To the Editor:
In “The Case for Bombing Iran” [June], Norman Podhoretz continues to liken the challenge posed today by “Islamofascism” to last century’s ideological conflicts with the Nazis and Soviets. But he fails to take his own analysis to its logical conclusion. After all, bombing Iran would at best only delay, not neutralize, Tehran’s nuclear program. Moreover, many military experts argue that Iran’s nuclear facilities are so well hidden and dispersed that it would be impossible to strike at them successfully from the air. Why, then, does Mr. Podhoretz not advocate a full-scale invasion to “drain” another “swamp” of terror and rid the world of a monstrous threat?
Perhaps the reason is that five years ago he misidentified Iraq as the strategic threat. Indeed, our soldiers are still drowning as they try to drain that particular swamp. And not only have America’s military forces been weakened and stretched thin as a result of the Iraq campaign, but our diplomatic tools and political might have also been depleted. In arguing for opening a new theater in the war on terror, Mr. Podhoretz quickly passes over these circumstances by saying they do not matter next to the horror of a nuclear Iran. But clearly they are affecting his thinking or he would not limit our options with Iran—in the middle of “World War IV”—to a mere bombing campaign.
Mr. Podhoretz credits Ronald Reagan (among others) for forcing the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Reagan did not carry out any new strategy; he merely reinvigorated a brilliant policy that was put in place by Harry Truman, a policy that created an alliance of democracies to contain and, where necessary, combat tyranny. This strategy used the threat of military might together with political and economic sanctions, diplomacy, sophisticated ideological warfare, and direct support for democratic forces in order to contain the Soviet bloc and force it to collapse of its own weakness.
Mr. Podhoretz gainsays implementing such a strategy today—sanctions “rarely work,” Iranian leaders act irrationally, diplomacy is hopeless, Western Europe is “Findlandized” by its Muslim minority, and so on—and instead advocates preemptive and unilateral war without any clear reason other than fear. But fear is no basis for clear analysis, much less for sound strategy. We did not have such enormous foreign-policy success during the cold war by acting on our fears; we won because of our strengths. It is time to return to them.
Eric Chenoweth
Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe
Washington, D.C.
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To the Editor:
I share Norman Podhoretz’s dislike of the regime in Tehran and largely concur with his assessment of the dangers it poses. I also agree that the current course of diplomacy with Iran is frustrating and uncertain. Still, I cannot agree with him that a military strike is the solution.
Iran’s leadership is cunning, resourceful, and hostile, but it is not suicidal. It uses aggressive rhetoric as a means to advance its pretensions to regional power, but it is not likely to follow through with action. Nor is Iran’s leadership monolithic. There are differences among top officials about the wisdom of continuing to defy the UN Security Council. Many elites, moreover, have no fondness whatsoever for the Islamic revolution. If America increased nonviolent pressures, internal divisions could widen.
Contrary to what Mr. Podhoretz suggests, Iran has little potential to lead the Middle East and expel the American presence from it. As a Persian and Shiite state in a region of Sunni Arabs, Iran is actually quite limited in its influence. Many of its appeals to the “Arab street” have driven Arab countries closer to Israel. The confidence that Tehran projects is driven by what it sees as American weakness in Iraq, but it is not backed by military strength.
Nor am I so certain that Iran is dead set on acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran seeks not only power but also international respectability. Leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or stating its nuclear plans clearly would undermine that goal and set the country on a collision course with its neighbors.
In any case, for Iran to exploit a nuclear capacity would not be as easy as it sounds. There are grave existential risks for the weaker party in a nuclear competition, and that is what Iran would be next to, say, the U.S. or Israel. Deterrence could still hold.
A perfectly executed strike by the U.S. on all known nuclear sites might delay Iran’s program. But the result could also be a strengthened and more determined regime that would have the sympathy of many in Europe and Asia for its battle against American unilateralism. The repercussions in the Middle East—even without a strong Iranian response there or on the U.S. homeland—would be destabilizing for American allies and interests.
Because the Islamic republic is not about to be brought down spontaneously by Iranians, the U.S. should focus on changing the regime’s behavior rather than on replacing the regime itself. The aim of U.S. policy should be to demonstrate to Iran the benefits of renouncing its revolutionary pretensions and becoming a normal state. If all this does not work, the U.S. should reinforce its deterrence capacity and take measures—arms sales, security assurances, and missile-defense technologies—to dilute and offset Iran’s nascent nuclear capability.
