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Nuclear Agreement Makes U.S.-Iran Confrontation More Likely
(Wall Street Journal) Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz - To imagine the Iran nuclear deal working is to imagine the Islamic Republic without its revolutionary faith. So Mr. Obama's deal-making is in effect establishing the necessary conditions for military action after January 2017, when a new president takes office. No American president would destroy Iranian nuclear sites without first exhausting diplomacy. The efforts by Mr. Obama to compromise with Tehran are comprehensive, if nothing else. If the next president chose to strike after the Iranians stonewalled or repeatedly violated Mr. Obama's agreement, the newcomer would be on much firmer political ground, at home and abroad, than if he tried without this failed accord. The president wants to believe that the Iranian regime will give priority to economics over religious ideology and that Ayatollah Khamenei can be weaned from the bomb through commerce. The problem is that the Islamic Republic remains a revolutionary Islamic movement that would never bend to America's economic coercion and never gut the nuclear centerpiece of its military planning for 30 years. Iranian adventurism will eventually provoke a more muscular U.S. response. The odds of Tehran respecting any nuclear deal while it pushes to increase its regional influence aren't good. Mr. Dubowitz is executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA's clandestine service, is a senior fellow.