Mainstreaming the Mad Iran Bombers, Marc Lynch

Editor's Preface: The cat's out of the bag. Now Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak has acknowledged that conventional bombs cannot knock out Iran's new nuclear enrichment facility near Qom, clearly implying that only a nuclear attack might work. So in addition to all the compelling reasons we already had why an Israeli preventive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would be a terrible idea (see “Why Israel Can't Bomb Iranian Nuke Sites - New Study Bursts Myth of Israeli Military Option” and Why senior Israeli intel & military officers think an Israeli strike on Iran is a bad idea - Anthony Cordesman, Wall Street Journal), now comes the coup de grace: an effective conventional strike against Iran would not significantly erode its nuclear enrichment capabilities, given how dispersed these are among known and still unknown sites, and how well-protected they are (the new Qom site is buried deep inside a mountain.) There can no longer be any doubt: those Republicans, American Jewish neocons and Israeli hawks who attack Obama's approach and advocate instead a preventive Israeli strike are advocating a nuclear war against Iran. Dubbing them "mad bombers" couldn't be more apt.

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Marc Lynch:

Today's New York Times runs what I believe is its first op-ed explicitly advocating a military campaign against Iran. Such agitation for war isn't new -- John Bolton and friends have been obsessively demanding such an attack for a long time, adapting the argument for war as the only solution to whatever the current situation may be. It's one thing when the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox News or other conservative outlets advocate such a war. You expect that, and discount accordingly; an op-ed in Fred Hiatt's Washington Post demanding war on Iran is like a DC-based blogger complaining about the Redskins... it happens constantly, nobody takes it very seriously and it doesn't accomplish anything. But the New York Times doing so is a serious step towards mainstreaming the idea, akin to how Ken Pollack and Tom Friedman's support for the invasion of Iraq persuaded a lot of centrists and liberals. It's as if we as a country have learned nothing from the Iraq war debate.

Alan Kuperman, the NYT op-ed's author, is best known for defending the U.S. non-response to the genocide in Rwanda (leading the late, lamented Alison Des Forges to accuse him of playing "word games to rationalize the West's ignominious failure to halt genocide in Rwanda"). While he has no evident expertise in Iran, he has determined that Iranian domestic politics and a few months of negotiations conclusively prove that negotiations can never work and that there's only one way to stop Iran -- war.

His argument is like a caricature of such war advocacy, hitting each predictable theme like a sledgehammer.

• Does he rule out the alternative policy by default? Yes he does! "peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work."
• Does he reduce the policy options to two extreme positions, one of which is guaranteed to be rejected? Yes he does! "the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons."
• Does he warn that Saddam, um, Ahmedenejad will give WMD to terrorists? Yes, yes he does. "if Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal, the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon, an atomic bomb." (the "neighborhood bully" is a nice touch.) Will, pray tell, the smoking gun be in the shape of a mushroom cloud?
• Does he exaggerate the prospects for success? Yes, he does. Well, first he says "As for knocking out its nuclear plants, admittedly, aerial bombing might not work." But he quickly moves on from that, since that will not do. Oddly, his main example of success comes from Iraq, where he claims that the first Gulf war led to the uncovering of the Iraqi nuclear program --- not the Osirak raid -- which is accurate, but rather completely contradicts his argument.
• Does he minimize the risks of military action? Yes, he does. "Yes, Iran could retaliate by aiding America’s opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does that anyway." Try telling that to U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to leaders in the Gulf, who are slightly less cavalier with the lives of their people.
• Does he suggest that if all else fails regime change would be easy and cheap? Yes, dear lord, he does. "If nothing else, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to." Truly, this was the lesson to be drawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm still marveling over how easily we overthrew Saddam and the Taliban and got out of Iraq and Afghanistan more or less costlessly. That was special. On the other hand, as Matt Duss helpfully points out, "if we don't have an Iran war, how are we supposed to have an awesome Iran surge?"
• Does he accuse those who oppose military action of appeasement? Yes, yes, of course he does. "in the face of failed diplomacy, eschewing force is tantamount to appeasement."