Shahram Chubin
Geneva Centre for Security Policy
Geneva, Switzerland
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz lumps together many widely disparate elements under the rubric of the “Islamofascist” enemy. The highest religious authorities of Saudi Arabia and Egypt have issued many fatwas against Shiite Muslims. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban despise Iranians. Sunnis and Shiites are at each other’s throats in Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Yet Mr. Podhoretz believes that these factions are magically “willing to set sectarian differences aside when it comes to forging jihadist alliances against the infidels,” all under (Shiite) Iran’s leadership.
If Mr. Podhoretz’s theory is correct, why is it that Iran played a major role in defeating the Taliban and helping to erect Afghani-stan’s national-unity government? Why is it that Iran, though capable of creating hell for U.S. forces in Iraq, has been relatively restrained?
Mr. Podhoretz’s likening of Iran to Nazi Germany in 1938 is ludicrous. Germany, a powerful nation that had been humiliated a few decades earlier in World War I, had major grievances against the victors. Adolf Hitler was a charismatic leader, and Germany’s culture was such that its people would follow him blindly. And Germany had a powerful military, backed by advanced technological and industrial capacity.
Iran, by contrast, has no territorial claims against any other nation, nor has it attacked any of its neighbors for 250 years. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a charismatic leader and is, in fact, in deep trouble at home, even among his own supporters. Anti-authoritarian thinking runs deep in Persian culture, and Iranians do not blindly follow their leaders. Iran, finally, does not have an advanced economy, and its air force and navy are museum quality.
All foreign-policy decisions in Iran are made by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. He does extensive consulting with Iran’s National Security Council, the Expediency Council, former leaders, and the military. Say what one will about Iran’s mode of government, the result has been a calculated, pragmatic foreign policy. Above all, Khameini has issued a fatwa against the production of nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel are deplorable, and have been roundly condemned, even within Iran. But others have noted that he has not actually called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Iran’s position since the 1979 revolution has always been that Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy Land must vote freely in a referendum to select their destiny for themselves. Khatami went even further, declaring that any solution that would be acceptable to the Palestinians would be acceptable to Iran.
Mr. Podhoretz’s worry that Iran could detonate a nuclear weapon in Israel is misplaced. Iran’s leaders consider themselves the protectors of the Palestinians and of Islam’s holy sites in Jerusalem. Any attack on Israel would wipe these out, too, besides provoking a counterattack that would wipe Iran off the map.
Muhammad Sahimi
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
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To the Editor:
I have several problems with Norman Podhoretz’s argument that the U.S. should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Although he acknowledges that many of Iran’s underground facilities are effectively invulnerable to conventional bombing, he still believes that surgical air raids could set back Iran’s nuclear program for several years. But where is the evidence for this? Iran has no doubt learned the lesson from Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak complex, and very likely has stationed its own nuclear facilities out of harm’s way.
In any case, over the past few years President Bush has effectively spent in Iraq whatever political capital he might have had for an air campaign against Iran. It is inconceivable that Congress or the American people would support such a difficult, expensive, and dangerous mission now or anytime in the near future.
Dismissing the possibility that “mutual assured destruction” would be an effective deterrent in the case of Iran, Mr. Podhoretz cites the comments of successive Iranian leaders that in a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, the latter would survive while the former would be destroyed. But this does not mean that bombing Iran now is the only way out. Instead, the U.S. should loudly and clearly disabuse Iran of the notion that it might survive after having launched a nuclear attack on Israel or anyone else. Although there are very likely some martyrs among the Iranian hierarchy willing to “let Iran burn” (as Ayatollah Khomeini put it), it is far more likely that the present supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini, would retreat under the threat of immediate and certain extinction in retaliation for the detonation of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Lewis A. Glenn
Danville, California
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To the Editor:
In arguing for the inexpressibly dangerous (and illegal) preemptive bombing of Iran, Norman Podhoretz waves the claim that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” But numerous expert articles, well distributed in the public sphere, have debunked this notion. They have shown the “threat” attributed to Ahmadinejad to have been based on a mistranslation by the Iranian news agency of words he uttered in 2005.
In brief, Ahmadinejad had been quoting a statement by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980’s that “this occupation regime [of Israel’s] will be erased from the page of time.” Destruction of the country as a whole was certainly not what was meant. (Recall that at the time, Israel was supplying Iran with military equipment.)
