• The main test for the free world  - Efraim Inbar
With diplomacy exhausted and economic sanctions unlikely to be effective, only military measures or the threat of force remain as viable options.

• A slippage in language  - Mark Perry
The best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring.

• End Tehran's free ride  - Danielle Pletka
Rather than the confused "speak loudly and carry no stick" policy embraced by the US of late, a better course would be to move forward immediately with sanctions.

• Deadlock or compromise?  - Sadegh Zibakalam
The view of many Iranian leaders is: advance the country's nuclear program in such a way as to create the least degree of conflict with the West.

The main test for the free world
 Efraim Inbar

A nuclear Iran poses a serious threat to the Middle East. Indeed, a nuclear bomb in the hands of such an extremist regime may have widespread repercussions far beyond the region. For Israel, a nuclear Iran constitutes an existential threat. As crazy at it sounds, the current regime, and President Mahmoud Ahmedinezhad in particular, believes that the destruction of Israel is an attainable goal. The ayatollahs have said they are ready to pay a very heavy price in order to destroy Israel. In their thinking, the Christian West will be ready to tolerate the obliteration of the Jewish state in exchange for a long truce with the Islamic world.

Iran believes it is in a position of strength. Therefore it continues to defy the preference of the international community to freeze Iran's nuclear program, particularly the uranium enrichment component. Tehran persists in its strategy of "talk and build", offering endless diplomatic talks in order to allow more time for the completion of its nuclear project.

Following the recent defiant Iranian response to the US offer of "carrots", Washington will try to prod the United Nations Security Council into imposing economic sanctions against Tehran. Eventually the Security Council may indeed decide on sanctions, but their effectiveness will depend primarily on the need to forge an international consensus. So far, China and Russia have been reluctant to adopt a punitive posture against Iran.

While economic sanctions would certainly hurt the Iranian economy with its heavy dependence on refined oil products, economic pressures are not the best means to stop Iran from going nuclear. Such sanctions often merely serve to make a point and keep an issue alive in the absence of the political will to take military measures to remedy the situation. Moreover, in the past, societies and regimes have demonstrated great resilience and capacity to withstand punishment in the face of economic sanctions.

Islamic Iran, which seeks a nuclear bomb primarily to gain regional hegemony and oppose a Pax Americana, is ready to pay a high price for its foreign policy orientation. Actually, external pressure has been used more than once as a focal point for rallying domestic support for the embattled regime. Another major problem with economic sanctions is that it takes time to put them in place and make them felt in the target country. In the case of Iran, time is of critical importance, particularly if Tehran wants to present the world with a nuclear fait accompli.

With the diplomatic track exhausted and economic sanctions unlikely to be effective, only military measures or an unequivocal threat to use force remain as viable options to delay completion of the Iranian nuclear program.

While intelligence services cannot provide military planners with a comprehensive picture of the Iranian nuclear program, we know enough to allow identification of the main targets. The military capability to hit all targets is important, but partial destruction would be sufficient to cripple Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb in the near future. Moreover, no large-scale invasion is needed in order to do the job, but only a sustained bombing campaign with commando strikes.

The difficulties in dealing a severe military blow to the Iranian nuclear program are generally exaggerated. The American military definitely has the muscle and the sophistication needed to carry out a preemptive strike in accordance with its new strategic doctrine. It also has the capability for a sustained air campaign if needed, to prevent the repair and reconstruction of the facilities targeted. President Bush has refused to rule out military action in dealing with nuclear proliferation in Iran, and his personality and worldview well suit a muscular approach.

Precisely because of the qualities of the American president, military action may not prove necessary. An ultimatum that includes an unequivocal American threat to use force might be sufficient to convince the Iranians to freeze their nuclear program and wait for better times to complete it. The threat of military force should be preceded by intensive American efforts to explain the danger of a nuclear Iran and active public diplomacy to gain international approval for military action. The Europeans definitely lean toward support for an American military intervention.

If the United States does not act in accordance with its international responsibilities as a superpower, it remains to be seen whether Jerusalem will be forced to act in accordance with its strategic doctrine. Since June 1981, Israel's position has been that a military nuclear program implemented by a hostile state constitutes a casus belli warranting preemptive action. Israel's leaders are likely to enjoy domestic support in the event that Israel decides to launch military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. The combative mood of the Israeli public was clearly demonstrated in the recent campaign in Lebanon.

