McGurk's Dangerous Overconfidence in Military Action

If this is the sort of dangerous and misleading advice Biden is getting from people in his administration, the chances of an unnecessary war with Iran are greater than we thought.

The top official in the Biden administration working on the Middle East gets something important very wrong. Brett McGurk said this last week:

And when it came to military force for behavior change, that is a pretty fuzzy objective for a military force. When it comes to military force to prevent a country from obtaining a nuclear weapon, that is a very achievable objective.

It’s not clear why McGurk has such confidence in the efficacy of military force to “prevent a country from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” In the two previous cases when the Israeli government used force to attack nuclear facilities, it caused one of the targeted states to intensify its work on acquiring nuclear weapons. The Osirak bombing ended up backfiring badly. It was post-Gulf War inspections that led to the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program that the Israeli strike had encouraged.

The 2007 strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor apparently did not have the same effect, but no one seriously thinks that the Iranian nuclear program today is comparable to the Syrian one. Destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would not be a simple undertaking of a few airstrikes. It would involve a major air campaign lasting weeks at least. The human toll from such a bombing campaign has been estimated to run into the tens of thousands, and that number could rise if the conflict escalated. Even if it “worked” in the short term, an attack could set off a major conflict whose costs would exceed any possible benefit. Golnaz Esfandiari reported on this almost a decade ago:

"People talk very callously about the prospect of military strikes, and they frame it in the geopolitical fallout, the geo-economic fallout, what will happen to the oil price and all of these issues. But nobody has ever talked about the humanitarian consequences of a military strike on Iran," Molavi says. "Those humanitarian consequences are grave, so I think this report fills a very important vacuum. It needs to be read by policy makers at the highest levels in Western governments; it needs to be read in Israel; it needs to be read all over the world."

It bears mentioning that most of the victims of such an attack would be civilians, so once again ordinary Iranians would be made to pay the price for our obsession with their nuclear program.

There is good reason to think that an attack on Iran would have similar or worse long-term effects than the Osirak attack. The U.S. could presumably inflict substantial damage on many facilities, but any attack would likely convince the Iranian government to build new facilities that can’t be attacked from the air. The “dash” for a bomb that everyone claims to worry about would then begin, and short of an invasion (and even the most psychotic Iran hawks don’t propose doing that) there would be little to stop the Iranian government from building nuclear weapons once it decided to do so.

An aggressive military campaign against Iran would prove to their government that a nuclear deterrent is the only thing that will prevent future attacks. In this case, preventive war would not only be wrong and illegal, but it would also drive Iran to make the political choice for nuclear weapons that it has so far refused to make. This is a situation where we can’t afford to have government officials assuming that military action is a solution, because it will very likely make things much worse than they are. If this is the sort of dangerous and misleading advice Biden is getting from people in his administration, the chances of an unnecessary war with Iran are greater than we thought.