Observers may legitimately disagree about Iran’s true intentions today, based on different readings of its leadership’s rhetoric and its nuclear ambitions. But given the catastrophic outcome of misreading partial information with respect to Iraq, it behooves everyone to be extremely cautious in making assessments.
Virginia Tilley
Human Sciences Research Council
Pretoria, South Africa
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To the Editor:
As an example of Britain’s tepid response to Iran’s taking captive several of its sailors back in March, Norman Podhoretz quotes the public reaction of Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to a photograph of one of the prisoners with a cigarette in his mouth: “This [smoking] sends completely the wrong message to our young people.” But this little anecdote cannot be used as evidence of Western weakness in the face of Iranian aggression. The quotation was fabricated as part of an April Fools’ joke in the London Guardian.
Neil Ford
Sydney, Australia
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz ably describes the Iranian threat and presents a strong case for confronting it. About the nature of the threat there can be no doubt. As we show in our 2006 book, What Makes Tehran Tick?, the Islamic republic’s revolutionary ideology drives it to seek enemies abroad. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons, support for international terrorism, and campaign to destabilize Iraq are ideological interests that cannot be negotiated away.
Mr. Podhoretz feels that diplomacy and sanctions have failed to halt Iran’s aggression, and military strikes are the only viable option. But we would argue that before military action (which should not be taken off the table), Washington should mount a real effort to empower the Iranian people, through their main opposition groups, to topple the regime of the mullahs. Regrettably, this has not yet been tried.
The main Iranian opposition group, the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), has domestic support within Iran, in the Sunni Arab heartland, and among Western sympathizers. But at present, the MEK is designated by Washington as a terrorist organization. This should change. Besides being a democratic force in Iran, the MEK can also be of help to us in monitoring Tehran’s nuclear program as well as its subversive efforts in Iraq.
We do not need to arm or fund the MEK, or even to provide it with political support. But if we are to avoid the drastic measures that Mr. Podhoretz advocates and that may become necessary, we must give Iranians every chance to achieve regime change on their own.
Raymond Tanter
Thomas McInerney
Iran Policy Committee
Washington, D.C.
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz writes that he has lost faith in the ability of the Iranian people to overthrow the theocratic regime that rules their country. He assumes that if the Iranians really desired regime change, they would follow the example set in the 1980’s by the democratic dissidents of Poland’s Solidarity movement. What Mr. Podhoretz seems to be forgetting is that our government did everything it could to encourage Solidarity. With respect to Iran, however, the U.S. (along with the EU) has designated the oldest, largest, most organized, and most popular of Iranian opposition groups, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), as a foreign terrorist organization. Whether this was done because of political pressure, political naiveté, or the desire to do business with the Islamic republic, the West has cut a bad deal for the Iranian people.
Daniel M. Zucker
Americans for Democracy in the Middle East
New York City
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz is right to apply the Bush Doctrine’s strategy of preemption to the threat from Iran, but his target is not the right one. Bombing Iran’s hardened nuclear sites could invite drastic retaliation by the mullahs and economic disaster for Western countries that depend upon oil from the Persian Gulf. Iran could withhold oil supplies, destroy competing oil fields in the gulf, and interdict sea traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a huge percentage of the world’s daily production of oil.
Iran has a fleet of small suicide boats and short-range missiles to be deployed for such action, and as we saw with the USS Cole, a single successful attack by a cheap, explosive-laden small craft can render a multi-million dollar vessel helpless. Massive land attacks against our forces in Iraq by suicide squads are not inconceivable, either—the mullahs have ordered such operations before, during their war with Iraq in the 1980’s. And bombardment of Israel has already been threatened by Iran’s president.
Success against Iran ultimately depends on destroying the regime, not just its nuclear sites. For that reason, I find more compelling the strategy proposed by Arthur Herman in these pages [“Getting Serious About Iran: A Military Option,” November 2006]. As Herman shows, systematic strikes against soft targets—command and control, air defenses, missile sites, naval assets, and especially oil-refinery and storage facilities—could defang the theocracy while simultaneously protecting the oil resources and vital shipping lanes in the gulf.
Wesley Clark
San Diego, California
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To the Editor:
In my opinion, Norman Podhoretz’s “The Case for Bombing Iran” is the most important article COMMENTARY has ever published, and I have been reading the magazine for over 50 years.