Why spend so much time on a mediocre, unoriginal op-ed? The better question is why the NYT published it. Advocates of such a military strike have been agitating tirelessly for years to mainstream and normalize an idea once seen as mad, using precisely these arguments so often that their deep weaknesses may not even register anymore. Opponents of such a military strike -- on the grounds that it would not likely stop the nuclear program, would kill lots of innocent Iranians and inflame Iranian public opinion, would destroy Obama's hopes to transform America's relations with the Islamic world and inflame anti-Americanism back to Bush-era levels, and so on -- may not take this seriously enough.

The Obama administration almost certainly doesn't want to make such a wrong-headed move --- but, then, there are a lot of things which the Obama administration doesn't want to do but has been forced into by political realities (Gitmo, the public option, escalation in Afghanistan) and intentions aren't enough. Many people may have assumed that the legacy of Iraq would have raised the bar on such arguments for war, that someone making such all too familiar claims would simply be laughed out of the public square. The NYT today shows that they aren't. I suspect that one of the great foreign policy challenges of 2010 is going to be to push back on this mad campaign for another pointless, counter-productive war for the sake of war.

UPDATE: see also Matt Duss, Heather Hurlburt, Joe Klein, Steve Saideman and Dan Drezner. This kind of sustained pushback is exactly what is needed to prevent this dangerous idea from being mainstreamed.

Posted By Marc Lynch Thursday, December 24, 2009 Reposted from Foreign Policy

Top Obama Advisor David Axelrod: US "looking to sit down and talk to the Iranians."

U.S. officials insist the door remains open [to negotiations with Iran over the nuclear issue], despite questions about the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad's re-election and his anti-American rhetoric.

"It's in the United States' national interest to make sure that we have employed all elements at our disposal, including diplomacy, to prevent Iran from achieving that nuclear capacity," said Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, said Washington was "looking to [...] sit down and talk to the Iranians."

Still he qualified his comments with a veiled threat of further U.N. sanctions should Iran remain defiant...Axelrod said that any negotiations with Tehran will offer "two paths [...] one brings them back into the community of nations, and the other has some very stark consequences."

Associated Press, Wed Jul 1, 12:58 pm ET

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: The US must ultimately talk to the Iranian regime about nuclear proliferation

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Rachel Maddow 6/23/09: After concurring with President Obama's condemnation of the Iranian regime's violent repression of peaceful protesters, Albright responded in part as follows to the question of whether the US will, in the end, have to recognize that Ahmadinejad is the president of Iran, if indeed he remains in power:

“. . . The issue is ultimately what are US national interests. The President said that we are very concerned about the direction that Iran is going on [their] nuclear program….I have to say that we have dealt with a lot of odious people in order to deal with issues that are larger.

"For instance, we dealt with Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, we dealt with other people that we don’t like when we have to deal with America’s national interests, and the truth is that nuclear proliferation is one of the biggest problems that we have.”

Watch the video of Albright's comments below:

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(The entire interview is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#31514869)

"Ahmadinejad prepared for dialogue with the US; clerical leaders would support a deal with the US on nuclear issue"

"Ahmadinejad...is even prepared for a dialogue with Washington under the right circumstances, as he stated earlier. But he is empowered now. The other leaders would support him to strike a deal with the US on the nuclear issue as long as it is in Iran's interest." Iran expert Flynt Leverett, Der Spiegel interview, June 15, 2009

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in Politico: While I don't agree with their view that Ahamdinejad won the election without fraud ("Ahamdinejad won; get over it"), their prescription for what President Obama must do, once the internal crisis in Iran is resolved, is the larger point that we must not miss. Why so? Because the United States, Israel and our Sunni Arab allies are headed for a new and far more disastrous regional war with Iran in the coming months if we do not find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem:

"The Obama administration should vigorously rebut any argument against engaging Tehran following Friday’s vote. More broadly, Ahmadinejad’s victory may force Obama and his senior advisers to come to terms with the deficiencies and internal contradictions in their approach to Iran. Before the Iranian election, the Obama administration had fallen for the same illusion as many of its predecessors — the illusion that Iranian politics is primarily about personalities and finding the right personality to deal with. That is not how Iranian politics works.