Israel can undertake a limited preemptive strike. Israel certainly commands the weaponry, the manpower, and the guts to effectively take out key Iranian nuclear facilities. Former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon admitted as much in a public speech in Washington. While less suited to do the job than the United States, the Israeli military is capable of reaching the appropriate targets in Iran. With more to lose than the US if Iran becomes nuclear, Israel has more incentive to strike.

Resolute action against Iranian nuclear installations involves many risks, but inaction, it seems, will have far more serious repercussions. This is the main test ahead for the free world.- Published 7/9/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Efraim Inbar is professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies.

Since talk of "Islamofascism" is so much in vogue these days, it might be useful to return to those years when the inventors of the ideology (let's call them "Christofascists") took their show on the road. If George Bush thinks that "the terrorists" hate our values now, he should getta-loada-these-guys. From 1933 to 1945, Germany, Italy and Japan (the latter, I suppose, "Shintofascists") and their freedom-hating friends put 21 million men and women in uniform. By the time they were finished they had killed ten million soldiers, sailors and airmen and another 22 million civilians. The Allies responded by fielding 50 million men and women who killed just over seven million soldiers and about two million civilians. The total butcher's bill was a whopping 41 million dead, give or take a million. Still--thank God--at the end of this "wargasm" our "Judeo-Christian values" had prevailed.

Among the more interesting statistics from this recent madness is this: at the height of the war, the Soviet Army executed more men each week for desertion than died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, a grand total of 157,000 executions. And that was just for desertion. Or this: that nearly five million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany and Japan in nearly three million bombing missions. In Hamburg, on three nights in late July and early August of 1943, Allied bombers killed nearly 100,000 people. In Japan, the "terror bombings" (as they were called) were so devastating that Japanese officials ripped down entire parts of their cities to create firebreaks. The American bomber command bombed Japanese cities anyway--a program called "dehousing." Approximately ten million Japanese were "dehoused" in 1945.

In the wake of this stupidity, the US and its allies created study groups to determine how to enhance their military prowess so as to more effectively kill people the next time our values were endangered. A team of Americans was appointed to pick through Germany's rubble to find out whether the bombing of Hamburg and 65 other cities had a significant impact on the German capacity to wage war. This "Strategic Bombing Survey" produced alarming results, especially for those air power advocates who believed that aerial bombardment could prove decisive in any future conflict. The survey blew a hole in that supposition and stated that, "the speed and ingenuity with which [the Germans] rebuilt and maintained essential war industries in operation clearly surpassed Allied expectations."

Germany's ability to produce tanks and guns lasted nearly to the end and while the German people were "terrorized", the regime that had started the war was never endangered by its own people. The survey team also knew the unalterable truth of the European war: that the Germans only surrendered when the last German soldier was killed, in the last room of the top floor of the last building left in central Berlin--the Reichstag. The study concluded: "The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring."

The US military was so stunned by the results of the Strategic Bombing Survey of World War II that its conclusions were retested in Vietnam, where 6.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on hamlets, villages, towns and cities against people who, being non-western, not only did not have our values but, as we said at the time, had absolutely no regard for human life. The results of the bombing were far different in Vietnam than in Germany or Japan. German and Japanese civilians were demoralized in World War II, but the Vietnamese people's morale soared with every bomb we dropped. In the end, it was our morale that was endangered and we were forced from the country in a humiliating retreat that left our Vietnamese allies clambering to climb aboard our departing helicopters.

It is with this sordid history in mind that, as the American press has recently reported, US strategists are developing a plan for the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. We should not take such plans too seriously: the US military has a plan handy for any contingency. Then too, while there has been a great deal of technological progress in the art of aerial bombardment since the end of World War II (the US Air Force can deliver its precision munitions on target with a minimum of civilian casualties, it is said), even the most precisely targeted weapon can go astray--as was recently shown by the Israel Air Force when they "accidentally" killed dozens of Lebanese civilians being used as "human shields" at Qana. So the world should be reassured: we only bomb those people who hate our freedoms and do not have our values.

There is also this: the United States has 138,000 men and women in uniform in Iraq and the day that we bomb Iran will be the day that they are taken hostage, or overrun, by an enraged Shi'ite populace. Then too, if there is a reason not to mount such a campaign against Iran beyond self interest (doing so would so endanger our own troops as to be counter-productive) and beyond principle (we have reached the ends of this incessant talk of values), it is because our past experience has shown that such action simply will not work. A US bombing campaign against Iran will not constrain its program, but reinforce it, invigorating a national initiative to build a bomb that, next time (and there would most assuredly be, in the wake of our actions, a next time) will be used against us. In the words of the Japanese admiral who launched the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, we will only have "awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve". Is our insistence that Iran not be allowed to pursue nuclear technology worth this price?

