Unthinkable (38 page)

The legacy of the Iraq War is part of the issue and a major impediment to winning over international support for an attack on Iran. Absent an
inexcusable Iranian provocation, an American attack would probably look to many like a replay of the Iraq War. The United States and its allies will have been claiming that Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons, while the Iranians—like the Iraqis before them—will be denying it. The Iranians will continue to argue that their nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes, and despite the evidence against that, many people will believe it. If the United States attacks anyway, justifying the strike by resort to the UN Charter's right to self-defense, many will brand it illegal—and they will be on much firmer ground than those who insisted that the Iraq War was illegal. Some respected American legal scholars have already rendered opinions that such an attack would be unlawful.
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In one widely cited law review article, Mary Ellen O'Connell and Maria Alevras-Chen declared, “The law governing the use of force is found in the United Nations (UN) Charter, in customary international law, and in the general principles of law. . . . Under these rules, no use of military force can be justified against Iran for carrying out nuclear research.”
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Some international legal experts have argued that Iran's nuclear facilities are not materially different from those of Japan, and therefore are barred from attack by an IAEA General Conference resolution. Others will dispute whether those resolutions have the force of law, or whether there are material distinctions with Japan's nuclear program.
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The International Court of Justice has gone so far as to assert that violations of the NPT and even acquisition of nuclear weapons themselves would not, on their own, constitute a violation of the UN Charter or international law justifying the use of force.
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Of course, Iran's own claims that the UN sanctions are somehow illegal have been repeatedly refuted, but that does not furnish a legal basis for an attack.
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What is clear is that making a legal case for going to war against Iran would be much, much harder than going to war against Iraq in 2003. In the words of John Bellinger and Jeff Smith, two legal scholars who have both wrestled with these issues as general counsels of the State Department and CIA, respectively, “In the
absence of U.N. authorization, many nations, including some of our allies, are likely to believe that a pre-emptive attack (on Iran) would violate international law.”
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For some Americans, this legal prohibition alone might be enough to oppose an attack on Iran. For others, the issue is more practical. The lack of a clear legal basis will make an operation that is going to be hard enough to pull off politically and diplomatically that much harder. Matt Waxman, who fought the legal trespasses of some of his more zealous colleagues in the Bush 43 administration, worries that in the case of Iran, “Dubious legality makes military action more costly—including in terms of military, political, and diplomatic repercussions, as well as long-term precedent that may be exploited by others—and therefore affects its perceived merits relative to other options.”
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If the president of the United States ever has to take to the airwaves to announce that we have attacked Iran to prevent it from making any further progress toward a nuclear weapons capability, he or she could have a hard time justifying the legality of an attack. That would make a hard political and diplomatic sell even harder. A September 2012 report signed by thirty-five distinguished former national security officials, generals, and experts on Iran warned that “if the U.S. and/or Israel end up attacking Iran's nuclear program without [an international] mandate, hard-won international support for maintaining sanctions against Iran could be substantially weakened. China and Russia would loudly condemn military actions against Iran, and some European nations might pull back from a sanctions regime after such attacks. Iran would be seen by many around the world, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as the victim of unjustified American and/or Israeli military action.”
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Thus, even if you don't regard international law as meaningful in and of itself, in the case of military operations against Iran, international law will play a role—and potentially a significant one—in determining international support for America's actions.

As a final point on this topic, there are some smart, well-meaning people who have suggested that the United States might not acknowledge
an attack on Iran, just as Israel has never acknowledged its attacks on the Syrian nuclear reactor at al-Kibar, an arms factory in Khartoum, and other sites.
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This idea is beyond far-fetched. The United States of America isn't the state of Israel. The only time that the United States tried to conduct a massive bombing campaign unacknowledged was Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969–70, and that ended badly for all involved. If the United States launches an air campaign against Iran, it is going to become known immediately and the American people are going to demand an explanation—and the president is going to have to give it to them. This attack will not be a drone strike against an al-Qa'ida terrorist isolated in the mountains of Yemen or Pakistan, where the governments have granted the United States permission to conduct such strikes.
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It will be a major military operation, an act of war against a sovereign government, that will result in Iranian and American casualties, especially as a result of Iranian retaliatory acts. Every American will want to understand why the president thought it necessary, what the U.S. government hopes to achieve, how the U.S. armed forces will try to accomplish these goals, and what to expect in the future. The Congress will (rightly) demand an explanation, if not its blessing. A campaign on this scale is not something any president can ignore or cover up, nor could I imagine that any would want to do so.

BASES.
There are several reasons why international support will be important to a U.S. military campaign against Iran. First off, it would be extremely helpful for the United States to be able to use foreign bases near Iran. The United States has Air Force units routinely deployed in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, and has also used facilities in Turkey, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman on previous occasions for military operations in the area. The U.S. military would also love to have access to bases in Central Asia and the Caucasus for an air campaign against Iran. Of course, we can only use those bases with the permission of the host governments. Because of the capabilities of U.S. military forces, not being able to use those bases would not be a showstopper: American planes flying from
the continental United States, from Diego Garcia, and from carriers in the Gulf and the North Arabian Sea, along with cruise missiles fired from ships at sea, could handle the job alone. However, it would be much more work for them to do so. It might mean limiting the number of targets struck, accepting lesser levels of destruction, or drawing out an air campaign for much longer than would otherwise be necessary.