The Islamic Republic is a system with multiple power centers; within that system, there is a strong and enduring consensus about core issues of national security and foreign policy, including Iran’s nuclear program and relations with the United States. Any of the four candidates in Friday’s election would have continued the nuclear program as Iran’s president; none would agree to its suspension.

Any of the four candidates would be interested in a diplomatic opening with the United States, but that opening would need to be comprehensive, respectful of Iran’s legitimate national security interests and regional importance, accepting of Iran’s right to develop and benefit from the full range of civil nuclear technology — including pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle — and aimed at genuine rapprochement.

Such an approach would also, in our judgment, be manifestly in the interests of the United States and its allies throughout the Middle East. It is time for the Obama administration to get serious about pursuing this approach — with an Iranian administration headed by the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Flynt Leverett directs The New America Foundation’s Iran Project and teaches international affairs at Pennsylvania State university. Hillary Mann Leverett is CEO of STRATEGA, a political risk consultancy. Both worked for many years on Middle East issues for the U.S. government, including as members of the National Security Council staff.

Obama urges Iran to probe election tally as violence grows
By Haaretz Service and News Agencies, 6/16/09

U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday that he was deeply troubled by post-election violence in Iran, and urged the Islamic republic to investigate voting irregularities in a way that would not result in bloodshed. Obama said he would continue pursuing tough, direct dialogue with Tehran despite deep differences with incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was officially declared the winner of last Friday's vote.

"I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television," Obama told reporters after his meeting with Berlusconi. “The democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent - all those are universal values and need to be respected," he said. Obama stressed that the United States respected Iran's sovereignty and could not judge how the election was run because neither U.S. nor international observers were present.

"The Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place," Obama said. "It's important that moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views."

Obama said the world was inspired by Iranian demonstrators who marched against what they say was a rigged election. "To those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was," Obama said.

Obama, a Democrat who has taken criticism from his Republican opponents for trying to engage with U.S. foes, said the election results did not alter his desire for direct diplomacy with Tehran. "We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries and we'll see where it takes us," Obama said.

"The use of tough, hard-headed diplomacy - diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries -- is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interest."

Should the US Ditch Diplomacy If Ahmadinejad's Power Grab Succeeds?

The violent suppression by the Iranian regime of democratic protests by supporters of the rightful winner of the Iranian election--Moussavi--is heart-rending. We must hope that the reformers will succeed in removing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, or pressuring him to reverse course, and conduct a truly free and fair election, which, by all indications, Moussavi would win. But, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof observed today, "at the end of the day, as I saw at Tianenmen 20 years ago, when Might and Right do battle, it's often prudent to bet on Might, at least in the short run"--at least in countries like Iran and China.

If, as is likely, Ayatollah Khameini and President Ahmadinejad succeed in violently suppressing the widespread protests, the US must act on the basis of our national security interests, which include a realistic assessment of what is best for our Middle East allies Israel and the Sunni Arab states including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, and not least the need for stablizing Iraq and Afghanistan and strengthening their governments. We must attempt to bargain with the Iranian regime to see if there is a basis for new arrangements which would defuse the grave threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, terrorism and war that we and our allies currently face.

Already voices on the right who never supported direct, comprehensive and unconditional US diplomacy with Iran in the first place--Netanyahu government hawks and their neo- and paleoconservative counterparts in the US--are using Iran's internal coup as a pretext for blocking the negotiations before they start. “In Israel, which has hinted that it might launch a military strike on Iran to disable its nuclear capability, officials said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory underscored the threat from Tehran and the need for a tough response rather than patient diplomacy. Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said in Tel Aviv that the victory [of Ahmadinejad] ‘sends a clear message to the world’ that Iran’s policies have broad internal support and will be continued. The results, he added, also ‘blow up in the faces of those’ who thought Iran was ready for ‘a genuine dialogue with the free world on stopping its nuclear program.’" (U.S. Officials to Continue to Engage Iran, N.Y. Times, 6/14/09 )