The truth is simply this: while our president and his crew might irresponsibly compare Islamists with fascists, the rest of us do not. And if their slippage in language leads to irrationality of thought, they will be held to account. And they know it.- Published 7/9/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Mark Perry is an author and foreign policy, military and intelligence analyst based in Washington, DC.

Iran has conducted its recent diplomacy with extraordinary skill and astuteness. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad may live in their own bizarre parallel universe in which terror, weapons proliferation and tyranny are acceptable norms. But give the Iranian dictators their due: they know their enemies. Europe is weak and, in the collective, without conviction. For different reasons, the United States is also haunted by vacillation and fear.

The Bush administration and its counterparts in London, Paris and Berlin are not similarly blessed in their understanding of the enemy in Tehran. To the contrary, plagued by the mirror imaging that has been a hallmark of allied diplomacy (think World War II and Uncle Joe Stalin), diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic believe they can do business with Iran. If we could only talk, the well-worn shibboleth goes, then we could persuade the Iranians. But persuade them of what?

Revelations of Iran's secret nuclear program came in August of 2002, more than four years ago. In the time since, the Iranian leadership, first under the "moderate" President Mohammad Khatami and then under the "hardline" current president, have dribbled out information about the program as necessary, allowed inspections sporadically, and suspended uranium enrichment briefly (and subsequently reneged). In other words, the regime has given up nothing and lost very little time as it works to perfect a fuel cycle necessary to supply a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Throughout this time, Iran has held its line. And why not? Nuclear weapons will likely mean an end to threats of war, an end to second-class citizenship in the Gulf, and a longer tenure for the mullahs over their terrorized populace. In light of those gains, what are the petty offerings and demands from indecisive western diplomats?

The EU-3 (UK, France, Germany) and the United States initially demanded that Iran suspend conversion of uranium ore to uranium hexafluoride. Iran initially agreed, but when Iran reneged the West accommodated itself to the new reality on the ground. Today no country is demanding that Iran suspend uranium hexafluoride production. Now the Europeans and the Americans (and the United Nations Security Council) are demanding a suspension of uranium enrichment, but all parties have hinted that Iran may be allowed to enrich in the future.

Faced with Iranian intransigence, the West's skilled negotiators have repeatedly upped the ante. Iran was first offered significant trade and economic incentives to keep its promised uranium suspension in place. But after Tehran unilaterally violated its pledge to suspend enrichment, Europeans argued that Iran had not been offered sufficient goodies and proffered a detailed and more generous incentives package, including benefits from the United States. Tehran rejected the package out of hand.

Since then, Europe and the United States have been threatening sanctions on a regular basis, backing down with predictable speed, offering further incentives (including direct dialogue with the US for the first time since the Iranian revolution), and threatening again. But the Iranians have broken the code: UN sanctions are not coming--Russia and China will not allow it. And if the recent rhetoric from Brussels is any indication, the Europeans aren't really that serious either. Finally, the Americans, who threaten loudly and often about "unacceptable" nuclear programs, are hardly more serious than the Europeans.

Rather than the confused "speak loudly and carry no stick" policy embraced by the United States of late, a better course would be to move forward immediately with sanctions by those nations willing to impose them. If the United Nations continues to be the venue for dialogue about Iran, nothing will happen. Similarly, offers of dialogue with Iran are a waste of time (much as they have been with North Korea). Iran has been offered a great deal, but is clearly unwilling to end its nuclear weapons program. In the face of that reality, offering an ever higher price to an unwilling seller is a waste of time.

In addition, nations that have influence over the Tehran regime must make choices: Russia can continue to support Iran diplomatically, economically and militarily (note the ever more sophisticated air defenses Moscow is shipping out), but it must not be allowed to do so without a price. For starters, the US-Russia nuclear cooperation agreement offered up by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice must come off the table.

Will these steps end Iran's nuclear program? Almost certainly not. However, unlike the feckless diplomatic minuet currently underway, they will signal some seriousness. In addition, as the noose around the regime tightens, it will force Iran's leaders to consider the costs of having nuclear weapons--a fate they have managed to escape thus far. Finally, a harder line from the West may actually buy the right people some time--those inside Iran opposed to the regime and outside Iran trying to shake the mullahs from their perch.

