An Iranian Missile Crisis?
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101078.html?nav=hcmoduleThe emerging confrontation between the United States and Iran is "the Cuban
missile crisis in slow motion," argues Graham Allison, the Harvard University professor who wrote the classic study of President John F. Kennedy's 1962 showdown with the Soviet Union that narrowly averted nuclear war. If anything, that analogy understates the potential risks here.
President Bush tried to calm the war fever Monday, describing stories about military contingency plans for bombing Iran that appeared last weekend in The Post and the New Yorker as "wild speculation." But those stories did no more than flesh out the strategic options that might be necessary to back up the administration's public pledge, in its National Security Strategy, "to block the threats posed" by Iran and its nuclear program.
The administration insists that it wants diplomacy to do the preemption, even as its military planners are studying how to take out Iran's nuclear facilities if diplomacy should fail. Iran, meanwhile, is pursuing its own version of preemption, announcing yesterday that it has begun enriching uranium -- a crucial first step toward making a bomb. Neither side wants war -- who in his right mind would? -- but both frame choices in ways that make war increasingly likely.
The impasse was summarized by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, in a quote attributed to a Pentagon adviser: "The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S."
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