Richard L. Rubenstein
Florida State University
Tampa, Florida
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
In my article, I tried to show that John McCain was right when he said that the only thing worse than bombing Iran is allowing Iran to get the bomb. I did this by (1) spelling out what was likely to happen if Iran should succeed in going nuclear; (2) demonstrating why neither diplomacy nor sanctions nor an internal insurrection could be relied upon to prevent this; (3) acknowledging the potential dangers of a bombing campaign; (4) drawing the unhappy conclusion that such a campaign was the only way to stop, or at least retard for years to come, the regime’s otherwise inexorable progress toward acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; and (5) expressing the hope that George W. Bush would make good on his promise not to permit Iran to develop a nuclear capability, and would do so by ordering air strikes against its nuclear facilities.
In the months since the article was posted on the Internet, I have been described throughout the blogosphere as “pathological scum,” a “morally repugnant cretin,” a “superannuated Zionist hack,” a “war criminal,” “a traitor to the U.S.,” and a “threat to our grandchildren”—not to mention other even more colorful characterizations unfit for quotation in a family magazine. Imagine my relief, then, when I read the letters above, where the worst crime of which I am accused is being wrong.
Grateful though I am for the mildness of this charge, however, I can no more plead guilty to it than I can to being already responsible (in the language of the blogosphere’s indictment) for the “murder” of “millions of innocent Iraqis” and to conspiring now to add “millions of innocent Iranians” to my record-breaking achievements as a “genocidal maniac.”
In his own indictment, Eric Chenoweth recycles every cliché of the antiwar movement to prove that I am not only wrong about Iran but that I was also wrong five years ago about Iraq. Well, as he will discover if he subjects himself to a reading of my new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamo-fascism, I still believe that Saddam Hussein—as the secular face of the two-headed monster against which we have been fighting for the past six years—did indeed pose a strategic threat to us and that we were right to overthrow him. And as to why I advocate bombing rather than invading Iran, he will discover that I place a strong emphasis on “the prudential judgment” that determines which fights to pick at a given moment and which to delay until the time is ripe, when to pause and when to advance, and which tactic is the right one to use in maneuvering on a particular front. For the rest, Mr. Chenoweth paints an idealized picture of how containment worked in World War III, both before and during Reagan’s return to it, and he seems to think that all by itself his rosy description refutes the careful case I made for bombing Iran.
President Bush has said that if we allow Iran to go nuclear, people 50 years from now will look back at us, just as we look back at the men of Munich who failed to stop Hitler when there was still time, and ask, “How could they have allowed this to happen?” The answer, if (God forbid) it should come to that, can be found in Mr. Chenoweth’s letter.
Shahram Chubin, Muhammad Sahimi, Lewis A. Glenn, and Virginia Tilley are all guilty of another Munich-like sin, namely, refusing to believe that Ahmadinejad means what he says when he says that he intends to wipe Israel off the map, no less than Hitler did when he promised to solve the “Jewish problem.” Indeed, Mr. Sahimi and Ms. Tilley are so desperate to shut their ears to this horror that they even buy into the myth that it all stems from a misunderstanding.
This piece of propagandistic nonsense is evidently based on the fact that a literal translation of the words the Ayatollah Khomeini used and that Ahmadinejad has cited would be “wipe out [or “purge”] the stain of disgrace from the center of the Islamic world.” That this carries the same meaning as “wipe Israel off the map” is not only clear in itself, but is confirmed by how the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) reported in its own English edition on Ahmadinejad’s speech to a conference on “The World Without Zionism” held in Tehran on October 26, 2005: “Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map.’” Since then Ahmadinejad has made the same threat on a number of other occasions.
Speaking of myths about statements, Neil Ford seems to be spreading a new one. If the remark I attributed to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was fabricated as an April Fools’ joke by the London Guardian, surely that would have been obvious to the other British papers that quoted it. Still,
if Mr. Ford is right, which I doubt, I for one would welcome it as a sign that while the British may be down, they’re not so flat as all that.
Shahram Chubin makes my head spin. He begins by saying that he “largely concur[s]” with my “assessment of the dangers” posed by the regime in Tehran, but he then goes on, point by point, to argue the opposite case, thereby joining the chorus of those who refuse to take seriously what Ahmadinejad and the other rulers of Iran say about their intentions.
Muhammad Sahimi, adding his voice to the same Munich-like chorus, denies that Iran poses any danger at all to anyone, not even Israel. He also claims that the division between Sunni and Shiite Muslims shows that there is no such thing as Islamofascism. Yet this division has not prevented Iran from supplying weapons to both the Shiites of Hizballah and the Sunnis of Hamas, as well as (in a characteristically opportunistic switch) the Taliban in Afghanistan; from allying itself with Syria; and from (yes) “creating hell for U.S. forces in Iraq” with the objective of driving us out so that, as Ahmadinejad recently put it, Iran can “fill the gap with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia.” So much for the fatwas against Shiite Muslims issued by “the highest religious authorities of Saudi Arabia.”
