Unthinkable (42 page)

Washington would have to expect Tehran to retaliate against American targets outside of Iran, too. In the case of an invasion, the Iranians would have no reason to show restraint and every reason to try to hurt us as much as they possibly could to try to get us to back off. Iran has a more formidable ballistic missile arsenal than Saddam had in 1991 and a far more extensive and capable network to mount terrorist and cyber attacks against the United States and our allies. Whether the Iranians could pull off a catastrophic attack—along the lines of 9/11—would depend on how much time they had to prepare for such an operation, how well developed their contingency plans were at the time, and how well American defenses performed. Iran has one of the most competent terrorist networks in the world, we worry that they have much more powerful cyber-weapons
in reserve, and they may actually have some of the WMDs that Saddam did not. Even if such attacks ended with the fall of the regime, since an invasion might take six months or more from the time the first U.S. Navy warships began to clear the Strait of Hormuz to the removal of the clerical regime, the United States would have to prepare to prevent such attacks—and live with the failure to do so—for at least this stretch.

The monetary costs of an invasion of Iran would be incurred principally in the initial invasion, the number of troops needed for occupation multiplied by the length of time they would be needed, added to the financial cost of casualties, and whatever money was directed at Iran for economic assistance and reconstruction. By way of comparison, the Iraq War cost $806 billion over roughly eight and a half years.
¹⁰¹
That strikes me as a good minimum of what we ought to be prepared to pay in Iran given its greater size, even taking into account the lessons we have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these costs would be spread out over five to ten years, which would diminish their impact, but they would not be negligible.

In addition to the costs, an invasion also entails running a significant set of risks. A botched reconstruction, like the one in Iraq, could unleash a Pandora's box of problems both inside the country and out. Various Iranian ethnic groups might declare independence, setting off a civil war with the country's Persian majority and creating the risk of drawing in Iran's various neighbors. Iran's oil wealth would be a major driver of both internal conflict and external intervention. Chaos and conflict could jeopardize Iran's oil and gas exports, and would complicate the security problems of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

There is one important exception to all of these points about the costs of and risks of the military options. If, for whatever reason, Iran attacks the United States first, the logic behind many of the downsides to air strikes against Iran may be mitigated or even reversed. In these circumstances,
bombing Iran would not only become a much more desirable (or at least, much less undesirable) approach; it might even be a “good” option.

There are many possible scenarios for why and how Iran might strike first. In one crisis simulation we ran at Brookings in 2012, we posited that a combination of U.S. cyberattacks and Israeli covert action prompted Tehran to mount terrorist attacks against both an American and an Israeli, and the hit on the American ended up inadvertently killing a large number of American tourists in the Caribbean. Modeled roughly on the Arbabsiar plot, the attack prompted the U.S. team to respond in what it saw as a measured, discreet way—a cruise missile attack against a remote IRGC base where the Revolutionary Guards trained and equipped Taliban fighters to kill Americans in Afghanistan. The American team felt that this was the absolute minimum that they could do in response to such a brazen Iranian terrorist attack. But the Iran team went ballistic—almost literally—and responded far more aggressively than the Americans had expected. Iran made moves in the Strait of Hormuz that convinced the Americans (and much of the rest of the world) that Iran was trying to close the Strait. As the game ended, the debate within the American team was over whether to obliterate all of Iran's naval, air, and missile forces around the Strait of Hormuz, or to obliterate all of those forces
and
take out Iran's nuclear sites as well.
¹⁰²

It isn't hard to imagine other circumstances in which American actions, or Iranian perceptions of American actions, could lead Tehran to take actions of their own that the United States and the rest of the world would see as outrageous, unprovoked acts of war. In the 1980s, Iran's misunderstanding of American actions and our role in the Iran-Iraq War led Tehran to attack American forces in both Lebanon and the Gulf. Likewise, in the 1990s, Iranian misperceptions of an aggressive U.S. covert action program against them led them to hit the Khobar Towers complex. The Arbabsiar plot is another example, although it might have been in response to real American actions, not just imagined.

In the event that Iran overplayed its hand, many of the problems attendant on air strikes against its nuclear program might abate or even
turn around. First, the American people would be enraged and would demand that the United States strike back, and strike back so hard that Iran would never think about conducting another one. Iran's nuclear sites would be the ideal target for such a response: they are part of an Iranian enterprise that the UN Security Council has demanded Iran halt. They are a threat to the stability of the region, a point echoed by all of the great powers, including all five permanent members of the Security Council. They are a threat to American interests in the region, and those of our regional allies. And they are valuable to the Iranian regime.

