IRAN’S HORMUZ THREAT
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2011
So now we know the kind of sanctions that hit Iran’s regime where it really hurts. The U.S. and Europe are at last mustering the gumption to target Iran’s multibillion-dollar oil industry, and almost immediately Tehran is threatening to bring Persian Gulf tankers to a halt.
“If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,’’ said Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, [last] Tuesday.… Admiral Habibollah Sayari, who runs Iran’s navy, added that “shutting the strait for Iran’s armed forces is really easy—or as we say [in Iran] easier than drinking a glass of water.…”
As a military matter, this is mostly bluster. If it struck first, Iran could sink a few ships and do some damage. But Iran is no military match for the U.S. and its allies in the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon and the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet both sent that message to Tehran: “Any disruption,” the Bahrain-based U.S. fleet said, “will not be tolerated.”
Yet the Iranian tantrum is educational. Iran knows that Western leaders fear the economic and political impact of higher oil prices, not least with elections coming in 2012 for President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Iran’s leaders are trying to see if they can intimidate those leaders into backing down. The Western response should be to tighten sanctions further to show such tactics won’t work.
The episode is also a reminder, the latest in a series, of the Iranian regime’s character and intentions. In October, the U.S. said it uncovered an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington—also wholly in character for the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. This is not a mature and rational actor that can be contained if it gets nuclear weapons. President Obama promised there would be consequences for the assassination plot, but there have been none.
The Hormuz threat is another opportunity to set boundaries on Iran’s rogue behavior. Washington, along with London, Paris and Riyadh, should say plainly that any attempt to close or disrupt traffic through the strait would be considered an act of war that would be met with a military response. That response would be robust and immediate, and it would target Iran’s military and nuclear assets, perhaps even its regime. Iran’s mullahs need to understand that an act of aggression would jeopardize their own survival.
The Hormuz flap should also underscore the strategic damage that would result if Iran does get the bomb. Fortified by a nuclear threat, the mullahs would be more willing to blackmail their neighbors and press for regional dominance. Would the U.S. dare resist Iranian aggression if it meant putting American forces at risk of a nuclear reprisal? Better to act now to stop Iran before we have to answer that terrible question.
OBAMA STATEMENT MEANS NO IRAN EMBARGO
Jonathan S. Tobin
Contentions, January 4, 2011
When Congress passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act last month that mandated a ban on all transactions with Iran’s Central Bank, it gave the administration the tool it needed to allow President Obama to make good on his promise to prevent Tehran from ever obtaining nuclear weapons. Restrictions on dealing with the bank would make it possible to put into place an oil embargo on Iran, the one type of sanction that could bring the Islamist regime to its knees. But the inclusion of waivers in the bill at the White House’s request also made it possible that nothing would be done. Though the president signed the Act into law [last] weekend, the release of his signing statement confirms doubts about his intentions.…
The statement explicitly noted the sanctions were passed over his objections and might interfere “with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations.” Obama’s statement bluntly warned Congress that if he was so inclined, “I will treat the provisions as nonbinding.” While administration officials said in spite of this, Obama still intended to pursue sanctions on the bank, the statement is a clear signal he has no such intentions.
The stated motive for Obama’s reluctance to try to stop the flow of oil income to the ayatollahs’ coffers is that it would disrupt the global economy and raise oil prices. That is a real danger and one that ought to worry everyone, not just a weak incumbent desperate not to worsen the nation’s financial situation. But given that such an embargo is the only measure short of war that would halt Iran’s nuclear program, there is no other choice. If Obama continues to waste more time by engaging in feckless diplomacy to assemble an anti-Iran coalition that has no chance of coming into existence, an Iranian bomb will be the inevitable result. If Obama thinks an oil embargo would be disruptive, what does he think the impact of an Iranian bomb on the global economy or gas prices would be?…
Turkey ha[s] already requested the administration grant its biggest refinery a waiver on dealing with the Iranian bank so as to continue the lucrative trade between the two nations.… Obama’s willingness to grant the request will answer the question about whether he is serious about stopping Iran. Unfortunately, the answer may have already been given with the president’s effort to stop the bill’s passage and a signing statement that all but promised it would never be enforced.
AN UNAVOIDABLE CHALLENGE
John Yoo
National Review, January 3, 2012
Our political calendar and one of our nation’s greatest threats have synchronized. In the upcoming year, the American people will render their judgment on Barack Obama’s presidency. Meanwhile, if the International Atomic Energy Agency’s November report is accurate, Iran will soon join the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers. Because of the Obama administration’s reluctance to confront this looming threat, others—such as the Republican presidential candidates—must begin preparing the case for a military strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Republican frontrunners have seized upon the threat. In last month’s South Carolina debate, Mitt Romney promised that Iran “will not have a nuclear weapon” under his presidency.… “If all else fails…then of course you take military action,” [Romney said]. Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in several early states…“agree[s] entirely” with Romney that, should pressure fail, “you have to take whatever steps are necessary” to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
In this game of diplomatic poker, the Republicans would go all in where the…present [administration] has checked. Though he declares that “we don’t take any options off the table,” President Obama avoids explicit military threats. Instead he seeks to “isolate and increase the pressure upon the Iranian regime.” He naively hoped to negotiate a settlement with Tehran (and Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea!).…
President Obama has done more than merely delay the inevitable day of reckoning with Iran. He has left the public uninformed about the nature and possible consequences of military action, which must be serious and sustained enough to destroy complex, protected, and dispersed facilities—pinpoint bombing of a single facility will not end Iran’s nuclear program. Iran might respond by attacking Israel, Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, and oil shipments in the Persian Gulf. President Obama has also failed to explain the heavy costs of containment, which would involve a constant, significant conventional and nuclear military presence on Iran’s perimeter.
