Thursday, September 27, 2007

Nothing From Nothing

So two days after complaining that the sexy story (Iran) has been distracting folks from a perhaps more significant one (Turkey), I've spent most of the morning chewing over some of the talking points bouncing around out there about... Iran. I know. Sue me.

Specifically I've been thinking about the question of whether we could live with a nuclear-armed Iran. And one of the major arguments given for why we can't is that a nuclear-armed Iran would become emboldened to use its conventionally-armed proxies to advance its regional interests. In other words, we might be able to deter Iran's nuclear threat (a point former French President Jacques Chirac made this past spring, before hastily retracting the comment the following day). But we would no longer be able to deter Iran's conventional threat.

The problem is, we're already unable to deter Iran's conventional threat. I don't think anyone can accuse the Israelis of having held back last summer in their response to Hizbollah's provocation. And yet it did nothing to weaken Iran's support of Hizbollah, which began re-arming almost immediately upon the cessation of hostilities.

As we speak, we've got 160,000 troops on one side of Iran, 20,000 on another, and two carrier groups on a third, all of them backed up with a not-so-very-subtle threat to bomb Iran back into the stone age unless it renounces its uranium enrichment program. And Iran's response, if you believe the Bush administration, has been to play an even more active role in supporting the Iraqi insurgency.

Don't get me wrong. A nuclear-armed Iran presents a whole host of complications, not least of which is the risk of nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East. I just don't see how it really changes the conventional balance of power, except insofar as it makes the US-Israeli worse-case option (ie. regime change) unacceptably costly.

If we were steadily rolling back Iranian influence throughout the region, this would strike me as a compelling argument. But until then, the danger is that we'll lose something we don't actually have.

Posted by Judah in:  Iran   

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