Why An Attack On Iran Is Not An Option

Israel simply cannot afford to launch a strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, though threatening to do it might be a useful tactic, Professor Gary Sick, a leading expert on Iran, said yesterday. Nor could any US president afford to sanction such a strike or, probably, to mount a US attack either, he added, arguing that the Obama Administration’s best course – perhaps its only one – was to talk to Tehran as soon as the Iranian presidential elections in June are out of the way. This view, it must be said, is a long, long way at the dovish end of the spectrum in Washington. It is “softer” than President Obama’s inauguration speech, in which he talked about keeping a clenched fist in reserve of an open hand. It doesn’t answer the question of what happens if America offers to talk to Iran but Iranian leaders don’t give up or freeze their nuclear programme. It doesn’t begin to answer Israeli fears that Iran is an existential threat, from which no other country will do enough to protect it. But it is worth paying attention, partly because of Professor Sick’s influence, and partly because these views are gaining some ground in Washington, from a low base. Professor Sick, who advised President Carter on the hostage crisis and is now at Columbia University, says that he has no intention of joining the Obama team. His views are followed widely, however, partly because of his own contact with leading Iranians, including President Ahmadinejad. His message – in which he has been consistent for years, despite the failure of the hostage talks – comes at a time when Obama advisers are beginning to consider how to live with an Iran that is within arm’s reach of nuclear weapons, or how to contain it if it chooses to get them.

Professor Sick, speaking at Chatham House, the LondonIranIran, because they can’t.” international affairs think-tank, said he worked on the assumption that Iranian leaders wanted to develop their nuclear programme to the point where weapons were within easy reach. Of the threats by assorted Israeli politicians to strike those facilities before acquires a nuclear weapon, he said: “They won’t bomb The technicalities were formidable, including the need to fly over Iraq and refuel in the air. Israel’s bombardment of South Lebanon showed, he argued, how you could mount strikes for weeks and miss the essential targets. A single Israeli strike would immediately provoke IranAfghanistanIraq (where it was certainly capable of forming a short-term alliance with al-Qaeda). “No one in the world would believe that Israel acted without US permission,” he argued. “What Israel would do with its one strike is take us [the US] to war,” he said, and no USIranIran analysts in Washington, recognising that it may be impossible to stop the first, and that, for all the reasons Professor Sick laid out, military action by the US or Israel is deeply unattractive. to withdraw from arms control treaties, rush to make a nuclear weapon, bolster hardliners and retaliate in the Gulf, and president would welcome that. Instead, he recommended that the new Obama team acknowledges the big difference between acquiring the skills and material to make a bomb, and actually making it. This is an increasingly popular distinction among