Region | Iran
Obama's Iran strategy contains a Plan B
President Barack Obama is working against time to untangle 30 years of enmity and prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, but even his own advisers know the chance of success is slim.
- By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 23:04 February 24, 2009
- Image Credit: AP
- Technicians work at the reactor building of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, some 1,245 kilometres south of the capital Tehran, Iran, two years ago. The Obama administration is debating its Iran policy.
Tehran: President Barack Obama is working against time to untangle 30 years of enmity and prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, but even his own advisers know the chance of success is slim.
So they also have been working on Plan B: What do we do if Iran gets the bomb?
Today, the Obama administration is debating its Iran policy behind closed doors. Last year, however, four of its key appointees wrote about the issue as private citizens, and their writings suggest they are planning for how to handle a nuclear Iran.
Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator, was recently appointed as adviser for Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Gulf states, as the administration seeks to strengthen ties.
"Maybe, even if we engage the Iranians, we will find that however we do so and whatever we try, the engagement simply does not work," Ross wrote in a September report published by the Centre for a New American Security, a think tank that has supplied several appointees to the new administration.
"We will need to hedge bets and set the stage for alternative policies either designed to prevent Iran from going nuclear or to blunt the impact if they do."
If diplomacy fails, another Obama adviser wrote in the same report, the alternative "is a strategy of containment and punishment". That was the conclusion of Ashton B. Carter, Obama's reported choice as an undersecretary of Defence, who also warned: "The challenge of containing Iranian ambitions and hubris would be as large as containing its nuclear arsenal".
Most (and maybe all) of Obama's advisers see the costs of attacking Iran as outweighing the benefits. If Iran gets closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, they have warned, military action will not look any more appetising than it did under George W. Bush.
But that does not mean the United States would do nothing. Instead, Obama aides suggested in their writings, the US should pursue an Arabian Gulf version of the containment strategy used against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What would that mean? For starters, a nuclear-capable Iran would face continued, serious pressure from the United States and its allies to dismantle whatever it had built. Obama might declare that a nuclear attack on Israel would be treated as an attack on the US homeland. And the US military would act to bolster Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Arabian Gulf states against conventional-warfare threats from an emboldened Iranian regime.
And there is some optimism among administration officials that a nuclear Iran would practice restraint.
Gary Samore, Obama's top adviser on nuclear proliferation, and Bruce Riedel, who is running Obama's review of policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote last year that a nuclear-capable Iran, while undesirable, would not necessarily be catastrophic.
For example, they claimed, it seems unlikely that Iran would give nuclear weapons to terrorists.
"If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is likely to behave like other nuclear weapons states, trying to intimidate its foes, but not recklessly using its weapons," Samore and Riedel wrote in a report for the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations.
"As such, Iran will be subject to the same deterrence system that other nuclear weapons states have accommodated themselves to since 1945."
None of this thinking means Obama has abandoned hope in negotiations to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.
At this point, one official said, the administration is focusing on Plan A, not Plan B. But it is welcome evidence that behind the slogan of hope lies a realistic appraisal of the possible outcomes.
During his presidential campaign, Obama called the idea of a nuclear Iran "unacceptable", and offered to meet with the its regime without precondition. And his advisers agree that there is still a window for diplomacy.
Samore and Riedel forecast that Iran is "at least two or three years away" from being capable of building a nuclear weapon, and note that there are several stages between capability and deploying a bomb - stages at which the US could still work to freeze the programme and contain Iran's behaviour.
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