Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to address Congress Tuesday, raising his concerns about President Barack Obama’s Iran talks.
Many Democrats will stay away from the speech. Most Republicans take Netanyahu more seriously than Obama. I certainly can sympathize with skepticism about either the Obama administration or their Iranian negotiating partners.
But as I write in my latest column for The American Conservative, it’s not clear that Netanyahu and company have identified a realistic alternative for keeping Iran from getting the bomb.
They said if I voted for Goldwater, we would be at war in Vietnam within a year. Well, I voted for Goldwater and they were right.
The new version goes something like this: They said if I opposed the Iraq war, Islamic radicals might get a hold of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. Or: They said if I opposed the war for regime change in Libya, Libya would descend into violence.
Lost in the partisan finger-pointing over residual forces in Iraq or boots on the ground in Libya is an uncomfortable fact: the two most recent preventive wars fought by the United States would end up achieving nearly the opposite of their original aims.
How could we see a similar result in Iran? If the negotiations end, it’s possible that so will the inspections. That means less scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program, not more. Tehran could develop new nuclear sites we don’t even know about.
It’s also possible that the international pressure on Iran will begin to crumble. Unilateral sanctions by the United States won’t much constrain the Iranians. Only a coordinated multilateral effort will.
A lot of the concern about the proposed nuclear deal is that Iran’s breakout time is too short. But without inspections, it could get even shorter. What even targeted successful strikes against Iranian nuclear sites would buy us has to be weighed against what they would cost in terms of Iran becoming more committed to developing nuclear weapons (intelligence suggests Tehran may not have made a decision to build a bomb), this time without inspections or broadly accepted sanctions.
Iran is also a much more difficult country to invade and occupy than Iraq — and we all remember how well Iraq went.
I’m concerned about whether the Obama administration will negotiate the best deal for American and Israeli security too. But I’m even more concerned that blowing up the diplomacy will leave us with no options besides war and letting Iran get the bomb.
