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Munk Debate on Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions — November 27, 2012
“BE IT RESOLVED: THE WORLD CANNOT TOLERATE AN IRAN WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAPABILITY”
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Munk Debate on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. I’m Rudyard Griffiths, and it is my privilege both to organize this series — along with my colleague, Patrick Luciani — and once again to act as your moderator.
We begin tonight with a look back at some of the memorable moments of previous Munk Debates, because tonight is a special evening for this series. Tonight we convene our tenth semi-annual Munk Debate.
On the Munk Debate stage, as we enter our fifth year, we’ve hosted over thirty-eight speakers, speakers such as Christopher Hitchens, Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger —who could forget him?— Paul Krugman, and Larry Summers.
And it’s really thanks to you, the 3,000 people here at Roy Thomson Hall again tonight for a Munk Debate, and to the thousands more watching online, all of you representing our 30,000-strong membership.
This debate series, undeniably, is making a lasting contribution to more and better public debate not only in Canada, but internationally. We’re doing that through global TV and radio broadcasts on the BBC, through our homegrown champions and supporters of this debate, CBC Radio and the Globe and Mail, and through our
unique publishing program with Anansi Books, which has seen these debates translated into over a dozen languages and published throughout the English- speaking world. It is undeniable that this series is having an international impact.
All of this would not be possible, once again, without you — our members, our attendees — and two other very special people. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a big round of applause for tonight, our tenth semi-annual debate, and for our hosts and the originators of this series, Peter and Melanie Munk and Aurea Foundation. Bravo.
Now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Let’s get our two teams of powerhouse debaters out onto the stage and our contest underway. Arguing for the motion, “Be it resolved, the world cannot tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons capability,” are Charles Krauthammer and Major General (retired), Amos Yadlin.
Given that tonight is an anniversary of sorts for the Munk Debates, who better to have on stage than one of the debaters from the winning team in our very first debate in 2008? He writes a must-read column in the Washington Post on U.S. and international politics. It is syndicated in over 150 newspapers around the world. His acerbic analysis and his steely reputation on Fox News for not suffering fools gladly have made him one of America’s most influential commentators. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Charles Krauthammer.
Given recent events in the Middle East, we are very fortunate indeed to host as Charles’s debating partner an individual whose career in the Israeli Defense Forces was synonymous with the nuclear threats that have confronted his country. Highlights include being one of eight F-16 pilots to strap themselves into jets and destroy the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, to most recently, up until 2010, playing a key role in managing Israel’s overt and covert campaign against Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Major General (retired), Amos Yadlin.
Now, let’s get out on the stage the equally formidable duo who will be arguing against tonight’s resolution, Vali Nasr and Fareed Zakaria.
Dean Vali Nasr leads Johns Hopkins University’s prestigious School of Advanced International Studies. Born in Tehran, he is one of the world’s top experts on the political and social development of Iran. He is also the author of two bestselling books, The Shia Revival and Democracy in Iran. He sits on the State Department’s influential Foreign Affairs Policy Board and has served as a senior adviser, as recently as 2011, for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the late Richard Holbrooke, a former Munk debater. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dean Vali Nasr.
When you think of provocative conversation on the big foreign policy challenges of the day, you have to think about our next debater. His flagship global affairs program on CNN is seen in over 200 countries worldwide, but he is anything but a talking head on cable TV. He writes a highly respected column for the Washington Post and is the editor-at-large of Time magazine. His numerous bestselling books include The Post-American World and The Future of Freedom. Please welcome back to the Munk Debate stage, broadcaster and journalist Fareed Zakaria.
We are just moments from getting the debate underway, but before we hear opening statements, once again, I’m going to need this audience’s assistance as the night goes on to make sure our debaters stay on time in terms of their opening and closing remarks, and that we move forward as a debate together. So you will see this handy count-down clock appear, and when it reaches zero, applaud. This will let our debaters know that the time is over for their opening and closing statements.