The problem is that while the GCC, Central Asian, and Caucasus states are America's friends and allies, they have not always allowed the United States to use those bases. In 1996, the Saudis, the Turks, the Jordanians, and the Kuwaitis did not allow the United States to fly aircraft from their bases in response to Saddam's attack on the Kurdish city of Irbil.
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For Operation Desert Fox in 1998, the problems got worse: Saudi Arabia refused to allow the United States to fly combat aircraft from its bases, impeding the execution of the plan.
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Similarly, for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saudi Arabia refused to allow the United States to fly combat aircraft from its bases, although it did permit support planes to do so.
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Turkey denied the United States altogether in 2003.
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And the reaction of Central Asian and Caucasus states is even more unpredictable. Thus, the more international support for an air campaign against Iran, the more likely that the United States will have access to regional bases, easing the planning, operational, and logistical requirements of an attack.

THE DAY AFTER.
If an American air campaign lacked widespread international support, it could incur the same post-strike problems as an Israeli military operation. In the worst case, Iran might garner widespread sympathy and be able to withdraw from the NPT and evict the IAEA inspectors without facing any serious consequences. Many countries, potentially including Russia, China, India, Brazil, and other major powers, might condemn the American attack and begin to ignore the UN-imposed sanctions as they did with Iraq in the late 1990s. The ability of the United States to prevent Iran from reconstituting its nuclear program would be diminished, calling into question the utility of the strike in the first place.

Such an outcome is hardly impossible; in fact it may be the most likely course of events given the current state of international sentiment. The Russians continue to insist that there is no basis for an attack on Iran because there is no reason to believe that the Iranian nuclear program has any military component.
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Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared in January 2013, “Attempts to prepare and implement strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and on its infrastructure as a whole are a very, very dangerous idea. We hope these ideas will not come to fruition.”
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In late November 2012, after the IAEA stated that it was becoming worried about a possible military dimension to Iran's nuclear program and published an extensive dossier outlining its concerns, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov responded, “We, as before, see no signs that there is a military dimension to Iran's nuclear program. No signs.”
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The Chinese have stuck to more realistic concerns about the dangers of war to signal their opposition. Chen Xiaodong, head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's West Asian and North African affairs division, cautioned in April 2012, “If force is used on Iran, it will certainly incur retaliation, cause an even greater military clash, worsen turmoil in the region, threaten the security of the Strait of Hormuz and other strategic passages, drive up global oil prices and strike a blow at the world economic recovery. . . . There may be 10,000 reasons to go to war but you cannot remedy the terrible consequences of plunging the people into misery and suffering and the collapse of society and the economy caused by the flames of war. . . . The international community has a responsibility to restrain itself from war.”
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Brazil, India, and Turkey also oppose an attack on Iran by either Israel or the United States.
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As for America's Arab allies, their views are more complicated. At least in private, many Gulf leaders have urged the United States to attack. The
New York Times
reports that the WikiLeaks cables showed that America's Arab allies privately “clamored for strong action—by someone else,” but “they seemed deeply conflicted about how to deal with it—diplomacy, covert action or force.”
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King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia is reportedly a staunch advocate of an American attack on Iran, as is Muhammad bin
Zayed, the crown prince of the UAE and possibly the most intellectually formidable of all of the Arab leaders.
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Nevertheless, the Gulf leaders demur from openly backing a military operation against Iran.
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Meanwhile, other Arab leaders have opposed it. In 2007, then Arab League chief Amr Moussa and then IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei (both now leading Egyptian politicians) both denounced the idea of an attack on Iran, with ElBaradei calling it “an act of madness.”
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Likewise, in November 2011, Prince Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief and former Saudi ambassador to Washington, said of a military attack on the Iranian nuclear program, “Such an act I think would be foolish and to undertake it I think would be tragic. . . . If anything it will only make the Iranians more determined to produce an atomic bomb. It will rally support for the government among the population, and it will not end the program. It will merely delay it if anything. . . . An attack on Iran I think will have catastrophic consequences . . . the retaliation by Iran will be worldwide.”
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And Qatar's minister of state for foreign affairs, Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah, said an attack on Iran “is not a solution, and tightening the embargo on Iran will make the scenario worse.”
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The potential for air strikes on Iran to send oil prices soaring is part of the opposition to an American (or Israeli) attack on Iran, and how this plays out in the event of an actual conflict will affect international reaction to the attacker. Ultimately, there is no way to predict what will happen to oil prices. It will depend on how the Iranians retaliate. The more they threaten the Strait of Hormuz and demonstrate a capacity to disrupt tanker traffic, the higher oil prices will climb. One sober analysis from 2012 that seems neither to underplay nor to exaggerate the potential impact on oil prices concluded that a strike on Iran's nuclear program could cause an immediate price increase of about $23 per barrel. This could be expected either to drop to about $11 extra per barrel in the case of a short disruption, or climb to as much as $61 more per barrel in the event of a sustained disruption, depending on how much of international oil reserves were released.
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So there is a real prospect that an American air campaign against Iran
would encounter widespread international opposition, and this opposition could cripple the sanctions, inspections, and other measures currently hamstringing Iran's nuclear progress, all of which would be crucial after a strike to impede or prevent Iran from rebuilding.