No one should doubt that US President Barack Obama is prepared to use
military force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon if
sanctions and diplomacy fail, the president’s former special assistant
on Iran said Monday.
Obama has “made it very clear” that he regards a
nuclear-armed Iran as so great a threat to international security that
“the Iranians should never think that there’s a reluctance to use the
force” to stop them, Dennis Ross, who served two years on Obama’s
National Security Council and a year as US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s special adviser on Iran, said in an interview.
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are consequences if you act militarily, and there’s big consequences if
you don’t act,” said Ross, who in a two-hour interview at the Bloomberg
Washington office laid out a detailed argument against those who say
Obama would sooner “contain” a nuclear-armed Iran than strike
militarily.
The administration considers the risks of permitting a
nuclear-armed Iran to be greater than the risks of military action,
said Ross, who last month rejoined the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, a research group.
His comments came the day after
Obama’s top civilian and uniformed defense officials said that
developing a nuclear weapon would cross a red line, precipitating a US
strike.
“They need to know that if they take that step, they’re
going to get stopped,” US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Jan. 8 on CBS
News’s “Face the Nation.” On the same program, General Martin Dempsey,
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he has been responsible for
planning and positioning assets to be ready if ordered to take military
action.
Challenging Iran’s claimIran,
the world’s third largest oil exporter, insists its nuclear program is
for civilian energy and medical purposes only. The
International Atomic
Energy Agency issued a report last Nov. 8 detailing nuclear activities
it said had no other use than for military purposes, bolstering the US
case that Iran is seeking the capability to produce nuclear weapons even
if it hasn’t yet made a decision to do so.
While some Iran analysts have suggested an alternative to military
strikes would be to “contain” a nuclear Iran, much as the US managed to
live with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, Ross said the analogy doesn’t
translate to the situation in the Mideast. Countries in the region, he
said, lack equivalent Cold War-era “ground-rules,” lines of
communication, and a protected second-strike nuclear capability, which
deterred a surprise attack during US-Soviet tensions.
A nuclear-armed Iran would set off a atomic arms race among neighbors,
pose a risk of proliferation to other states or terrorist groups, and
increase the chances of a nuclear strike resulting from miscalculation,
he said.
Potential for miscalculation
“You don’t have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians.
You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act
on a hair trigger - where they can’t afford to be second to strike,
the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence
is simply too high,” he added.
Ross acknowledged that a military strike would have serious consequences
as well, including Iranian retaliation, either directly or through
terrorist proxies around the world, a possible effort to
shut down the
Strait of Hormuz, and a spike in oil prices.
Understanding those risks, “nobody uses military force lightly,” he
said, and “nobody commits to using military force one minute before they
have to.”
US credibility
Ross underscored that US willingness to stop Iran from getting nuclear
weapons affects decision-making in other countries that fear Iran,
including Israel and Gulf states. If the White House abandoned a pledge
to stop Iran made by Obama and former US president George W. Bush before him, the
US would lose all credibility, he said.
“I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the Israelis would act if they
came to the conclusion that basically the world was prepared to live
with Iran with nuclear weapons,” he said. “They certainly have the
capability by themselves to set back the Iranian nuclear program.”
Ross stressed he believes there is still time for diplomacy to work, as
the financial pain of sanctions may yet persuade Iran to abandon its
suspected nuclear weapons program.
“Force is not inevitable,” he said. “Diplomacy is still the desired means. Pressure is an element of the means.”
Oil embargo
Coordinated efforts to tighten penalties, including the European Union’s
preliminary agreement on an oil embargo, new US sanctions on the
Central Bank of Iran, and pressure on Japan and South Korea to reduce
their imports of Iranian oil, may finally persuade Iran’s leaders to
give up the program rather than suffer a shutdown of their economy, Ross
said.
The latest measures are the first “really affecting the core of their
revenue, which is their sale of oil,” Ross said. Historically, “when
they’re really pressured, they look for ways out.”
The leaders of Islamic Republic of Iran only accepted a cease-fire with
Iraq, halted the assassination of Iranian dissidents in Europe, and
abandoned the enrichment of uranium in 2003 when “it wasn’t worth the
cost” anymore, Ross noted.
The latest round of punishing sanctions target oil sales, which fund a
majority of Iran’s government revenues, according to the International
Monetary Fund.
Iran is “feeling pain in a much more dramatic way” than ever, Ross said.
Iranian ‘Bluster’
He dismissed threats by certain Iranian officials to retaliate against
oil sanctions by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth
of the world’s oil transits, as “bluster” aimed to send a message at
home and abroad, as Iranian leaders vie for power in a struggle that
Ross said is as intense as any since the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic
revolution.
The IAEA yesterday confirmed that Iran has begun enriching uranium to as
much as 20 percent U-235 at the underground Fordow underground site
near the holy city of Qom, as Iranian leaders had pledged to do last
year. The site is monitored by IAEA inspectors to detect any attempt to
enrich uranium to the 90 percent level necessary for a nuclear bomb.
“There really is no justification for it,” Ross said of the latest
enrichment activities. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of doubt that
they are embarked on a program that can produce, at a certain point,
weapons.”