Suppose Iran obtained nuclear weapons. The threat of retaliatory annihilation from the United States and Israel, both endowed with enormously superior nuclear arsenals, would assuredly deter Iran’s clerical regime from a suicidal nuclear attack against either global or regional superpower.

The threat of nuclear incineration has deterred extremist or unstable regimes in Pakistan and North Korea from using nuclear weapons against historic enemies such as India (for Pakistan) and South Korea and Japan (for North Korea). Only in a neoconservative fantasyland, such as that inhabited by columnist Charles Krauthammer, would Iran not similarly be deterred.

The United States should refrain from any preemptive military strike in hopes of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear capability (which only Congress may authorize under Article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution). Waging war without the justification of self-defense constitutes the crime of aggression under international law. The post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal, on which the United States sat, punished Hitler’s subordinates for wars of aggression. Chief American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson elaborated: “To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Possession of nuclear weapons, simpliciter, is not an act of belligerency creating a right of self-defense. If it were, every nation on the planet would be entitled to attack the United States.

Foreign aggression against Iran also would strengthen the ruling clerics by unifying the nation in defense of Iranian sovereignty. The 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran War provoked precisely that patriotic response despite the widespread unpopularity of the Iranian government. United States aggression would additionally risk calamitous blowback indistinguishable from our ill-considered support for Al Qaeda—then in embryo—to oppose the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The United States exercised military restraint when India, Pakistan and North Korea acquired nuclear arsenals. Even neoconservatives are not clamoring to reverse those decisions. Is the case of Iran different?

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran’s ruling mullahs have predictably acted to advance national interests and to seek money and power in lieu of exporting Shia Islam around the world with force and violence. Ruling clerics and their flocks have shown no enthusiasm for emulating the Jewish mass suicide at Masada in protest of Roman paganism. They negotiated the release of American hostages in Tehran in exchange for an international arbitration tribunal to settle monetary claims. Ayatollah Khomeini accepted termination of the Iraq-Iran conflict. He rejected an indefinite apocalyptic holy war that might accelerate putative ecstasies of afterlife for a mounting number of dead Muslims. Iran negotiated compensation payments in lieu of military retaliation for the accidental United States destruction of a civilian airliner and the deaths of hundreds of passengers in 1988. Iran has refrained from complicity in terrorism in Israel notwithstanding Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran. Members of Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guard are more preoccupied with making money in government-controlled or protected businesses than with pilgrimages to Mecca.

Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons bespeaks realpolitik, not avidity for destroying Israel. For more than fifty years, the United States has attempted to manipulate the internal affairs of Iran to its own advantage. The CIA engineered the overthrow of popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 in favor of the pliable and corrupt shah. Washington propped up the shah with massive weapons sales and diplomatic or economic support until he was toppled in the 1979 revolution.

Since then, the covert and overt policy of the United States has been regime change through economic strangulation, sabotage or otherwise—a variation of 1953. The United States supported Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War triggered by Saddam Hussein’s aggression. In October 1995, then congressman Newt Gingrich authored the first of several articles urging covert action to overthrow the government of Iran. Gingrich then had $18 million inserted into the classified portion of the annual Intelligence Authorization Act to support covert action to “change the behavior” of the Iranian regime. The provision leaked to the press, was signed by President Clinton, and provoked the Iranian parliament to appropriate $20 million to counter the U.S. covert action.

The United States similarly desires regime change in North Korea, but Washington has refrained from military force to accomplish that objective because North Korea sports nuclear weapons. Iran’s leaders have learned from that example. They rationally seek nuclear weapons to deter the United States or Israel from resorting to military force to oust them from power. If the United States and Israel renounced regime change in Iran by outside force or manipulation, Iran might abandon its quest for nuclear weapons in the manner of South Africa, Argentina and Brazil.

Krauthammer Debunked

Neoconservatives have conjured up fantasies about Iran’s earthbound theocracy to justify an illegal United States war of “anticipatory self-defense.” Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Krauthammer proffers threefold reasons for believing that deterring Iran is fundamentally different than deterring the Soviet Union: the nature of the regime, the nature of the grievance and the nature of the target. But Krauthammer’s distinctions are specious.

Soviet dictators were brutal and aggressive far beyond anything risked by Iran’s ruling mullahs. Stalin allegedly quipped: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the deaths of millions is a statistic.” Stalin or his successors callously perpetrated genocide in Ukraine, liquidated the Kulaks, assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico, supported North Korea during the Korean War, occupied Eastern and Central Europe, mercilessly suppressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, operated a terror network described by neoconservative darling Clair Sterling and invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviet Union featured a massive nuclear arsenal, delivery vehicles and conventional forces that might have inflicted a devastating first strike against the United States that could have foreclosed or crippled nuclear retaliation. Despite the indifference of the Soviet Union toward mass killings and its formidable military might, deterrence worked for the United States throughout the Cold War.

Krauthammer suggests that Iran, equipped with only a tiny, primitive nuclear arsenal, could nevertheless not be deterred. Iran’s ruling clerics, says the columnist, covet death and the afterlife triggered by a holy war more than life on earth, power or creature comforts.

In contrast to the Soviet Union, Krauthammer argues, Iran is complicit in suicide bombings, which ostensibly demonstrates indifference or eagerness for death. Did he forget that Tsar Alexander II was killed by a suicide bomber in 1881 in a spasm of pre-Bolshevik terror, and that Lenin’s brother was hanged in 1887 for complicity in a bomb plot? In any event, if Iran’s clerical regime were heedless of human carnage, then the war with Iraq would have been fought until the last Iranian perished. The conflict would not have ended inconclusively in 1988. Further, the Marxism-Leninism dogma of the Soviet Union prophesying the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state was no less messianic or unhinged from reality than is Shia millenarianism.

The Soviet Union was predictably nationalist but supported local communism movements around the globe with money and arms when consistent with Soviet nationalism—for example, Angola, Cuba or Nicaragua. Iran likewise is reliably nationalist. Indeed, Iranians historically have sneered at their Arab neighbors as uncivilized. Enmity between Iran’s Shia and Arab Sunnis is notorious. Iran’s support for Shia adherents in Syria, Bahrain, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East is no different than Soviet support for local communist political parties. Contrary to Krauthammer, the realpolitik of Iran today fits the realpolitik of the Soviet Union like a glove.

Krauthammer instructs: “For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.” If this were true, Iran would long ago have exhausted itself in more than three decades of endless conventional warfare and suicide bombings in Israel. The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, has coexisted with Israel for thirty-three years. Krauthammer is unable to summon a crumb of evidence suggesting coexistence has reached its endpoint.

Finally, Krauthammer insists that Iran would risk self-annihilation with a nuclear attack aiming to destroy Israel because the majority of 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide—the ummah—would survive the devastating local nuclear exchanges. The ummah is 75–90 percent Sunni. The vast majority—including Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and Afghanistan—deplore Shia Iran’s nuclear and national ambitions and view Shia Muslims as heretics. At present, Iran is supporting violence against Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Thus, the assertion that Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel and risk the destruction of Iran’s Shia population to benefit Sunni Muslims elsewhere is like the willful blindness that refused to see the intramural communist enmity between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Beware of neoconservatives bearing warnings. As Krauthammer’s imagined nuclear nightmare illustrates, they characteristically invent or inflate danger manifold to justify military force, military spending or the crushing of individual liberty. Never forget that the alternative to accepting life with reasonable risks is vassalage to an omnipotent president promising a risk-free existence.

Bruce Fein is author of American Empire Before The Fall. He was associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan.

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