Obama has compounded this political negligence by failing to build the legal case for attacking Iran. Instead, the administration has tethered American national security to the dictates of the United Nations. In Libya, Obama delayed launching the air war until the Security Council approved the intervention, allowing a popular revolution to metastasize into a prolonged, destructive civil war. The same craving for international approval may lead the administration to put off military action against Iran until it is too late.…
Thankfully, the U.S. has not often waited for the Security Council’s permission to protect its interests. But if the president seeks U.N. authorization for a military action against Iran…it can argue that destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons is a combination of self-defense and protecting international security. Nuclear weapons in the hands of an obvious enemy would constitute a grave threat to American interests. Even without them, Iran has fomented conflict in the region, supported groups hostile to Israel…supported terrorists who target American allies such as Saudi Arabia, and attacked American troops in Iraq. It has also supported attacks on [US] embassies and military bases in places such as Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, planned to kill ambassadors on American soil, and of course taken our diplomatic officials hostage. Nuclear weapons would allow Iran to escalate hostilities with little fear of any large-scale American military response.…
A president need not wait until an attack is imminent before taking action.… [Iran’s] president hopes to wipe Israel from the map. It undermines reconstruction and reconciliation in Iraq. It supports terrorists throughout the world. It threatens to close off the Straits of Hormuz…[and] has attacked shipping in the Persian Gulf. A nuclear Iran could expand its asymmetric warfare against its neighbors, or even escalate into conventional warfare, with little fear of direct retaliation.
Military action need not go so far as an invasion or even a no-fly zone. Our forces would have to destroy Iranian air-defense sites, but otherwise, thanks to precision-guided missiles and drones, they could concentrate on a few links in the Iranian nuclear chain.… The surgical nature of such strikes would make them proportional to the military objective, which would be not the overthrow of the Iranian regime but the destruction of its nuclear capability. Nuclear-weapons infrastructure is a legitimate military target.… If casualties result because facilities are located beneath cities, the fault rests with the Iranians for deliberately using civilians to shield its military—a move long forbidden by the laws of war.…
The United States has assumed the role, once held by Great Britain, of guaranteeing free trade and economic development, spreading liberal values, and maintaining international security. An attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, though it would impose costs in human lives and political turmoil, would serve these interests and forestall the spread of conflict and terror. The [US] should begin preparing the case now for this difficult but unavoidable challenge.
(John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
He served in the Bush Justice Department from 2001 to 2003.)
PREPARING FOR A NUCLEAR IRAN
Benny Morris
National Interest, January 3, 2012
The subject of the recenttête-à-tête between U.S. president Barack Obama and Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak in the White House was clear: Iran. But what was said?
The meeting itself was unusual—only rarely does the American president receive visiting defense ministers and almost never in a one-on-one meeting.… Did Obama give Israel a green (or yellow) light to attack Iran’s nuclear installations? Or did he add his own personal caution against such a move, following similar public warnings recently issued by the U.S. secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? Or was the outcome of the meeting something in between: An American assurance that it would give Israel the green light or, better still, take out the Iranian installations itself or with Israel within a specified time frame, provided the current sanctions campaign bears no visible fruit?
What divides America and Israel over Iran is the apparent, immediate readiness to take military action. The United States, having just wound up its nine-year war in Iraq and still mired in the Afghani bog, has lost the will to fight another war in the Middle East.… Israel feels existentially, mortally threatened, while America is a two- or three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile away. And apparently Israel and the United States differ in their chronological appreciations: how soon Iran will get the bomb, if left unimpeded. Barak has been speaking in recent weeks of a window of opportunity of “months”; the Americans seem to believe that there are still between one and two years.
The Iranians, for their part, have been displaying a growing nervousness and appear to be speeding up the completion of their underground enrichment facility inside a mountain outside Qom, which rumor says is designed for carrying out the final “sprint,” enriching the uranium produced at the outdoor Natanz facility from 20 percent to a weapons-grade 90 percent. At the same time, they have been issuing forthright warnings that, if attacked, they will hit American targets and shut the Straits of Hormuz.…
Israel, too, seems not to be wasting these final months before a prospective showdown. Last week it announced that the IDF is at last setting up a “long-range operations command,” something debated for decades in the defense establishment without upshot. Barak even brought back from a ten-year retirement a leading commando general, Shai Avital, to head the command. (Both Barak and Avital in their day commanded the country’s most elite unit, the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, sayeret matcal, of 1976 Entebbe Raid fame. Foreign reports have it that the unit has been operating in Iran, at least in an intelligence-gathering role, for years.)
And over the past month, three mysterious explosions have rocked major Iranian installations: a rocket-development base forty kilometers southwest of Tehran; an unidentified site in or near Isfahan, which has a large nuclear facility; and at a “special steel” production plant in Yazd. While neither Israel nor the United States has claimed responsibility, a smiling Barak said: “May such explosions continue.”
The recent American and EU upgrades of sanctions against Iran have left Israelis—and, apparently, the Iranians—unimpressed. The sanctions do not include a total ban on oil exports and refined fuel imports or a blanket boycott of Iran’s central bank. Moreover, so long as Russia, China, India and some European countries, not to mention Turkey and the Arab world, continue to trade massively with Iran, expect Tehran to continue its push toward nuclear weaponry.
So what it boils down to is simple: Iran will get the bomb—or Israel and/or America will have to stop them militarily.…