So the president could count on strong domestic backing and little international opposition—and possibly strong international support, just as the United States enjoyed tremendous international support after the 9/11 attacks. Many people around the world would see Iran as a dangerous, rogue regime supporting terrorism, and many more would feel that the Iranians had only themselves to blame. Because Iran would be seen as the aggressor, it would be much easier to maintain the sanctions and inspections in place after a strike. It would be much harder for the Iranians to play the victim as cover to withdraw from the NPT. Iran would look even more like a dangerous country that needed to be restrained, contained, and prevented from acquiring a nuclear capability.

Perhaps of greatest importance, it would also be much easier for the American president to refrain from further escalation and so avoid being pulled into an invasion. If Iran attacked us,
that
would be the justification for the attack. The president would not have to convince the American people of the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program. Iran might retaliate, but the United States could also continue to respond against other target sets—Iranian conventional forces around the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian oil facilities, Revolutionary Guards facilities, air force bases—without feeling the need to finish off the regime once and for all. Of course that risk would not be entirely absent. If Iranian retaliation also proved far more painful than expected—if Iranian cyber or terrorist attacks killed large numbers of people in the United States, for instance—then the president might still feel such pressures.

A clear and outrageous Iranian provocation will create the most advantageous circumstances possible for the United States to use force to take out Iran's nuclear program. It might even make this the preferable course of action. But like everything with Iran, it is not without costs and risks. With Iran, the worst is always a possibility.

C
ontainment
has become a dirty word in the debate over Iran policy. In Washington, it is denounced as criminal by those on the right, while those on the left insist that they never had any intention of embracing it. In September 2012, the Senate voted 90–1 in favor of a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution that “rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran; and joins the President in ruling out any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”
¹
Not to be outdone, President Obama and his senior lieutenants have insisted over and over again that containment is neither their policy nor their intent. After meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in March 2012, President Obama explained, “We will not countenance Iran getting a nuclear weapon. My policy is not containment; my policy is to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”
²
Six months later, in his speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, President
Obama warned, “Make no mistake: A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained . . . that's why the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
³
In his February 2013 State of the Union address, Obama devoted precious little time to foreign policy and only a single sentence on Iran, but it made the same point: “Likewise, the leaders of Iran must recognize that now is the time for a diplomatic solution, because a coalition stands united in demanding that they meet their obligations, and we will do what is necessary to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”
⁴

Somehow, somewhere along the way, containment became confused with appeasement. Many now assume that it means that the United States would accept Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons and adjust to Iranian ambitions—in a passive manner. This misunderstanding is a shame. Not only because it is not what a strategy of containment would entail, but also because the United States has always employed a strategy of containment against Iran, we are practicing containment of Iran today, and we will continue to do so for as long as there is a government in Tehran that sees itself as the enemy of the United States.

Containment is not appeasement. Quite the contrary. The most basic way to understand a strategy of containment is that it seeks to prevent a hostile nation from causing harm to American interests and allies, by “containing” it within its borders until the structural flaws in its political system bring an end to the regime itself.
⁵
It means preventing the regime being contained from attacking other countries in any way—militarily, diplomatically, economically, clandestinely, politically, even psychologically—to the greatest extent possible. In the words of a thoughtful essay on the containment of Iran by Karim Sadjadpour and Diane de Gramont, “The goal should be not to contain Iran ad infinitum but to limit its destructive influences while facilitating its transition to a nation that can begin to realize its potential to serve as a constructive
force in the world.”
⁶
Or to quote the summary of containment's purpose from an outstanding study by Thomas Donnelly, Danielle Pletka, and Maseh Zarif, containment “should seek to block any Iranian expansion in the Persian Gulf region; to illuminate the problematic nature of the regime's ambitions; to constrain and indeed to induce a retraction of Iranian influence, including Iranian soft power; and to work toward a political transformation, if not a physical transformation, of the Tehran regime.”
⁷

The United States has adopted a strategy of containment whenever a nation has been hostile and unwilling to have a normal, peaceful relationship with the United States, but the American people were unwilling to bear the costs and risks of a war to eliminate its government or bend it to our will. Containment is what the United States does when it does not want to appease a nation but is also not willing to try to conquer it. It is our traditional “third way.”

Although containment is not cost-free, it has allowed the United States to minimize the resources it expends on Iran, and to devote far less than would be needed to overthrow its regime. Iranian assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, the goal of every American administration since Carter has been to pay as little attention to Iran as possible without jeopardizing American interests elsewhere in the Middle East.