The Case for Striking Iran
The Case for Striking Iran
nytimes.com
Iran poses a threat to global order by way of its damaged but abiding nuclear ambitions, its deep strategic ties to Moscow and Beijing, its persistent threats to maritime commerce and its support for international terrorism.
It poses a threat to regional stability, not just through its support for anti-Israel proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, but also by its meddling in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and (until the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime) Syria.
And it’s a mortal threat to the life and safety of its own people, many thousands of whom it slaughtered last month. There was a time not long ago when Americans, both left and right, cared enough about human rights to believe it could, in some circumstances, justify military intervention.
Why is a military attack crucial? Look at what hasn’t worked to change the regime’s behavior.
Economic sanctions haven’t: The regime has been under some form of sanction since its earliest months. But while sanctions damage economies, they have little effect on despotic rulers who are indifferent to the well-being of their own people and who can always find ways to enrich themselves through sanctions busting, bribery, cybercrime, drug dealing and other black-market transactions.
International institutions haven’t: The International Atomic Energy Agency spent decades engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Iran as the regime repeatedly hid its nuclear capabilities and prevaricated about its intentions. Ultimately, that led to an I.A.E.A. report last year noting that the regime had failed to provide “technically credible answers regarding the nuclear material at three locations” and that it pursued a “unique and unilateral approach to its legally binding obligation.”
And diplomacy hasn’t.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s first-term decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal (a good decision about a bad agreement, in my view, though thoughtful people differ), the Biden administration invested months in torturous negotiations trying to entice Iran back into it. They got the back of the ayatollah’s hand. Last year, Trump spent months seeking a diplomatic outcome. It, too, went nowhere, and current negotiations seem to be on a similar course.
For all of its willfulness and the evil it has wreaked over 47 years, the regime does not stand 10 feet tall. It nearly fell during the 2009 Green Movement against that year’s fraudulent elections. It nearly fell again in 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.
The difference on those occasions was the absence of external military support. Donald Trump now has a unique opportunity to provide it. Despite the risk that military strikes entail, the bigger risk, in the judgment of history, would be to fail to take it.
There is at least a reasonable chance that a sustained military operation that not only further degrades the regime’s nuclear, missile and military capabilities — a desirable outcome in its own right — but also targets its apparatus of domestic repression could embolden the type of sustained mass protests that could finally bring the regime down. Even more so if the leaders who give the orders, including the supreme leader and his circle, are not immune from attack.