Iranian Mess

This week Wiley Lecture Series, a student organization in the Texas A&M Memorial Student Center, hosted its symposium entitled 'Iranian Hazard' with Dr. Paul Barretto, a consultant on international nuclear projects (his corner on NSSPI can be found here), and Richard Stoll, Professor of Political Science at Rice University. The problem with Iran, as they pointed out, is that America and Iran have had bad relations for many years, since we helped over throw a democratically elected government and instituted a more friendly dictator in his place. Now, their nuclear program is continuing to ramp up as they continue to acquire nuclear technology that is military specific and has no use outside of nuclear weapons and they increase the number of nuclear facilities they admit to be building.

A lot of people suggest a simple preemptive strike composed of numerous precision air strikes to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, but Iran has so far not crossed the red line of actually beginning to assemble a nuke, though they continue to work close to the line. A plethora of air strikes is not the simple easy solution that it might appear. First, it would require numerous, simultaneous strikes throughout Iran which could stretch our operational capabilities in the region. Second, We do not have the Intel we need to make the kind of precision strikes necessary. Iran's facilities are spread all over the nation and we do not even know exactly where many of them are. Third, our bunker buster bombs are beginning to be obsoleted by the bunker building capabilities of established nations and there is a considerable chance that even a direct hit on an Iranian nuclear bunker could fail to completely destroy it. Fourth, and most importantly, it is a temporary solution.We and the Israelis have knocked out nuclear facilities before, and though they delay development of the nuclear program, they do not take it off the table.

If we want to keep Iran from developing nukes, we need to remove their motivation to do so, which would make an interesting discussion in defining.

Something that surprised me Wednesday evening was the lack of power that the president of Iran holds. Iran is ruled by a smorgasbord of high elder councils, religious boards, clerics, etc., with the president being somewhere south of tenth on the political power rankings of Iran. Iran's military is also made up of two different pieces, the regular army, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the fanatics of the military. The military threat is not necessarily that Ahmadinejad will send Iranian forces in, but rather that one of the radical elements in one of the councils or a cleric will provide the little push the Revolutionary Guard needs to start some kind of conflict. Then, whatever the Iranian people think of their government, they will be very anti U.S., worse even than Iraq was.
As is usually the case, the situation is a lot more complicated than it would appear at first glance and will take time and energy to solve, and more than a little sacrifice on everyone's part.