Finally, before we kick off our debate, let’s see how the 3,000 people gathered today in Roy Thomson Hall voted on our resolution. This is how things stood as you took your seats — let’s see those numbers: 60% in favour of the motion, 23% opposed,
17% undecided. Now, we all answered a second question: depending on what you hear during the debate, are you open to changing your vote? How many proverbial swing states do we have in the audience this evening? Wow — that’s different. In past Munk Debates we’ve seen higher levels of potential vote changers. So this debate is very much in play.
So, it is now time for opening statements. As we’ve agreed to the order, Dr. Charles
Krauthammer, you are up first.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Thank you very much. Thank you for that kind introduction. There are nice introductions; there are kind introductions. The nice ones are where they list all your achievements, they get a copy made and notarized, and they send it to your mother. The kind introductions are the ones where they leave stuff out. For example, I appreciate your leaving out the fact that I once worked for the famously liberal senator, Walter Mondale. People sometimes ask me, how do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News? I tell them, it’s easy. I was young once.
Also, I appreciate the fact that you left out that I was once a psychiatrist. In fact, technically I still am a psychiatrist. But in reality I am a psychiatrist in remission, doing extremely well, thank you. I haven’t had a relapse in twenty-five years. I’m sometimes asked to compare what I do now as a political analyst in Washington with what I did back then as a psychiatrist in Boston, and I tell people that, as you can imagine, it is not that different. In both lines of work I deal every day with people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. The only difference is that in Washington the paranoids have access to nuclear weapons, which makes the stakes a little higher, the work a little more interesting — and which leads us to tonight’s debate.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of a regime like Iran’s — can we live with it? The answer is no. I will give you three reasons why I think so, to start off the debate, and then we’ll get into the details as we go on. I’m sure you will enforce the six-minute rule.
I think we have to look at this in concentric circles of decreasing size — the global, the regional, and the local effect. So the first reason is global. The global problem, the global threat, is that the world has been, for sixty years, trying to curtail and
prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Hyper-proliferation is the ultimate world nightmare. We congratulated ourselves when Brazil and Argentina renounced nuclear weapons. Imagine what the world would be like were Iran, the most important, the most powerful, most aggressive and — according to the State Department — the greatest exporter of terror in the world, and the most aggressive and radical state in the Middle East, to acquire nuclear weapons. That is the end of non-proliferation. You think the weaker nations in the region are going to take refuge in the parchment of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) Treaty? No.
Here is what will happen — “uncontrollable nuclear proliferation throughout a region roiled by revolution and sectarian blood-feuds.” Those are the words of Henry Kissinger, who knows something about deterrence, both when it works and when it doesn’t.
We will get an instant nuclear arms race. All the important neighbours — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Syria — will join in. Think of Syria. God knows who will be in charge of Syria. All those countries will go nuclear, assuming that Iran will go nuclear first.
And it’s not just in the immediate Middle East. This is going to spread in the region. Our opponents tonight are going to speak reassuringly about deterrence. Well, the experience that we have had is with a stable deterrence in a bipolar system, the United States and the Soviet Union, a bilateral stable system. Imagine that you have to do deterrence with six, seven, eight powers, countries that are unstable, some revolutionary, and with shifting alliances. How do you enforce or rely on deterrence in those circumstances? You can get accidental or unauthorized use; you can get theft; you can get deliberate proliferation in the hands of terrorists.
Imagine if al Qaeda would do what it did on 9/11 with nukes. Would it hesitate for a second, if it got its hands on nukes, in using nuclear weapons in such an attack in the future? That is the threat; that is the end of non-proliferation and the end of world reliance on deterrence.
Second, we have always tried to prevent a hegemon rising in the Middle East, in control of the world’s oil, in control of the strategically important region. That is why there was an Iraq war in 1991 over the invasion of Kuwait. What the Arabs understand in the region is that, once Iran is nuclear, it becomes the hegemon of the region, the most aggressive, radically Islamist, anti-Western state, in charge of the strategic area of the Middle East.
That is why the Gulf states, in private, have beseeched the United States to take out the nuclear program in advance, and why, if Israel were ever to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Saudis would line the desert with directional arrows saying, “This way to Tehran.”
