Iran should be key topic at hearings
By Zbigniew Brzezinski,
WashiingtoN Post
Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy
Carter and is the author most recently of “Strategic Vision.”
It is to be hoped that the forthcoming Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hearings regarding the president’s nominations for
secretary of state and secretary of defense produce a wide-ranging
debate regarding this country’s role in today’s very unsettled world.
The hearings almost certainly will provoke searching questions regarding
the strategic wisdom of potential U.S. military action against Iran.
Recent Israeli media reports have cited a former member of President
Obama’s National Security Council staff predicting a U.S. attack by
about midyear.
It is essential that the issue of war or peace with Iran be fully
vented, especially with the U.S. national interest in mind. Although the
president has skillfully avoided a specific commitment to military
action by a certain date, the absence of a negotiated agreement with
Iran regarding its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will
inevitably intensify some foreign and extremist domestic clamor for
U.S. military action, alone or in coordination with Israel. Accordingly, five potential implications for the United States of an additional and self-generated war deserve close scrutiny:
●How effective are U.S. military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities likely to be, with consequences of what endurance and at what human cost to the Iranian people?
●What might be Iran’s retaliatory responses against U.S. interests, and with what consequences for regional stability? How damaging could resulting instability be to European and Asian economies?
●Could a U.S. attack be justified as in keeping with international standards, and would the U.N. Security Council — particularly China and Russia, given their veto power — be likely to endorse it ?
●Since Israel is considered to have more than 100 nuclear weapons, how credible is the argument that Iran might attack Israel without first itself acquiring a significant nuclear arsenal, including a survivable second-strike capability, a prospect that is at least some years away?
●Could
some alternative U.S. strategic commitment provide a more enduring and
less reckless arrangement for neutralizing the potential Iranian nuclear
threat than a unilateral initiation of war in a combustible regional
setting?
Best available estimates suggest that a limited U.S.
strike would have only a temporary effect. Repetitive attacks would be
more effective, but civilian fatalities would rise accordingly, and
there would be ghastly risks of released radiation. Iranian nationalism
would be galvanized into prolonged hatred of the United States, to the
political benefit of the ruling regime.
Iran, in retaliating,
could make life more difficult for U.S. forces in western Afghanistan by
activating a new guerrilla front. Tehran could also precipitate
explosive violence in Iraq, which in turn could set the entire region on
fire, with conflicts spreading through Syria to Lebanon and even
Jordan. Although the U.S. Navy should be able to keep the Strait of
Hormuz open, escalating insurance costs for the flow of oil would
adversely affect the economies of Europe and Asia. The United States
would be widely blamed.
Given the recently woeful U.S. performance
in the United Nations — where the United States and Israel gained the
support of only seven states out of 188 in opposing U.N. membership for Palestine
— it is also safe to predict that an unsanctioned U.S. attack on Iran
would precipitate worldwide outrage. Might the U.N. General Assembly
then condemn the United States? The result would be unprecedented
international isolation for an America already deeply embroiled in the
region’s protracted turmoil.
Congress should also take note that
our Middle Eastern and European friends who advocate U.S. military
action against Iran are usually quite reticent regarding their readiness
to shed their own blood in a new Middle East conflict. To make matters
worse, the most immediate beneficiary of ill-considered recourse to war
would be Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which would be able to charge Europe
almost at will for its oil while gaining a free hand to threaten Georgia
and Azerbaijan.
It follows that a failure to reach a satisfactory
negotiated solution with Iran should not be viewed as the trigger for a
new U.S.-initiated war that is not likely to be confined just to Iran. A
more prudent and productive course for the United States would be to
continue the painful sanctions against Iran
while formally adopting for the Middle East the same policy that for
decades successfully protected America’s European and Asian allies
against the much more dangerous threats emanating from Stalinist Russia
and lately from nuclear-armed North Korea. An Iranian military threat
aimed at Israel or any other U.S. friend in the Middle East would be
treated as if directed at the United States itself and would precipitate
a commensurate U.S. response.
A serious discussion of these
issues by the Foreign Relations Committee may help generate a firmer
national consensus that a reckless shortcut to war — which is favored
now by neither the American people nor the Israeli public — is not the
wisest response to a potentially grave crisis. Indeed, could Meir Dagan,
the former head of Israel’s Mossad, have been right when he bluntly
said that an attack on Iran is “the stupidest thing I have ever heard”?
Fortunately, there is a better, even if not a perfect, option.
Read more at PostOpinions:
The Post’s View: Overheated rhetoric on Israeli settlements
John McCain, Joseph I. Lieberman and Lindsey O. Graham: Syria’s descent into hell
David Ignatius: Encouraging signs toward peace in Afghanistan
Opinions: 5 steps Obama can take to avert a strike on Iran
Jamie Fly and Matthew Kroenig: On Iran, it’s time for Obama to set clear lines for military action
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