Attacking Iran Would Be Wrong and Illegal

If anything, the case against attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is stronger than it has ever been.

Richard Nephew thinks that the case against attacking Iran isn’t as strong as it used to be:

But today, the case against military action is not so neat.

If anything, the case against attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is stronger than it has ever been. It is because Iran’s nuclear program has advanced so far that we have no reason to believe that military action would be successful. Because Iran is more vulnerable than it has been in the recent past, that makes it more likely that an attack would spur the Iranian government to pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent. When a government feels more threatened than before but has more advanced capabilities for developing these weapons, that is a terrible time to make their fears of attack a reality. Thanks in large part to the stupidity and malice of hawks in the U.S. and Israel, Tehran’s incentives to acquire nuclear weapons have increased. That is why we should reject a military option that gives Iran an even bigger incentive to cross that line.

Military action against Iran is unnecessary, and the threat of military action has made the nuclear issue harder to resolve. The Iranian government likely could have built a small nuclear arsenal over the last six and a half years since Trump reneged on the nuclear deal, but their leadership has not wanted to do that. Western policymakers talk about attacking Iran as if this were a last ditch option to halt proliferation, but Iran weren’t constantly being threatened with attack (and then occasionally attacked) their government would have fewer incentives to consider acquiring nuclear weapons.

Nephew writes, “But unless it is prepared to live in the world that Iranian nuclear weapons would create, it may have little choice but to attack Iran—and soon.” This is dangerous nonsense. The U.S. has no right to attack Iran in the name of “preventing” a possible threat sometime in the future. Even if Iran were building a nuclear arsenal right now (it isn’t), the U.S. would have no right to attack them. The prohibition against the use of force has only one exception, and waging a preventive war against Iran has nothing to do with self-defense. If the U.S. chose to attack Iran, it would be doing so because it wanted to and because it had no respect for international law. It would be the act of a rogue aggressor.

One of the biggest lies that interventionists like to tell is that the U.S. has been forced into taking military action. They will always insist that they don’t want war, but that the other state has “forced” the most powerful country in the world to attack anyway. What they usually mean is that the U.S. has issued maximalist demands that the other government cannot accept without humiliation, and then when the other government refuses to capitulate the U.S. “has to” attack the much weaker state. This is the brutish logic of a thug. It is also the logic of an imperialist.

American policymakers have toyed with the idea of launching unprovoked strikes on Iran for decades. It has been a prominent part of our foreign policy debates for at least half of my lifetime, and most participants in these debates have taken it for granted that there is nothing inherently wrong with attacking another country that poses no real threat to ours. The mindset that made the Iraq war possible is still very much with us. Analysts that want to be perceived as “serious” still treat preventive war as a legitimate policy option.

The worst part of Nephew’s flirting with support for military action is that he already understands the reasons why it makes no sense, but for whatever reason he still claims that the U.S. “may have little choice” but to commit a criminal act of aggression against another country. Nephew boxes himself in with this imaginary necessity. He acknowledges elsewhere in the article that military action likely won’t work, and he admits that the U.S. might “have to attack Iran in perpetuity or carry out a much larger assault” to “quash” Iran’s “nuclear aspirations.” Military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would not be a one-off act of aggression, but the first in a series of illegal attacks.

As if he wanted to call attention to how awful his argument is, Nephew ends with an appeal to credibility. He writes, “attacking Iran’s nuclear program could help shore up U.S. credibility,” and he even brings up the usual hawkish complaints about the “red line” episode in connection with this. Using force to “shore up credibility” is one of the more ridiculous reasons for taking military action. Few things would do more harm to America’s reputation than trampling on the UN Charter by attacking another country. The idea that the U.S. needs to “shore up” the credibility of its threats is deranged in any case, since no one outside Washington really doubts that the U.S. is trigger-happy and looking for any pretext to use its military power against other states.

Nephew concludes that it “is thus time for Washington to consider extreme steps.” There is no good reason for the U.S. to consider any such thing. All that Nephew does by saying this is to undermine the cause of diplomatic engagement and to lend his voice to the chorus of warmongers.

Iran shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, but the insane and destructive policies that hawks have proposed to “stop” this have consistently made that outcome more likely. Attacking Iran would be wrong and illegal, and it would probably lead to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. It should be rejected out of hand.