Book Review : War With Iran?
Iran, Le Choix des Armes, by Francois Heisbourg, (Stock, 2007).
Want to know how a U.S. strike on a newly nuclearized Iran might actually work? Turn to page 154 of Francois Heisbourg's extraordinary new book, Iran, the Choice of Arms, published in Paris but, alas, not yet in the English-speaking world.
It's frightening, but as accurate as only an insider's insider can possibly be--down to the actual weapons America might launch and their impact on the military machine and civilian infrastructure and population of the nation that is perhaps the world's most dangerous and unpredictable power.
In one of three densely conceived, though, the author is careful to warn, utterly fictitious scenarios, President Bush launches Operation Boundless Fortitude after Iran's religious leader Ali Khameini announces baldly that his nation has manufactured weapons-grade fissionable material enriched to nearly 100% (in lieu of 5% enrichment for peaceful nuclear reactors).
In an effort to show the world that the U.S. has not been paralyzed by its disastrous adventure in neighboring Iraq, on Aug. 16, 2008, Bush orders a massive aerial bombardment, flights of Tomahawk cruise missiles streaking from submarines and naval warships to strike Iranian command and control centers, ministries, telecommunications facilities and Iranian air defenses, especially Russian-made TOR M-1 missile emplacements, while B-2 stealth bombers destroy all access to the subterranean enrichment facilities at Natanz.
American warplanes and missiles carefully avoid striking research reactors in Teheran and Ispahan as well as the nuclear reactor at Bousher--less than 100 kilometers from Kuwait--as well as the centrifuges themselves at Natanz in an effort to prevent the spread of radioactive material to nearby population centers. However, other missiles producing electromagnetic pulses do knock out virtually all of Iran's electric grid and computer systems.
By Sept. 4, less than three months after the first flight of Tomahawks, Iran is reduced to a state of near paralysis, unable in any sense to retaliate militarily, its entire economic infrastructure in shambles. The president's near-term goal is satisfied to the letter. But if you think that's the end, well then, read on.
For there are some extraordinary surprises in this consummate, if brief, but brilliantly conceived work by the man who is perhaps Europe's leading global thinker--chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, adviser to French presidents and ministers of defense and foreign affairs going back to Valery Giscard d'Estaing and top adviser to French arms makers from Thompson to Matra.
Indeed, if you read no other book on Iran, its nuclear ambitions and its threat to a world that is still struggling desperately to wrap its collective mind around the consequences, this is the one. In under 200 pages, you have the history of Iran's entire nuclear program, back to the Shah, Dwight D. Eisenhower and his 1953 "Atoms for Peace" program and beyond.
In the course of his narrative--colossally authentic as only the head of the world's leading think tank dealing with strategic and military affairs could provide--Heisbourg weaves us expertly through a thicket populated with such Dr. Strangelove characters as Pakistan's Dr. A.Q. Khan, who brought the nuclear arms race to the subcontinent and far beyond, and the riveting details of the arrival on the scene of other major players from Russia and China through Libya and North Korea.
"Iran could produce a nuclear weapon within the years 2008 to 2010, if that is its objective. It remains for us to determine whether that is the case. It's here that we must ask ourselves what are the motivations and the intentions of Iran," Heisbourg says.
The key motive, he argues, is "respect." Iran isn't unique here. France, India and China all went nuclear for similar reasons. The "ummah," Iran's religious powers who follow their own Shiite agenda, dream of an "Islamic Bomb," that will restore Iran's leadership role in the Muslim world.
Still, there were various points along the road to the brink of membership in the nuclear club when a different path might have been taken, Heisbourg seems to suggest--but none more significant than the moment with President Bush welcomed Iran into his own, quite exclusive club--the "Axis of Evil." Suddenly, on Jan. 29, 2002, the leadership in Teheran saw itself directly in the cross-hairs of the American military machine. There seemed to be only one possible response.
And so we arrive at the most riveting, and frightening pages of this brief work--Heisbourg's three "scenarios"--each, alas, more chilling than the last. What could happen should the world, or at least the part of the world that is immediately concerned about the future of mankind and the planet, lose sight of the fact that any further expansion of membership in the "nuclear club" could have catastrophic consequences for the very existence of life as we know it?
His first scenario he labels "Cooperation," and envisions a newly inaugurated President Hillary Clinton meeting at the UN with her moderate Iranian homologue Mohamed Qalibaf immediately after he defeats Ahmadinejad in the June 2009 Iranian presidential elections, followed by her triumphal state visit to Teheran a few months later that recognizes Iranian supremacy in the region, ushering in a nuclear-free age. In this case, Iran becomes a bona fide member of the community of nuclear-free and stable nations, a leader in its region and the world.
In the second scenario, which Heisbourg dubs "Compromise," Iran successfully launches a Shahab rocket and orbiting satellite, proving it has a functioning delivery vehicle, then announces it has produced sufficient fissionable material at its Natanz facility to build two nuclear bombs in 2009 and begins work on underground test facilities in the basalt formations beneath the great salt desert of Dacht-e-Kavir. (Another nod to the database of the IISS.) Heisbourg calls even this option one with "disastrous consequences from every angle." Non-proliferation is all but totally discredited, North Korea resumes its nuclear program and Japan reopens its nuclear debate, Saudi Arabia decides it needs a bomb and buys a dozen or so from Pakistan, which desperately needs the oil.
Next up? Egypt, then Turkey, and by 2020 the Middle East is a nuclearized region hurtling toward Armageddon "without brakes." And yet again, Iran is as isolated as it was in 1979.
But there's more, much more to even this "Compromise" scenario. Iran, to show that it still is master of the region, launches a raid by Iranian commandos under the thinly veiled smokescreen of Hezbollah--using a tramp steamer to bring a small nuclear weapon into the harbor of Haifa, exploding it on the beach with apocalyptic consequences.
Here, the radicals lose dramatically in the March 2008 Iranian parliamentary elections (in fact they did not, but the book was written last fall). So they perceive a need to move rapidly. By mid-2008, 10,000 enrichment centrifuges are in operation, pumping out weapons-grade uranium. Bush, still in office as a lame-duck in August 2008, launches Operation Boundless Fortitude, though, horrified, not a single nation, even Israel, agrees to join in. The result? Nothing good.
The irony of all this, of course, is that Iran, without a nuclear weapon, is well placed to claim leadership as the single most powerful nation of the Persian Gulf and perhaps of the Middle East itself. Yet, as Heisbourg so compellingly points out, if armed with a nuclear weapon, its advantage evaporates, as a nuclear arms race in the region would find a host of other neighboring states buying their way into the nuclear arms club and aligning themselves with the superpowers. Iran would again find itself isolated, alone, shunned and boycotted. Indeed the Iranian people, while they might accept being bashed by the Great Satan (George Bush's America), they "take badly their country being perceived by the world as a sort of leprous regime of the North Korean type rather than as a great nation," Heisbourg points out.
As Heisbourg's final chapter ("The Hour of Choices") concludes, we must continue to hold firm on non-proliferation, treat Iran in all respects like North Korea (negotiate where appropriate, but from a position of strength). Otherwise, the West would seem to be in a position of simply stumbling along behind an America that's been crippled by its multiple failures in Iraq but which must, at all costs, restore its credibility.
Heisbourg's scenarios, he admits, are written "without joy," but from a profound sense of reality by one who has, quite frankly, seen it all.
In short, learn French if you must-- Iran, Le Choix des Armes is indeed a must-read book for our times.
