Attacking Iran Won't 'Solve' Anything

The president’s mindless obsession with Iran makes Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons more likely.

The president imagines that military action can “solve” the nuclear issue with Iran:

We are down to final strokes with Iran. We are down to the final moments. We can't let them have a nuclear weapon. Something is going to happen very soon. I would rather have a peace deal than the other option but the other option will solve the problem [bold mine-DL].

If Trump has been told that military action will “solve” the problem, his advisers have been lying to him. Attacking Iran will at most set back Iran’s nuclear program, and it will then give their government every incentive to escalate and move towards becoming a nuclear weapons state. Military action is not going to be able to eliminate the existing program.

An attack is much more likely to push Iran to build a nuclear deterrent in order to prevent future attacks. Far from solving the current problem, it will create a much worse one. The president’s mindless obsession with Iran makes Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons more likely.

It can’t be emphasized enough that all of this is unnecessary. Iran isn’t building nuclear weapons. As far as we know, the Iranian government still doesn’t want to build any. Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, and it hasn’t had anything like that in more than twenty years. Why does anything need to happen “very soon” when there is no good reason for it?

It’s also worth remembering that Iran’s nuclear program would not be nearly as advanced as it is if it had not been for Trump’s disastrous decision to renege on the original nuclear deal. The reason that critics of his Iran policy keep harping on this is that he is responsible for the current mess and he has no clue how to get out of it. His only answer is to fall back on the same braindead punitive measures and threats that have led to this point.

If it weren’t for Trump, the old nuclear deal would have remained in force and the nuclear issue would have stayed resolved. In that scenario, Iran wouldn’t be enriching uranium to 60% and it wouldn’t building up its stockpiles. Instead, Iran would have ratified the Additional Protocol a couple years ago, and its nuclear program would have remained under the most extensive inspections regime in the world.

Despite the Trump-induced breakdown of the nuclear deal, there is still no legitimate reason to resort to military action. If the U.S. or Israel attacks Iran, it will be an act of illegal aggression. Obviously neither Trump nor Netanyahu cares about international law and Trump doesn’t care about the Constitution, but the rest of us should denounce these threats and reject preventive war as a policy option. Attacking Iran over a non-existent nuclear weapons program would be every bit as insane and indefensible as attacking Iraq was in 2003.

Trump says that he would rather “have a peace deal,” but everything he does tells us that isn’t true. If he wished to reach an agreement with Iran, he would not have intensified the economic war against them as soon as he took office. If he were genuinely interested in a peaceful resolution, he would use the old nuclear deal as a model and negotiate a new nonproliferation agreement to replace the one he destroyed.

What the administration offers instead is more sanctions and more threats while showing no interest in compromise. The Iranian government can see that Trump isn’t serious about finding a diplomatic solution. Whatever he said in the letter he sent to the Iranian government, his hostile actions speak much louder.