But Shalom's inference is groundless; the "victory" of Ahmadinejad shows nothing about whether Ayatollah Khameini or Ahmadinejad are interested in better relations with the US or in negotiating a new system of safeguards which would assure us that Iran was not weaponizing enriched uranium. "'It would be nice to have an environment without the kind of vitriol we see from Ahmadinejad,' a senior administration official said. 'There clearly would be differences in tone between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi, but not necessarily in policy.'” (NYT, 6/14/09)

Moreover, were the regimes in China and the Soviet Union any less repressive than in contemporary Iran? Did we not reach detente with them--under Nixon and Reagan--and advance our own security interests? Did we not negotiate arms limitation agreements with the Soviets, whom Reagan had called "the evil empire"? "'We should be clear about what we’re dealing with,' said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'Just as we deal with Assad’s Syria and Mubarak’s Egypt, we now have to deal with Khamenei’s Iran,' he said, referring to President Bashar al-Assad and President Hosni Mubarak." (NYT, 6/14/09)

Hawks in Congress and in Israel Will Now Try to Prevent or Encumber US-Iran Talks - The Case for Negotiations with Iran

To be sure, negotiations with Iran won’t be easy, as Iran expert Gary Sick, who worked on Iranian affairs for three administrations, reminds us in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday: “But now after this internal coup and all the coverage it has received, those people in the United States and particularly in Israel who really opposed the idea of having negotiations with Iran - who favored a pressure strategy to build up more sanctions - are now going to use their clout in Congress and elsewhere to slow down or stop the process.

"So it's not that we can't talk to the Iranian government - obviously it's going to be harder to talk to an Ahmadinejad government after it's stolen the election - but the real problem is a domestic one. The administration is going to have to overcome a whole series of domestic hurdles which previously had been in abeyance.

"...The problem has been and remains preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The fact is we've tried a pressure strategy for more than ten years going all the way back to the Clinton administration. Now after more than ten years of putting pressure on Iran they have far greater capacity than they had when we started. This has to tell us something about the policy. So the real question is what will work? What can you do that will actually have an effect? And the fact is that the only thing that's remaining for us to do is to actually talk to Iran about what we want, what they want, and look for common ground. It's not going to be easy. But it hasn't been tried, and the other things we've been doing haven't worked.

"People who say we haven't been tough enough with our sanctions are completely missing the point. Every time we've imposed sanctions, at whatever level, however stringent, Iran has upped its program, not reduced it. We need to be aware of that and think of what we can do. We probably will have to accept Iranian enrichment in one form or another. The trick is how do you monitor that and control it and get Iran's cooperation in insuring that the low-enriched uranium they are producing is not transformed into high-enriched uranium, and into nuclear weapons. That's the objective and that's still something we can talk about with Iran. They have an interest in finding some kind of agreement with the international community and we have a strong interest in getting them to back off and basically agree to a form of surveillance or monitoring that we've not had thus far."

From today's Boston Globe ("As Iran Roils, US Still Hopes for Talks"): "Trita Parsi, the president of the US-based Iranian-American Council, which calls itself the largest organization of Iranians living in the United States, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he was not surprised that the Obama administration is expressing a willingness to talk with Iranian leaders regardless of concerns about the election. 'The decision to negotiate with Iran has never been driven by any like or dislike of any particular candidate, but rather because it lies in the interests of the United States to get Iranian assistance in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan,' Parsi said. The rationale behind Obama's statement during his presidential campaign that he would make a diplomatic effort to improve relations with Iran still exists, Parsi said. As for the election results, Parsi said that while 'there is an overwhelming perception this was not a fair election,' it may never be known whether the results were rigged."

It also lies within our collective interests to fully explore whether an improvement in relations with Iran is possible which will allay Iran's well-founded fear of a US effort to change the regime by force or subversion, which in turn is the main motive, according to Israeli intelligence, impelling Iran to seek a nuclear weapon. If such a detente is possible--which can only be ascertained once the US fully pursues direct talks with representatives of Supreme Leader Khameini--a pragmatic rapprochement with Iran may enable us to offer political and economic incentives to end its opposition to an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, leading to changes in Iran's approach to Hezbollah and Hamas which might benefit Israel.

