Patrick Disney, the former Assistant Policy Director for the National Iranian American Council, has written a great piece responding to Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon’s Washington Post op-ed, which Tony Karon described as “a ‘how-to-bomb Iran’ manual.”
(Ali discussed the increasingly hawkish rhetoric coming out of the Council on Foreign Relations in his blog post Monday.)
Disney’s critical analysis of Takeyh and Simon’s article concludes that a bombing campaign of the type proposed by the CFR scholars would have disastrous effects.
Disney writes:
First, there is no military option short of a full-blown invasion and occupation. Even if all of Iran’s nuclear facilities can be located, and even if they can all be destroyed with surgical air strikes, the ruling hardliners will just rebuild them — only this time without the contraints of the IAEA.
Indeed, no proposed air strike would permanently destroy Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and would probably exacerbate already tense U.S.-Iran and Iran-Israel relations.
He continues:
Secondly, and most disappointingly, Takeyh and Simon’s analysis totally ignores the devastating impact an attack would have on the long-term prospect of democracy in Iran. Iranians last summer took to the streets in the most passionate outbreak of popular dissatisfaction since the 1979 revolution. Those who know their history viewed the events of last year as the latest step in Iran’s democratic evolution — a process that began over 100 years ago with the constitutional revolution of 1906. Although the street protests have died down and the democracy movement is in some disarray, it is clearly still a factor in Iran. Unfortunately, dropping bombs on Iran now is the surest way to uproot any hope for peaceful democratic change in the country. The hardliners will most likely use an act of foreign aggression as justification for a brutal crackdown, and the focus of political discourse will shift away from questions of internal reforms and regime legitimacy toward external threats and the need to rally the nation’s defenses.
While Takeyh and Simon may have the luxury of discussing their hypothetical best-case scenarios for bombing Iran, Disney draws a believably dismal picture of what a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities might bring.
An Iranian regime which has quit the IAEA, crushed its domestic opposition and turned its nuclear program into a symbol of avenging the countless deaths from an Israeli or American air strike is a frightening thought, but one which — no thanks to alarmists such as Takeyh and Simon — could become a reality.
Disney concludes:
With the anti-Iran rhetoric at a fever pitch in Washington, it’s easy to forget sometimes just how remote of a threat Iran’s nuclear program actually is. According to numerous unclassified assessments by the U.S. Intelligence Community, Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear bomb, and the US and international community still has time to convince them not to. The three to five years an attack would gain now will most certainly not be worth the cost it would incur: a non-democratic Iran with an overt nuclear weapons program and a vendetta against Western powers who attacked it.
The US will never attack Iran simply because USA is affraid of Iranians and looking at US war history you will understand what iam saying cause US never won any war. USA PROPAGANDA is finished this time.
Sam apparently received a blow on the head recently.
Jake, let’s get the facts straight. Iran has no biological warfare capability and a rudimentary chemical one. It wouldn’t use either in any case because then we’d truly bomb them back to the Stone Age.
Russia and China might “get involved” to the extent of providing covert aid to Iran, but that’s all. Nor will nuclear weapons be used (should war break out) — except possibly the “bunker-buster” variety.
An attak on Iran will probably lead to blowback lasting years if not decades. But World War III? That’s ludicrous.
Reap what you sow, America.
Dempsey is engaged in the same sort of fantasization process that neocons have been engaged in since 1991. Recall the promises of cakewalk, flowery greetings and those oil revenues paying to rearm America? Chances are though, he’s more correct than they turned out to be.
An attack on Iran will at the absolute minimum turn the straits of Hormuz into a chokepoint for US and European oil. Even sending the Marines into hold enough of a beach head to ensure that the Iranians can’t lob missiles or fire artillery at transiting oilers would result in a major war scenario.
It would be a real fantasy to think that the Iranians would be any less ‘welcoming’ than they were to Saddam’s forces when they ‘took on the mullahs’, with America’s support, back in the 80’s.
Combined with the bleeding ulcer in Afghanistan, the unfinished business in Iraq and Israel’s constant need to upset the neighborhood, another entanglement in Iran could only encourage the minor players, who can always be depended on to create a crisis, to take advantage of the ‘world cop’s’ troubles.
Fantasy could extend to getting the UN onside for another serial of the GWOT, and getting another coalition willing to engage in it.
@ Jon Harrison,”Personally, I agree that a U.S. attack would set back the Iranian democracy movement”
What democracy you’re talking about you idiot, Take your god damn Amerikkkan DEMOCRACY & shove it where the sun don’t shine!