Another War in the Middle East?

Why Israel and the U.S. must not launch a preventive strike against Iran


The pressure is building on Iran, but there are no serious discussions of negotiated outcomes. Israel has been ever more explicit in saying it may launch an attack by summer. Obama has amped up his threats of military strikes too, limiting his room to maneuver. And Republican presidential candidates will instantly denounce any negotiated solution—no matter how comprehensive the inspections it requires—as a sellout.

So either Iran suddenly and completely surrenders—and when have countries done that under foreign pressure?—or Israel will strike. And the Israeli government knows that the window presented by the U.S. political season is closing. If it were to strike between now and November, it would be assured of unqualified support from Washington. After November, the American response becomes less predictable. The clock is ticking.


What if Iran does manage to develop a couple of crude nukes in several years? Obama says a nuclear Iran would set off an arms race in the Middle East. But a nuclear North Korea has not led the two countries directly threatened by its weapons—South Korea and Japan—to go nuclear. Saudi Arabia and Egypt did not go nuclear in response to Israel’s developing a large and robust arsenal of nuclear weapons. After all, Egypt has gone to war with Israel three times. By contrast, it has not been in a conflict with Iran. Were the U.S. to provide security guarantees to Iran’s neighbors, as Hillary Clinton has proposed, it is highly unlikely that any of them would go nuclear.


Iran’s weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, says the President. But would a country that has labored for decades to pursue a nuclear program and suffered huge sanctions and costs to do so then turn around and give the fruits of its efforts to a gang of militants? This kind of reasoning is part of the view that the Iranians are mad, messianic people bent on committing mass suicide. When General Martin Dempsey explained on my CNN program last month that he viewed Iran as a “rational actor,” he drew howls of protest.

Dempsey was making a good point. A rational actor is not necessarily a reasonable actor or one who has the same goals or values that you or I do. A rational actor is someone who is concerned about his survival. Compared with radical revolutionary regimes like Mao’s China—which spoke of sacrificing half of China’s population in a nuclear war to promote global communism—the Iranian regime has been rational and calculating in its actions. In an essay in the Washington Monthly, former senior U.S. intelligence official Paul Pillar writes, “More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one.”

In fact, the entire punitive strategy against Iran is premised on the notion that Iran is calculating the costs of these pressures and will change its policies as a result. The question right now is not whether Iran can be rational but whether the U.S. and Israel can carefully evaluate the consequences of a preventive war—inside Iran and beyond—and weigh them against its limited and temporary benefits.