Endgame

Remember how smug, insufferable, know-it-all David Ignatius informed us that the NIE showed that our policies towards Iran were all wrong? Here’s how he put it in a Post-Global forum:

Sometimes events create space for diplomacy where none existed before. I want to think that this might be the case with the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. What matters about the NIE is less the details than the atmospherics. The details themselves are hard to parse: Yes, we now believe that in 2003 Iran halted a previously unknown covert military program to build a bomb; but no, that doesn’t mean Iran has stopped its threatening nuclear activity or that it has given up its ambition to be a nuclear power. When you boil it all down, the United States has aimed its intelligence rifle at Tehran–and shot itself in the foot. It has undercut its old policy and embarrassed itself and its allies. So what’s the advantage in that, you ask? Simply this: The NIE creates a way for both parties to come to the negotiating table without losing face. Both sides can start a new narrative, in place of the old one that led to an impasse. It is this serendipitous aspect–this unexpected reversal of the parameters of the game–that interests me most.

Shortly after its release my Watcher’s Council colleague Wolf Howling wrote:

Our intelligence agencies have done our nation a tremendous disservice. It will, inn the long run, likely cost us bitterly since it puts off any reckoning with the single most destabilizing force in this world. Every day that reckoning is put off will increase the cost we will pay and gold and blood. And if Iran achieves a nuclear arsenal, that cost we will pay will rise exponentially.

Charles Krauthammer points out in today’s column, the Holocaust Declaration (or here) that this week’s announcement that Iran was installing 6000 new centrifuges demonstrates that we have reached a point of no return.

It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration’s attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road.At home, the president’s efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program were irreparably undermined by November’s National Intelligence Estimate, whose “moderate confidence” that Iran has not restarted nuclear weaponization — the least important of three elements of any nuclear program — has promoted the illusion that Iran has given up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet uranium enrichment, the most difficult step, proceeds apace, as does the development of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

The president is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the Middle East, threaten the moderate Arabs with Iranian hegemony and leave Israel on hair-trigger alert.

This failure can, however, be mitigated. Since there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by pre-emption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence to prevent the mullahs, some of whom are apocalyptic and messianic, from using nuclear weapons.

(Keep in mind the second paragraph when you read Ignatius’s praise for Thomas Fingar from a couple of years ago. What Fingar and those involved in the NIE exercised was not caution. It was recklessness to create an illusion of complacency.)

At this point then, what does Krauthammer counsel?

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush’s greatest contribution to nuclear peace would be to issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy’s language while changing the names of the miscreants:“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran.”

This should be followed with a simple explanation: “As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people.”

This policy — the Holocaust Declaration — would establish a firm benchmark that would outlive this administration. Every future president — and every serious presidential candidate — would have to publicly state whether or not he supports the Holocaust Declaration.

Krauthammer then acknowledges that such a policy may not deter the likes of Ahmadinejad, but it would likely (or maybe just hopefully) spur rational actors in Iran to take charge and restrain or depose him.

Krauthammer further argues that such a policy isn’t just necessary to save the Jews of the world (see his 10 year old essay At Last Zion for a fuller treatment of this topic), but to confirm America’s role in the world as a beacon of freedom.

For the first time since the time of Jesus, Israel is the home of the world’s largest Jewish community. An implacable enemy has openly declared genocidal intentions against it — in clear violation of the U.N. charter — and is pursuing the means to carry out that intent. The world does nothing. Some, like the Russians, are literally providing fuel for the fire.For those who believe that America stands for something in the world — that the nation that has liberated more peoples than any other has even the most minimal moral vocation — there can be no more pressing cause than preventing the nuclear annihilation of an allied democracy, the last refuge and hope of an ancient people openly threatened with the final Final Solution.

UPDATE: If this report in the Times of London is accurate, the recklessness of the NIE is even more apparent.

A previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230km southeast of Tehran, and the link with Iran’s long-range programme, was revealed by Jane’s Intelligence Review after a study of the imagery by a former Iraq weapons inspector. A close examination of the photographs has indicated that the Iranians are following the same path as North Korea, pursuing a space programme that enables Tehran to acquire expertise in long-range missile technology.Geoffrey Forden, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that there was a recently constructed building on the site, about 40 metres in length, which was similar in form and size to the Taepodong long-range missile assembly facility in North Korea.

Avital Johanan, the editor of Jane’s Proliferation, said that the analysis of the Iranian site indicated that Tehran may be about five years away from developing a 6,000km ballistic missile. This would tie in with American intelligence estimates and underlines why President Bush wants the Polish and Czech components of the US missile defence system to be up and running by 2013.

So as Tehran reaches the point of completing its quest for the requisite fuel, it is working on a delivery system too. Not exactly the pause that the NIE proclaimed in its summary.

Jihad Watch mentions that this isn’t just about “filthy bacteria,” it’s also about “corrupt powers.”

Note the resonance that this kind of talk will have with the American Left, which sees the U.S. as the chief of the “corrupt powers.” And remember: this man was applauded at Columbia University.”Iran: President wants to ‘annihilate corrupt powers,'” from AKI (thanks to Insubria).

Israel Matzav cautions:

Will this wake the world up to the fact that Iran’s nuclear aspirations are not just Israel’s problem? Don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, expect countries like Germany to continue to undermine sanctions in the pursuit of the Almighty Euro.

Gina Cobb reminds us that this emphasizes the importance of missile defense, a position that I imagine with which Poligazette wholeheartedly agrees.(via memeorandum)
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.