Repeating history

An Iranian Missile Crisis?

David Ignatius in the Post: The emerging confrontation between the United States and Iran is "the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion," argues Graham Allison, the Harvard University professor who wrote the classic study of President John F. Kennedy's 1962 showdown with the Soviet Union that narrowly averted nuclear war. If anything, that analogy understates the potential risks here.

What worries me is that the relevant historical analogy may not be the 1962 war that didn't happen, but World War I, which did. The march toward war in 1914 resulted from the tight interlocking of alliances, obligations, perceived threats and strategic miscalculations. The British historian Niall Ferguson argued in his book "The Pity of War" that Britain's decision to enter World War I was a gross error of judgment that cost that nation its empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, makes a similar argument about Iran. "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world," he told me this week. "Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world."

Brzezinski urges President Bush to slow down and think carefully about his options -- rather than rushing to stop Iran's nuclear program, which by most estimates is five to 10 years away from building a bomb, even after yesterday's announcement. "Time is on our side," says Brzezinski. "The mullahs aren't the future of Iran, they're the past." As the United States carefully weighs its options, there is every likelihood that the strategic picture will improve.

Brzezinski knows of what he speaks; he was Carter's security adviser during the Iranian hostage crisis. His quote about war with Iran ending our present role in the world is pretty chilling, but probably accurate.

Ignatius, on the other hand, is wrong to expand upon Allison's comparison to the Cuban missile crisis. When Iran has scores of nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at us from 60 miles away and the might of a superpower's arsenal backing it, then the analogy might fit.

It's interesting for a confrontation over nuclear weapons that Ignatius, like some other commentators and reporters, have pointedly ignored or else buried the section of Seymour Hersh's article that reveals:

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.

Throwing the word tactical in front of nuclear does nothing to change the fact that it's a Hiroshima and Nagasaki-like attack that the U.S. is contemplating. It won't result in the deaths of as many civilians, but that's entirely due to the Iranian government's refusal to use civilians as shields the way Saddam Hussein did.

The U.S. and Israel and Europe want to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons in 5-10 years because we fear they may use it against Israel. So to do that, we're going to use nuclear weapons against Iran?

In terms of logic and planning, that's more Bay of Pigs than anything else.

Image of Cuba's Bay of Pigs stamp in various places on the Web.