Fear not Iran

The buzz to use military power to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear state is in full swing. The 13, March opinion piece by Joshua Muravchik advocates total war with Iran and believes that a use of force will undermine the regime. Studying the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war should leave some doubt in one’s mind about the wisdom of attacking Iran. Compound this with the American reasoning and experience in Iraq and it’s difficult to see why anybody would support the notion to wage total war on Iran over their nuclear program. 

Scaring the public about Iran has become a pastime of sorts in certain policy circles in the US and abroad recently. In fact if you replace “Iran” with “Iraq”  the arguments closely resemble each other. However in this case there is not a 9/11 scale event driving public support. In a recent document leak it has been suggested that Iran’s capability is nowhere near what the policy wonks have been advertising and won’t be for quite some time.

Muravchik believes that an attack will divide and inspire an already present Iranian opposition. Saddam Hussein believed the exact same thing in 1980. The Iraqi invasion of Iran actually united a people that were on the verge of a second revolution to replace the theocracy that took the place of the Shah. While Muravhick cites some vague examples of people turning their back on regimes the evidence suggests that the opposite is true: that invasions by outsiders unite a fractured society. Iranian propaganda is quite anti-US and while there is a significant portion of people who do not support the theocracy counting on them to support a US invasion is a fool’s errand that is asking for trouble. 

Iran is also very good at producing weapons for propaganda purposes. Their domestic arms industry is fairly robust when it comes to basic military equipment but the production of more advanced technology is almost certainly smoke and mirrors. The F-313 stealth fighter Iran debuted had an instrument panel seemingly built with a quick shopping trip to the Garmin website. Their newest fighter, the Saeghe-2, looks suspiciously like the US produced F-5 Tiger II that was exported from the US to Iran in the days of the Shah. To believe that they have the capability to build a nuclear weapon in six months almost seems like buying into propaganda, a dangerous precedent for anybody. 

 The mismanagement of the occupation by elements within the Bush administration and the military’s inability to formulate a cohesive strategy in Iraq make me wonder if they could manage anything in Iran, presuming that the US does not get bogged down in a destructive war against a determined conventional force. The same people who mismanaged the initial occupation are still in policy circles and still have powerful voices. The calls for war are ridiculous in the face of an Iran that is changing, albeit slowly, and seeking to reenter the international community on a greater scale. War would only reaffirm the anti-US and anti-western propaganda doled out by the regime. Diplomacy is, in the case, the best hope for a non-nuclear Iran. Don’t let people with PhDs argue for total war unless they volunteer to go first.