F. Gregory Gause III blogging at Foreign Policy:

"I know that it is way early, and we have to see how things develop, but let's assume that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the clerical elite get away with the power grab. What does Washington do? Put the outreach to Iran on hold?

"I'll start with a provocation: I think that the diplomatic outreach should continue as it started. It would be great if there were real democracy in Iran and the United States did not have to deal with the execrable incumbent president. But American interests here are not about Iranian domestic politics. They are about Iran's role in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, the Arab-Israeli arena, and the nuclear program.

"I acknowledge that it would be much easier to come to some understanding on these issues with a different, more representative Iranian government. But it looks like we might not get that. So the United States might as well try to engage the incumbents in order to see if it can get some kind of deal on at least some of these issues that will help avoid a confrontation down the road.

"America deals with all sorts of governments whose domestic arrangements are, to put it mildly, less than compatible with American ideals. (The Saudis are Exhibit A.) I think that's how to deal with Iran."

F. Gregory Gause III is professor of political science at the University of Vermont and author of Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States.

An Israeli Strike on Iran, a Plan that Just Doesn't Fly, by Bernard Avishai & Reza Aslan

Originally published Sunday, August 10, 2008; The Washington Post

The Bush administration seems less and less likely to launch a parting strike on Iran's nuclear installations -- but Israel isn't sounding nearly so tranquil. The talk from Jerusalem will almost certainly grow more strident as the competition to replace the country's scandal-plagued prime minister, Ehud Olmert, intensifies. Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz is running hard against the less hawkish Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to succeed Olmert as leader of the governing Kadima Party; he recently told Israel's dominant daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, that an attack on Iran was "unavoidable." And Binyamin Netanyahu, the right-wing opposition leader who might well beat either Livni or Mofaz in a general election, is also likely to think seriously about a preventive Israeli raid.

Meanwhile, prominent Israeli military analysts, officials and writers are insisting that Iran constitutes a mounting "existential threat." Take one of the country's most important historians, the erstwhile dove Benny Morris, who recently predicted in the New York Times that "Israel will almost surely attack Iran's nuclear sites in the next four to seven months" -- roughly (and not inconveniently) the period between the U.S. presidential election and the departure of the Bush administration. Morris claimed that his view that Israel's existence was on the line is shared "across the political spectrum." In Israel today, anyone who resists such talk risks becoming an appeaser amid a chorus of Churchills.

Leave aside the possibility that the threat of an Israeli attack may be designed to give leverage to U.S. and European diplomats pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear efforts. Leave aside the question of whether, if you believed that such a strike was truly imminent, you'd predict it in a major newspaper. Leave aside the fact that no Israeli strike could happen without a U.S. green light and permission to fly over Iraq. And leave aside the perennial suspicions that Israel's military elite, which sees the Jewish state as the West's foremost strategic asset in the region, also tends to see the Middle East through the prism of the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. Could Israeli threats be serious?

We hope not, because we don't buy the underlying premises. Here's the argument one hears almost daily in Israel: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a jihadist fanatic; he is bent on (as he put it) wiping Israel "off the map," and his insistence on denying the Holocaust shows that he may be vile enough to perpetrate another one; the Iranian regime is on the fast track to developing a nuclear weapon. So the West -- and if not the West, then Israel alone -- must treat Iran as though it were the national equivalent of a suicide bomber. It must strike now, without hesitation, before it's too late.

Moreover, the argument continues, even if a nuclear-armed Iran didn't attack Israel first, it would still spur an arms race that would turn the region into a nest of mutually assured destroyers that would include Egypt and Saudi Arabia. An Iranian bomb would also curtail Israel's freedom of action if it has to strike against the tens of thousands of missiles now in the hands of Hezbollah, Iran's fearsome proxy in southern Lebanon. So why should Israel not (we need George C. Scott here) just go for broke?

Here's why not: because Iran presents the West with a kind of real-life chess game, and the advocates of a preemptive Israeli attack only understand checkers. Intelligence experts insist that we examine both the intentions and the capabilities of an opponent. Let's do that.

