch such an air campaign against Iran, the president of the United States would have to assume that the Iranians would reconstitute.

COULD WE USE AN AIR CAMPAIGN TO HELP OVERTHROW THE IRANIAN REGIME?
One way to overcome Iran's determination to revive its nuclear program even after an American air attack would be to go after the regime itself. This is especially appealing to those who believe that air strikes might destabilize the Islamic republic. However, there is still the problem that the regime has consistently demonstrated an overwhelming ability to crush domestic opposition movements, even including the massive 2009 Green revolt. To try to square that circle, some have mused about the possibility of using an air campaign to go beyond destroying
Iran's nuclear program and help the Iranian opposition overthrow the regime. Imagine the Green Revolution all over again, but this time with American airpower intervening to smash the regime's security forces and allow the opposition to seize power over a carpet of American bombs. The NATO air effort in support of the Libyan rebels in 2011 is the obvious analogy here, but so too is the U.S. air campaign that allowed Afghanistan's Northern Alliance to evict the Taliban in 2001.

If U.S. air strikes also targeted the regime's security services, internal command and control network, key transportation choke points, leadership targets, all the while providing on-call fire support for Iranian rebels facing regime security forces, there is some probability that Iranian revolutionaries might defeat the regime's security forces and gain power. However, doing so would require a massive air campaign on its own, on top of whatever necessary sorties were needed to destroy the Iranian nuclear sites. By way of comparison, during the six weeks of Operation Desert Storm, the coalition air forces flew 38,000 interdiction sorties to cripple Iraqi forces in the Kuwait Theater of Operations that began with more than 500,000 men.
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Although those strikes did tremendous damage to Iraqi forces, key units (principally Saddam's Republican Guard) still fought fiercely against the overwhelming coalition ground offensive and still retained the strength to crush both the Kurdish and Shi'i revolts that broke out after the end of Operation Desert Storm.
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Thus, an air campaign to enable regime change in Iran would have to do better. Nor does Kosovo provide a more hopeful example. In Kosovo, NATO air forces flew 3,400 interdiction sorties over seventy-eight days against roughly 100,000 Serbian troops, and caused much less damage than against Iraq.
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Those air strikes failed to enable the Kosovo Liberation Army to make any significant headway against Serbian Forces.
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Finally, in Libya in 2011, NATO flew more than 9,700 interdiction sorties over 203 days that helped Libyan rebels defeat 20,000–40,000 Libyan regime troops and paramilitary forces.
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NATO's success in Libya was largely a function of the incompetence and apathy of Qadhafi's troops.
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Every one of those campaigns also required thousands more sorties for air superiority,
electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defense, command and control, reconnaissance, and logistics to support the strike sorties.

Historically, victory in these kinds of campaigns hinges on the commitment of the regime's forces. The more determined they are, the harder it is to defeat them, the more sorties, and the more time it takes to enable opposition ground forces to prevail.
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From what we have seen of Iran's security forces, there is no reason to believe that they would be unenthusiastic in defense of the regime. Iran's 150,000-strong Revolutionary Guard can call on hundreds of thousands of Basiji militia to bolster their numbers. Iran's regular armed forces, the Artesh, have competed for years to prove that they are just as loyal to the regime as the Guards are. And beyond them, the regime can call on tens of thousands of Law Enforcement Force personnel and thugs from Ansar e-Hizballah—paramilitary groups that it uses to beat up and kill Iranian protesters.
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There are many questions to answer to determine how much airpower would be needed to give Iranian rebels a shot at overthrowing the clerical regime: how much of Iran's security services would have to be defeated, how many cities would be involved, would the morale of the Iranian security services crack, and so on. The United States might need anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of sorties and, as in Iraq and Kosovo, even that might not be enough. Cracking the morale of enemy ground forces (let alone destroying them physically) by airpower alone is a very difficult undertaking, requiring repeated applications of force over many days. Never have small doses of airpower broken an enemy army by itself. And incorporating this mission into an air campaign meant to knock out Iran's nuclear program would be adding a massive additional undertaking; one that runs contrary to the whole point of a policy option meant to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and disengage to
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a wider war with Iran. Trying to use airpower to assist a revolution against the Iranian leadership would produce that wider war. If the United States were looking to overthrow Iran's government by force, it would be better to do the job right by invading with ground forces rather than gamble on airpower alone.

As always when discussing American air campaigns, the military dimensions make the idea seem easy, straightforward, and entirely under our control. But of course, as Carl von Clausewitz warned two centuries ago, that is never the case in war because “everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
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Nothing about Iran is easy or straightforward and there are many potential complications to an American air campaign against Iran to eliminate its nuclear sites.

The reaction of other peoples and governments to an American strike could be particularly important and difficult to manage. Although the United States might not face the same degree of international outrage as Israel for attacking Iran's nuclear program, in many scenarios, we would incur considerable ill-will. That would be more problematic for the United States because of our greater reliance on international cooperation, both against Iran and around the world.

INTERNATIONAL LAW.
For some people, international law is sacrosanct. They believe that it would be much better to live in a world of laws than an anarchical international order where might often makes right. Or they believe that the United States benefits from the current system of international law, and therefore the U.S. should not undermine it. For others, however, international law is worse than irrelevant: it is something that the powerless use to constrain the powerful. They tend to regard advocates of international law as dangerous dreamers who would hamstring the United States in pursuit of a utopian will-o'-the-wisp. In the case of air strikes against Iran, indeed any military action against Iran, there are reasons why both groups need to pay attention to international law.

The basic problem is that absent an Iranian provocation, it will be hard for the United States to justify using force against Iran. Since the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, the United States has typically relied on UN Security Council resolutions to justify force. There have been a few exceptions. For
Operation Enduring Freedom, the 2001 campaign against Afghanistan, the United States invoked the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter in response to the 9/11 attacks. In Kosovo in 1999, NATO had no legal basis for intervention and some legal scholars branded the war illegal. What mattered, however, was that all of the NATO nations, all of the EU countries, and many other countries ultimately supported the intervention—indeed, then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan asserted that the war was “legitimate” even if the absence of Security Council authorization did not necessarily make it “legal.”
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Interestingly, the United States had a far stronger legal basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, resting on the UN Security Council resolutions from 1990–91 authorizing the use of force to ensure Saddam Husayn's compliance with all of the conditions imposed by the UN after the Persian Gulf War. Yet the invasion of Iraq was denounced in many quarters as illegal. Arguably, the problem in this case was the opposite of Annan's remark about Kosovo: whereas that campaign may have been illegal but legitimate, the Iraq War was legal but eventually seen by many as illegitimate.

An attack on Iran could fall on the wrong side of both the Kosovo and Iraq experiences. Since 2006, there have been six UN Security Council resolutions against Iran enacted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. However, every one of these resolutions has noted that it does not authorize the use of force. This assertion is not accidental: it was demanded by Russia and China (and others) as a condition for their voting in favor of the resolutions. Many Americans oppose the use of force (a topic addressed in greater detail below). Even America's European allies have drawn stark lines between supporting sanctions and supporting military operations.
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Unless Iran does something stupid that constitutes an unquestionable casus belli, it is unlikely that the Chinese and Russians would allow a new resolution authorizing the use of force to pass the Security Council.