Demolishing the Case for War with Iran

I've been unable to blog over the last few days, but I have been following the NIE story pretty closely. There's so much to write about, so many things that need to be said, but for now I want to focus on one particular line from the NIE itself:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.

Many people are seizing upon this line as evidence that a diplomatic approach can indeed by successful in dealing with Iran, and I think that's true. But the key takeaway here is that we are dealing with a rational regime, a regime that approaches issues by applying a standard cost-benefit analysis.

Why is that important? Well, because the primary argument that has been put forth in favor of attacking Iran is that the Iranian regime is somehow uniquely irrational and undeterable by traditional means. Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, the argument goes, because it is run by irrational religious fanatics who would be willing to deploy nuclear weapons even knowing that it would result in the complete obliteration of their country. For instance, Rudy Giuliani recently said that the Iranian regime could not be deterred like Mao's China or the former Soviet Union because it had no "residual rationality." His chief foreign policy advisor, Norman Podhoretz, made exactly the same argument in his lengthy article entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran."

But as the NIE spells out, the Iranian regime is nothing like the cartoonish caricature that neoconservative commentators and Republican presidential candidates like to paint. Iran, like most other countries, interacts with the rest of the world in a rational way, a way that reflects a weighing of its national interests and a cost-benefit analysis of its actions. While it would certainly be preferable if Iran did not have nuclear weapons, the idea that the country is run by a bunch of suicidal lunatics is ridiculous.

And, therefore, the NIE not only calls into doubt the idea that Iran is on the verge of going nuclear, it demolishes the underlying rationale for attacking the country even if it were about to go nuclear. There is little doubt that attacking Iran would lead to a whole host of collateral consequences: some easily foreseen, some unpredictable. It would unquestionably be an enormously destabilizing and risky move, which means that such an attack could only be justified if we were certain that the alternative (a nuclear Iran) was both imminent and worse than the consequences that would result from the attack. The NIE completely undermines both of these claims. It describes a rational Iran that is not currently seeking to build nuclear weapons and, even if it were, is still many years away from having even the requisite knowledge to do so.