Iran is not our enemy. The regime that enriches itself while murdering, oppressing, and impoverishing ordinary Iranians; the regime that incites genocide against Israel, threatens its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and vows to bring about a “world without America” — that is our enemy. This was one of the key points driven home by a trio of extraordinary individuals gathered for a dinner in Tel Aviv last week.
At the table were Bernard Lewis, for my money the greatest living historian of the Middle East; Uri Lubrani, Israel’s envoy to Iran prior to the fall of the Shah and an advisor to leaders of the Jewish state ever since; and Meir Dagan, a retired paratrooper, commando, and general who was recruited in 2002 by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon to rebuild the Mossad as an intelligence agency “with a knife in its teeth.” (Dagan stepped down from that post in 2010 and has been increasingly outspoken ever since.) A small group of young American national-security professionals — from the Hill, the Defense Department, Homeland Security, even the D.C. police department — broke pita with them. None of the three minimizes how dire will be the consequences should Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s finger come to rest on a nuclear trigger. The Iranian president subscribes to an extremist school of Shia theology that, General Dagan explained, looks forward to an apocalyptic war that would “hasten the arrival of the Mahdi,” mankind’s ultimate savior. But he thinks Ahmadinejad and his associates are not as close as many analysts believe to acquiring a nuclear capability. “Two years to have such a weapon, in my estimation,” he said.
If that is correct — a big if — it means we have a little time to find out whether tough measures short of military force can be effective. Dagan notes, too, that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would not end the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons: It will only delay it by perhaps two or three years. The technology, the expertise, and the components are all too readily available. North Korea and Pakistan both have them — and both have proliferated them before.
The larger point is this: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It is the regime that rules Iran, more than weapons or the facilities in which they are produced, that constitutes the real problem. From that it follows that changing the regime — not destroying its hardware — is the higher goal.
We had a chance in 2009 to achieve just that – regime change, when the people took to the street. What did our’wunderkind’ do? Turn his back on the; to this day I can’t understand why we did not assist them.
One problem with the oil embargo strategy is China and the incentives it gives them (China FWIW imports more oil than Iran exports, so they can absorb all of Iran’s output). Suppose everyone else stops buying Iranian oil, and China as the sole remaining export market of any size negotiates a steep discount (in line with what is suggested in the article). Now China is saving $billions per year on its oil bill and has Iran as a dependent client state. They will want to keep things that way as long as they can…
Not that I have any better ideas, mind you. If you can get China and Russia on board with the embargo then Iran’s economy folds like a paper cup, but we’ll also see $140+ per barrel oil again (even if they don’t close the strait). And I suspect that China and Russia are secretly happy to cause trouble with Iran as a proxy.
Take out Iran’s refineries?
I don’t want people that don’t hate us and want us dead harmed, but Iran may have set it up so that it will happen regardless.