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The President Has Been Given a False Choice on Iran

(Wall Street Journal) Edward N. Luttwak - As the pros and cons of attacking Iran's nuclear installations are debated inconclusively, Iran's nuclear efforts persist - along with daily threats of death to America, Israel, Britain, Saudi Arabia's rulers, and more. Yet everyone seems to assume the scope of the attack itself is a fixed parameter. This is misleading. The magnitude and intensity of an attack is a matter of choice, and it needs to be on the table. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and their planners offered President Bush only one plan, a full-scale air offensive with all the trimmings - an air war rather than an air strike. The assault would last weeks rather than hours and require more than 20,000 sorties. The target list included every nuclear-related installation in Iran, with several hundred primary strike sorties and many more support sorties for electronic suppression, refueling, air-sea rescue readiness, and overhead air defense. Given the longest possible target list, casualties on the ground could run to the thousands, with many more targets justified by "Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses." In the name of not risking the loss of even one aircraft, planners put every combat airplane in the Iranian air force on the target list. But this war planning denied to the president and American strategy the option of interrupting Iran's nuclear efforts by a stealthy overnight attack against the handful of buildings that contain the least replaceable components of Iran's enrichment cycle. This kind of attack was carried out in September 2007, when the Israeli air force invisibly and inaudibly attacked the nuclear reactor that Syria's Assad regime had imported from North Korea, wholly destroying it with no known casualties. An equivalent attack on Iran's critical nuclear nodes would have to be several times larger. But it could still be inaudible and invisible, start and end in one night, and kill very few on the ground. The writer is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
2012-02-20 00:00:00
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