Ferguson flubs future firestorm

IN THE NEWS
Niall Ferguson's "what if" opinion piece on a future Iranian nuclear attack is astounding for its stupidity. If, to take his line of argument, a future historian were to look back on the Iranian nuclear program, they would not reach the following conclusion:

But the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been discredited by the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had supposedly possessed and by the failure of the US-led coalition to quell a bloody insurgency.

Americans did not want to increase their military commitments overseas; they wanted to reduce them. Europeans did not want to hear that Iran was about to build its own WMD. Even if Ahmad-inejad had broadcast a nuclear test live on CNN, liberals would have said it was a CIA con-trick.

There are no signs that Americans take real nuclear threats any less seriously than they did before 2003. They are likely to be a lot more skeptical about claims of nefarious nuclear weapons programs, but you can hardly look at Iran's determined march toward getting its own nuclear arsenal without believing the warnings. After all, they're coming from the Iranians, the IAEA, and fairly experienced nuclear proliferation experts in Europe and the United States. There are few reasons left to doubt the sincerity of the Iranians' nuclear ambitions, where there were real reasons to doubt whether the Ba'ath regime in Iraq actually had a nuclear program at all.

What Ferguson leaves out in his vulgar Churchillian picture of modern-day appeasers is, of course, the feasibility of taking any military action against Iran's nuclear program. Where Ferguson would like you to believe the fantasy of "bases in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan," the reality of the mess in these two countries is obvious for anyone with a television, Internet connection, or newspaper to see. American military resources can barely stabilize the situation in these two countries without taking on yet another war against Iran, a much tougher foe than the supine Iraqi military of 2003. (Click here for a breakdown of the current Iranian military.)

Even if we won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, attacking Iran would not be a cakewalk. Surgical strikes that identify and destroy Iranian nuclear testing and manufacturing facilities are just as fanciful as Ferguson's safe bases in Iraq. The Iranian nuclear program is too dispersed for the air strike option to have anything but a marginal chance of success--leaving aside the question of how easy or hard it would be for Iran to reconstruct the program all over again. Otherwise, the United States would have to find enough willing allies to invade Iran, which would require a very large coalition effort to have any chance of success.  While there are many reasons for that last conclusion, terrain alone is a significant factor. Most of Iraq was a flat, table-like expanse across which ground forces could maneuver freely. Iran has far more mountains to cross, not to mention swamps, salt deserts, and other difficult terrain dotting the military landscape. While the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan showed that military analysts can overstate the difficulty of mountainous terrain, it's worth remembering three points: (1) the Taliban was much weaker than the Iranian military; (2) the US-led coalition that invaded Afghanistan was much stronger than anything the US could assemble against Iran today; and (3) US military forces are much less available than they were before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

We also lack any other kind of leverage with Iran. What could the United States offer the mullahs? Even if we had rewards for good behavior to offer, the Administration has already boxed itself in with its "axis of evil" rhetoric, making it harder to sell to the US public any detente with Iran in exchange for an end to the Iranian nuclear program. If Iran ever uses a nuclear weapon against the United States, its allies, or its interests, we'll have that lack of leverage, including effective military options to blame.

Comments

[Alex]

Fuck it. Ferguson just ran a find-replace on his complete archive for the words "Iraq" and "Iran". Point and jeer.

[Jeff Rubinoff]

WTF is up with Dr Ferguson? Dude, I read Empire and though certainly not without problems it was interesting and mostly well reasoned. Is it because now right-wing Americans just hand him gobs of money he figures "Excellent, now I can just babble whatever nonsense percolates to the top of my mind and get paid ten times as much as when I had to worry about peer review?"

[Alex]

Err..yes. Just another number in the bulging file of "British intellectuals who go giddy with love at any sign of attention from the US and collapse in a pool of their own credibility" - see also Amis, Martin, Rushdie, Salman, Hitchens Christopher...

[Mojo]

- Ferguson is indeed an idiot
- Air strikes don't need to take out every element of Iran's nuclear program to disrupt the weapons program
- Air strikes would also put pressure on Iran to cooperate with diplomatic proposals
- Russian fuel for Iranian reactors (and the ability to still have reactors) is a potent carrot
- Although the link you provide to Iran's military capability understates their air defenses, they're still porous at best
- Although the US is in no position to invade and occupy Iran, Iran can't invade Iraq or Afghanistan either so their ground forces are largely irrelevant
- If Iran can build nukes with impunity, why would they be afraid of supporting the Iraqi insurgency (which provides them lots of benefits)?
- As you point out, nobody doubts that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and even their friends are uncomfortable with the idea
- Russia and China suspending military trading with Iran at the same time the Security Council was discussing potential authorization for military action could have a sobering effect in Tehran
Bottom line. Yes, we're in a weaker position than we were in 2002. But there is still a role for the threat of some level of military action in our negotiations.

[Brian Williams]

#Mojo

Even if air strikes do succeed in disrupting the Iranian nuclear program, such a disruption is likely to be only temporary at best. What then? Would the reality of past US attackes on Iranian soil then increase or decrease the amount of leverage the US would have with a now nuclear-armed Iran? While our threats of military action are not exactly paper tigers, the weaknesses Kingdaddy mentions do significantly weaken the US position.

Iranian ground forces are only irrelevant to the extent that we don't try to invade them. As air power might not be effective agains the nuclear program in Iran, the only other option would be a ground offensive, which would then show exactly how relevant the Iranian forces are to the equation.

[Tequila]

When reading certain intellectuals, it pays to remember exactly what their area of expertise is. Niall Ferguson writes a lot about imperialism and wars, but he's an economic historian whose best work was about the Rothschild banking family. Victor Davis Hanson pontificates endlessly about war and military matters, but he is primarily a classicist and amateur farmer who repeatedly injects his own personal experiences and opinions into his work (to good effect with regards to his theories on the efficacy of Greek intercity ravaging, less so on his analysis of the genesis of hoplite and thusly Western warfare). Bernard Lewis goes on about Islam and the state of the Arab world, but he is really an authority only on the later Ottoman Empire.

[Nick Schwellenbach]

In contrast to Ferguson, the British historian Antony Hopkins is much better. I had him when I was a student at the University of Texas-Austin during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. Hopkins was quite clear that though we'd easily win the war, we weren't likely to win the peace in Iraq. Also, he didn't have too many good things to say about Ferguson, whom he believed had ripped off his work without giving credit on at least one occasion.