Nor is any comfort to be derived from the fact that Ahmadinejad is not the same person as Hitler or that Iran today is not the same country as Germany in 1938. For as I argued in my article, Iran today has this in common with Nazi Germany in 1938: rather than a “normal state” with negotiable grievances, it is (as Mr. Chubin is honest enough to concede) a “revolutionary” regime seeking to change the international order.
As to my worry that Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel, Mr. Sahimi considers it “misplaced.” How, he asks, could Iran’s leaders do such a thing when an attack on Israel would also wipe out the Palestinians, of whom Iran’s leaders “consider themselves the protectors”? (What?!—even though most Palestinians are Sunnis?) The answer to Mr. Sahimi’s question can be found in the statements quoted in my article—statements both by Khomeini (“I say let Iran go up in smoke provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world”) and by the putative “moderate” Rafsanjani (“If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession . . . application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world”). But of course (see Mr. Glenn’s letter) the Munich-like chorus of today dismisses such statements as mere rhetoric, just as Hitler’s threats were taken then as—to borrow a word Hannah Arendt used in discussing Eichmann—“rodomontade.”
Raymond Tanter and Thomas McInerney, along with David Zucker, still believe in the possibility of a democratic insurrection that, by getting rid of the rogue regime now in power, would rescue us from the terrible dilemma of what to do about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Would that I could take refuge in the same hope—which, as I indicated in my article, I once shared. But, pace Mr. Zucker, I knew Solidarity, and the NCRI, which has very close, if somewhat murky, ties to the MEK cited by Messrs. Tanter and McInerney, is no Solidarity. First of all, its commitment to democracy is (to put it gently) nowhere so clear as was Solidarity’s. Furthermore, reports indicate that it has been losing support, and given the stepped-up activity of the repressive apparatus in Iran, its chances of overthrowing the mullocracy are in all probability less good than ever.
Like a number of other commentators, Mr. Zucker, and to a lesser extent Messrs. Tanter and McInerney, blame the Bush administration for failing to do for the MEK and/or the NCRI what they imagine the Reagan administration did for Solidarity. By now, everyone blames Bush for everything that has gone wrong, and denies him credit for everything that has gone right, in the past six years, so why not throw this accusation into the pot as well? But Mr. Zucker, like Mr. Chenoweth on containment, is romanticizing when he chides me for forgetting that “our government did everything it could to encourage Solidarity.” Having been there and having actively participated in the debates on the subject, I can assure him that it was not “our government” but the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland that “did everything it could” for Solidarity. I myself attacked Ronald Reagan at the time for asking us to put a candle in our windows as a show of support for Solidarity while refusing for his own part to put serious economic pressure on the Polish regime then in power.
The truth is that Solidarity—with a little help from its nongovernmental friends—succeeded because of its own courage and determination, and because the Soviets had by then lost the will to send in the tanks as they had done in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I see nothing comparable at work in Iran. I wish I did, but I don’t.
Besides, time is a crucial factor here, as it was not in Poland. No one knows how close the Iranians have already come to achieving a nuclear capability, but it is only prudent to accept the lower estimates, which put them a year or so away from the point of no return. Why is this prudent? Because, as President Bush has rightly declared in explaining why preemption is a necessary element of our strategy in World War IV, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” The same rule can be applied, conversely, to the hope that a democratic insurrection will break out in Iran.
Wesley Clark (whose judgment is far superior to that of his incredibly silly namesake, the retired general) gives us a good summary of the actions proposed in these pages by Arthur Herman. I am all for them, too, but I think they should be implemented not as a substitute for bombing but as a preliminary step on the way to hitting the nuclear facilities themselves.
Finally, in response to Richard L. Rubenstein: I am not famous for my humility, but I assume that the amazing superlative he bestows on my article is a measure not of its superiority to all the other pieces that have been published in COMMENTARY over the last 50 years (I could name a great many that are better in one way or another) but of how seriously he believes the threat of another Holocaust should be taken. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t feel both grateful for and deeply honored by what he says about my own analysis of the dimensions of that threat and of why nothing but a bombing campaign can succeed in heading it off.
