Clinton has the wrong idea on Iran's nuclear ambitions

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has threatened to obliterate Iran if it launches a nuclear attack on Israel. She says this will deter Iran from attacking. The senator’s analysis is deeply flawed.

First, deterrence does not work against Iran. Its leaders are religious fanatics perfectly willing to make their country into a suicide bomber. They believe their religion requires a great cataclysm. See “The Final Move Beyond Iraq” a book by Dr. Michael D. Evans. Like the early Christians, they consider this life merely a preparation for the after-life.

Second, a threat of retaliation necessarily suggests Iran will be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But when Iran has nuclear weapons, it can not be deterred from their use. This poses a mortal threat to America, for there appears to be no way, at least under current conditions, to prevent Iran from smuggling such weapons into the United States. As America and Israel are such close friends, Iran would probably conceal nuclear devices in America to detonate simultaneously with an attack on Israel or to threaten to detonate them unless America does its bidding.

There will be a roundtable discussion of this situation, “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe”, at the Harvard Club of Boston on June 3, conducted by Graham Tillett Allison Jr., a founding dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Allison recommends a new international order based on no insecure nuclear material, no new facilities for processing uranium or enriching plutonium, and no new nuclear states. The application of military force would be necessary to enforce such an order. Iran exemplifies that.

Iran under its current leadership will not be prevented by diplomacy, sanctions, or threats from developing nuclear weapons. Its mad theocrats are deliberately on a suicide course. They might require, as a condition of not detonating some or all of the devices in the United States, that the threat of massive nuclear retaliation be retracted. Doing so would end America’s status as a world power and make Iran a world power. Failure to make good on the threat would do the same.

What would be Senator Clinton’s reaction to such events? Retaliate and suffer the consequences to her country and herself? Such a response would kill, sicken and maim vast numbers of innocent Iranians, and Iran’s covert nuclear devices would kill, sicken and maim millions of innocent Americans, without bringing back Israel and its people. On the other hand, would Clinton withdraw her threat to obliterate Iran and have America branded a feckless giant to be shunned, or to be plundered and dismembered while mourning in vain the loss of Israel and the death and suffering of innocent people, Jews and non-Jews alike, from an Iranian attack? Unless Iran be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons, these scenarios are more likely than not.

Iran is simply playing for time. Absent a change in the Iranian government, the only real hope of preventing Iran’s development and use of nuclear weapons is to destroy its capability. No threats; just do it.

This would require pre-emptive military strikes and sabotage, which Senator Clinton appears to rule out with her naïve, erroneous reliance on deterrence by threat of retaliation and her aversion to pre-emption. Her notion of deterrence comes from the Cold War strategic milieu. Deterrence worked against the Soviets. They were rational. You could negotiate with them.

The sad sacks will cry that an attack on Iran’s nuclear resources will make more terrorists. Perhaps, but it is hard to conceive of anything that would attract more recruits to Islamic terrorism than Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and its use of them to eradicate Israel and reduce the United States to impotence, particularly an impotence reeking of death and destruction. Muslims killed or injured in such warfare will not be mourned, but exalted, extolled, maybe even a bit envied by Islamic fanatics, as martyrs.

The senator’s threat was in response to the question of what she would do if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel. A better question would have been, what would she do to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? A wise answer would be that her thinking on the matter should not be disclosed at this time but that everything is on the table. A president must have top-secret contingency plans for destroying Iranian nuclear capability.

Albert W. L. Moore Jr. lives in Independence.