Charles Krauthammer & Max Boot: Neo-con war counsel

Tehran Calculus http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer091506.php3

Against
millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a
mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions
of inhabitants...

Sept. 15, 2006 /  22 Elul, 5766

By Charles Krauthammer

In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not "leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." There's only one such current candidate: Iran.

The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran:
"It's very important for the American people to see the president try
to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."

"Before" implies that the one follows the other. The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy. With the
crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important
to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option.

The costs will be terrible:

Economic . An attack on Iran
is likely to send oil prices overnight to $100 or even to $150 a
barrel. That will cause a worldwide recession perhaps as deep as the
one triggered by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Iran might suspend its own 2.5 million barrels a day of oil exports and might even be joined by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, asserting primacy as the world's leading anti-imperialist. But even more effectively, Iran will shock the oil markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's exports flow every day.

Iran
could do this by attacking ships in the Strait, scuttling its own
ships, laying mines or just threatening to launch Silkworm anti-ship
missiles at any passing tanker.

The
U.S. Navy will be forced to break the blockade. We will succeed, but at
considerable cost. And it will take time ­ during which the world
economy will be in a deep spiral.

Military . Iran will activate its proxies in Iraq, most notably, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr is already wreaking havoc with sectarian attacks on Sunni civilians. Iran
could order the Mahdi Army and its other agents within the police and
armed forces to take up arms against the institutions of the central
government itself, threatening the very anchor of the new Iraq. Many Mahdi will die, but they live to die. Many Iraqis and coalition soldiers are likely to die as well.

Among the lesser military dangers, Iran
might activate terrorist cells around the world, although without
nuclear capability that threat is hardly strategic. It will also be
very difficult to unleash its proxy Hezbollah, now chastened by the
destruction it brought upon Lebanon in the latest round with Israel and deterred by the presence of Europeans in the south Lebanon buffer zone.

Diplomatic. There will be massive criticism of America
from around the world. Much of it is to be discounted. The Muslim
street will come out again for a few days, having replenished its
supply of flammable American flags, most recently exhausted during the
cartoon riots. Their governments will express solidarity with a fellow
Muslim state, but this will be entirely hypocritical. The Arabs are
terrified about the rise of a nuclear Iran and would privately rejoice in its defanging.

The
Europeans will be less hypocritical because their visceral
anti-Americanism trumps rational calculation. We will have done them an
enormous favor by sparing them the threat of Iranian nukes, but they
will vilify us nonetheless.

These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.

In the
region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the
Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against
its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a
nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.

Then
there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired
by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the
imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of
Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than
anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized
world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered
either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an
official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah
Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Against
millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a
mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions
of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.

____________

Israel Should Hit Syria First http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0806/boot.php3

Tehran... was holding Hezbollah's rockets in reserve for a possible retaliatory strike if Israel or the U.S. hit Iran's nuclear weapons complex.

August 24, 2006 / 30 Menachem-Av, 5766

By Max Boot

"We are walking with open eyes into our next war."

The
pessimism of a senior Israeli official who made that comment on Aug. 13
was striking because he had just finished telling a group of security
analysts brought to Israel by the American Jewish Committee that the United Nations-brokered cease-fire had achieved many of Israel's
goals. But he had no illusions that this would represent anything more
than a temporary halt in the fight between Israel and the Quartet of
Evil seeking to dominate the Middle East — Iran, Syria, Hamas and
Hezbollah.

The war wasn't a total loss for Israel.
But it was far from a victory. Hezbollah lost more than 500 fighters as
well as most of its medium- and long-range missiles and its bunker
network in southern Lebanon, while inflicting scant damage on Israel. Israeli intelligence analysts are convinced that Tehran
isn't happy about this turn of events because it was holding
Hezbollah's rockets in reserve for a possible retaliatory strike if Israel or the U.S. hit Iran's nuclear weapons complex.

But rockets are easily replaced, and Iran and Syria will now undertake a massive effort to make good Hezbollah's losses, and then some.

From the perspective of the Quartet of Evil, this conflict demonstrated the power of their rockets to blunt Israel's
military superiority. Antitank missiles inflicted substantial losses on
Israeli armor and infantry. A cruise missile badly damaged an Israeli
warship that didn't have its defensive systems turned on. And Hezbollah
was able to keep firing hundreds of Katyusha rockets a day into
northern Israeli right up until the cease-fire.

Israel had managed to defeat the terrorists' previous wonder-weapon, the suicide bomber, by walling off the Gaza Strip and West Bank. But a fence won't stop missiles. Israel will now be loath to retreat any further from the West Bank. Hamas, for its part, will have strong incentive to stockpile rockets in its Gaza redoubt and launch a "third intifada," as suggested by a columnist in the Hamas newspaper Al Risala.

Israel
had hoped that this conflict would reestablish its deterrence, but, if
anything, the unsatisfactory outcome will only embolden its enemies.
The problem is that wars of attrition against fanatical jihadists who
do not fear death and who hide among civilians negate to some extent
the Israeli Defense Forces' superior firepower. Additionally, Iran, the ultimate source of terrorist money and arms, is too far away for effective Israeli retaliation.

Syria, however, is a weak link in the quartet.

Syria's importance as an advance base for Iran
— the two countries concluded a formal alliance on June 16 — cannot be
exaggerated. It is the go-between for most of the munitions flowing to
Hezbollah. It is the sanctuary of Hamas honcho Khaled Meshaal. It is
also, according to Israeli intelligence sources, the home of a new
Iranian-Syrian intelligence center that tracks Israeli military
movements and relays that information to terrorist proxies.

State Department optimists dream that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad can be weaned from Iran through concessions from the United States and Israel, such as the return of the Golan Heights. But since the early 1990s, the United States has tried repeatedly to strike a deal with Syria
and never gotten anywhere. More economic pressure, especially from
Europe, would be helpful, but it could probably be offset by increased
subsidies from Iran.

History suggests that only force, or the threat of force, can win substantial concessions from Syria. In 1998, Turkey threatened military action unless Syria stopped supporting Kurdish terrorists. Damascus promptly complied. Israel may have no choice but to follow the Turkish example.

Indeed, Shlomo Avineri, a former director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, argues that his country fought the wrong war: Instead of targeting Lebanon, it should have gone after Syria. The Syrian armed forces are less motivated than Hezbollah, and they offer many more targets for Israeli airpower.

It is, of course, hard for a liberal democracy such as Israel to contemplate war if it hasn't been attacked directly — and Syria has been careful to avoid direct attacks on Israel. (It prefers to fight to the last Lebanese.)

Israelis
naturally prefer peace. But the choice they face isn't between war and
peace. It is between war sooner and on their own terms, or war later
and on the enemy's terms. Ignoring the threat and hoping that it goes
away isn't a serious option. That's the mistake Israel made with Hezbollah over the last six years.