The president of Iran is not the regime. Ahmadinejad has almost no control over Iran's nuclear program; that power rests in the hands of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei alone commands Iran's military and dictates its foreign policy. Through intermediaries such as Vice President Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, Khamenei has adopted a much softer tone than Ahmadinejad on nuclear negotiations with the West. As Rahim-Mashaei recently put it, according to Iranian news agencies, "Iran wants no war with any country, and today Iran is a friend of the United States and even Israel."

The Iranian regime is not a suicide bomber. The idea that one fine morning Iran will incinerate Tel Aviv is madness; Morris's description of the mullahs' "fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset," echoed by others, is a caricature. The Iranian regime knows full well that Israel has an arsenal widely thought to include as many as 200 nuclear warheads as well as missiles, submarines, strategic bombers and enough apocalyptic psyches to retaliate. Do Israelis seriously believe that Iranians hate them (on behalf of the Palestinians, who would be poisoned by the fallout) more than they love their children -- or, for that matter, the historic cities of Tehran, Qom and Esfahan?

The regime wants to survive. The mullahs, let us remember, have managed to remain in power for three decades, despite international isolation, a devastating eight-year war with Iraq and the loathing of the vast majority of the country's citizens. In times of economic frustration, they rely on anti-Israeli and anti-American gambits to distract attention from domestic hardship; we should view their nuclear program in this context. This is a country that sits atop the world's third-largest proven reserves of oil, according to the CIA, yet imports about 40 percent of its gasoline -- simply because it doesn't have the resources or the know-how to update its refineries to pump more. We have greater reason to assume that, in time, the mullahs will bow to internal pressure and open their country to global intellectual capital than to think that they will engage in an ecstasy of suicidal mass murder.

The Iranian nuclear program is daring but not crazy. Consider the view from Tehran. The United States overthrew Iran's government in 1953 to obtain Iranian oil, and the country is now surrounded by U.S. troops -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. This surely argues for prudence from Tehran. Besides, the regime has probably learned a valuable lesson from another member of the "axis of evil": Nuclear North Korea was never attacked; it was offered hundreds of millions of dollars to give up its bombs. Nuclear diplomacy, the mullahs have probably concluded, enhances the international prestige of what would otherwise be a Third World country.

An Iranian bomb need not precipitate a regional nuclear arms race. Israel's bomb -- developed by the Middle Eastern power most hated and feared by its neighbors -- hasn't.
Even if Tehran were determined to get the bomb, there's no guarantee that it could pull it off. Iran's nuclear program is far more modest than its leaders like to admit. As Undersecretary of State William Burns testified before Congress last month, "It is apparent that Iran has not yet perfected [uranium] enrichment, and as a direct result of U.N. sanctions, Iran's ability to procure technology or items of significance to its missile programs . . . is being impaired."

An Iranian bomb will not "degrade Israel's deterrence." Tens of thousands of conventional missiles in southern Lebanon, Syria, Gaza -- and Iran -- have already done that. Hezbollah knows that it can bombard Israel and survive, as it did during its summer 2006 war with Israel. If an Iranian bomb would provide cover for Hezbollah, Hamas and their state sponsors to launch these missiles at some indefinite point in the future, but a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran would make Iran's proxies launch them now (as Hezbollah did two years ago), how exactly does the logic of regaining Israeli "deterrence" work?

None of these points mean that Ahmadinejad will stop blustering; he is a two-bit politician playing to his base. Nor does it mean that the Western powers should stop planning a long-term strategy of containing Iran. But Western powers should now focus not only on their power to deter but on their power to attract; we should push for new collective-security agreements that would benefit everyone in the region. Israeli threats to attack Iran produce only paranoia and solidarity inside Iran. And after 40 years of Israeli occupation in Palestine, Israel's threats also have the handy effect of changing the subject.

mailto:bavishai@gmail.com,%20aslanmedia@mac.com
Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of "The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last." Reza Aslan is the author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam" and the forthcoming "How to Win a Cosmic War."