Iran has pursued ruthless oppression at home, terrorism abroad and weapons proliferation, largely with impunity. The time has come to end the free ride. We have talked about talking for long enough; there must be other options. If those options are unavailable to those most threatened by a nuclear armed Iran (that is, the American people), then the likelihood of war becomes ever greater. It is not wise to force America into a choice between doing nothing and doing everything. But it may come to that.- Published 7/9/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Danielle Pletka is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

There are very few dates that millions of Iranians have so anxiously awaited as August 31, 2006, the deadline set by the United Nations Security Council for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program. Given the Iranian regime's defiant mood, Iranians were wondering what the next step would be. Would there be trade sanctions against Iran? Could we travel abroad again? What about medicines and drugs, would they be included in the sanctions? Would the United States attack Iran? Would the Israelis strike at Iran's nuclear sites? What about Russia and China, would they not veto the Security Council sanctions resolution? Dozens of such questions passed through the minds of Iranians as August 31 approached without any sign of a solution to the three-year old nuclear crisis.

The more articulate and affluent Iranians were more concerned about the future of the country's nuclear program. While Iranians prefer a compromise with the West, the general mood among many is a solemn belief that Iran must not back down from its "just stance". The more radical Iranians oppose any compromise over the country's nuclear program and urge the government to stand firm against US pressure.

The average Iranian, however, does not seek a showdown with the West. Apart from a minority that is prepared to use the nuclear crisis as a tool to deepen the country's struggle with the West, the majority of Iranians, particularly the middle and upper classes, are against a confrontational course with the West over the country's nuclear program. Yet at the same time they do not want the Islamic regime to abandon its nuclear program. This dichotomy is at the heart of the Iranian approach.

This view is shared by many Iranian leaders as well. It can be summed up as: advance the country's nuclear program in such a way as to create the least degree of conflict with the West. This strategy can only be achieved through hard bargaining with the 5+1 representatives. The so-called European package, which was offered by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana to the Iranian authorities in June, contained the seeds of such a compromise.

At the heart of Iran's nuclear dispute with the West is its enrichment program. The West simply wants Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment root and branch. In response, Iran insists on its legitimate rights under the NPT thresholds to continue its enrichment program and even to be assisted by the IAEA in accordance with that agency's obligations to its members. While the West, particularly the US, accuses Iran of harboring sinister and dangerous motives behind its nuclear program, Iranian leaders retort that all their nuclear activities have hitherto been in broad agreement with the IAEA regulations and that Iran hasn't contravened any of its commitments under the NPT charter. This includes its much disputed enrichment program. It therefore sees no justification for the western demand to abandon that program.

The Iranian leadership believes that the main objective of the West's opposition to its nuclear program is to prevent its progress toward scientific and technological development. The state media as well as many Iranian leaders argue that the country's progress in nuclear know-how is synonymous with scientific and industrial advancement. By trying to block Iran's nuclear program, the West is actually trying to prevent Iran from becoming a developing industrial state.

For many Iranians, the nuclear issue has turned into a highly charged nationalist issue: the West vs. Iran and, for quite a few, the infidels vs. Islam. Some hardliners are more than happy to perceive the nuclear issue in such an ideological context, in much the same way that some westerners perceive Iran's nuclear program as an "Islamic or fundamentalist challenge" to western civilization and therefore believe that it ought to be stopped at any price.

The militant approach is, however, shared by a minority both in the West and in Iran. The majority on both sides believes in finding a compromise over the crisis. That is the underlying reason why the 5+1 proposal was given careful consideration in Iran. The Islamic regime has in principal accepted the West's main demand to halt its enrichment program. But there are two points that must be clarified by the West before Iran will cease enrichment.

First, Iran wants to have a time frame for the freeze. Second, and more important, Iran wants to know what it will gain in return for giving up what is its right under the NPT charter. Both points require deep and prolonged negotiations. The West, however, insists that Iran must stop its enrichment before any serious negotiations can begin. It fears the negotiations will drag on for months while Iran continues its enrichment program. Iran responds that negotiations should be about the freezing of its enrichment program. If it stops enrichment before the negotiations, what is left to negotiate about?

Thus there is broad agreement on the main point of the dispute. The problem is how to resolve the technical issue of starting the actual process of negotiations. This problem can best be resolved through the mediation of an honest broker. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Russia, China and some of the European powers can in principle act as mediators between the two parties. Failure to resolve Iran's nuclear crisis will result not only in the strengthening of the hardliners' position on both sides, but will also provide more fuel for the fire in an already volatile region.- Published 7/9/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Sadegh Zibakalam is professor of political science at Tehran University.