Now lastly, and I’m running out of time — and I hope perhaps you will desist from applauding at the six-minute mark, or at least the 60 percent of you who are sympathetic to our view will desist, and drown out the others — is that this is a regime that has threatened to annihilate Israel and has expressed its intention to do so. We are told we have to rely on deterrence because it worked in the Cold War. The Cold War was radically different. The Soviets had an ideological argument with the United States. It was not existential. And the target, the United States, was a continental nation of great size. Israel is a one-bomb country.
[Audience applauds for the six-minute mark] That’s a very strong 23 percent. I commend you on your energy. I will stop here and say there is a radical difference between the Soviet–U.S. relationship and the relationship of Israel and Iran, and you will not ask six million Jews in Israel to rely for their existence on deterrence in this kind of situation. Thank you very much.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Charles, if it makes you feel any better, Henry Kissinger didn’t get
away with it either. Up next is Dean Vali Nasr; the podium is yours.
VALI NASR: Good evening, and thank you for that introduction. It is a pleasure being here. Let me start by saying that it goes without saying that the world will be better off if Iran does not become a nuclear-armed state, and achieving that goal should be our principal aim going forward. However, despite our best efforts, that undesirable end may very well come to pass.
Should we act as if this is the first time that we have encountered such a challenge, or that the logic of containment and deterrence somehow does not apply to Iran, that Iran is somehow to be set apart from the realm of politics as we know it? The answer is no.
As troublesome and menacing as Iran has been, its behaviour still reflects the pursuit of national interests. It has a strategy. It pursues it, and in the course of doing so it reacts to incentives and pressure. We don’t approve of its methods, but we understand its goals. In short, Iran is a familiar problem, one with which we have plenty of experience.
During the Cold War, we managed peace and prosperity in Europe and Asia, containing both nuclear-armed Soviet Union and China. We may parse details as to what the similarities and differences are in the Middle East, but the principle is very clear.
We are still guaranteeing peace and prosperity in Asia by containing the very dangerous North Korean regime that is armed with nuclear weapons and on a weekly basis threatens to set Seoul on fire. India too has been prospering, while tolerating great nuclear danger from a neighbouring country, which is known for its instability, adventurism, and support for terrorism. That situation has been going on
for over two decades and yet there is a stable containment situation in which the
Indian economy has been prospering.
It is often argued that Iran is different because the Iranian regime is irrational and it is messianic, so much so that it is impervious to the logic of containment and deterrence. It is assumed that Iran’s singular aim is to start a nuclear Armageddon the minute that it acquires nuclear weapons, that it is actually religiously mandated to do so. There are plenty of American politicians who believe in rapture, but that does not mean that you can read American foreign policy on the basis of that suggestion.
If Iranians were truly driven by messianism in their foreign policy, they would have reacted when the shrine most directly associated with their hidden Imam was blown up in Iraq in 2006, and yet they didn’t. The last time Iran attacked a neighbour was in 1859, to reclaim Afghan territories that had been snatched away by Great Britain. The record of the past three decades shows that as objectionable and problematic as Iran’s behaviour has been, it is still driven by the cold calculations of regime survival and national interests.
You don’t need a degree in Islamic Studies to understand Iranian strategy or to conclude that the regime that has survived in power for three decades could not be suicidal or completely reckless. In fact, despite its bluster and support for terrorism, Iran has been more accepting of international norms than was the case with communist China or is the case with North Korea or even Pakistan. We talk about the proliferation issue, but let us remember, it was Pakistan — while in America’s tight embrace — and not Iran, that began acting as a nuclear eBay.
If we are to say that we will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, if that becomes the case,
then we have to basically say we are prepared to go down the path to war with Iran. We should ask ourselves, can we tolerate another major war in the Middle East?
This time it would be with a country that is twice as large, twice as populous as Iraq;
it has much larger land mass, its capital city is 2,000 kilometres and two mountain ranges away from the nearest port facilities. Will that war actually be effective? Will it get the job done? How long would that war take? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Longer? How much will it cost? How many more trillions of dollars would this war cost the United States? How many Americans would die in such a war? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand? More?
How would such a war impact the Middle East, or America, for that matter? Do we want such a war — can we tolerate it? It seems that the Americans have already answered this, from the president on down. They have answered these questions very clearly and it is a resounding no. They don’t want such a war. The good news is that they don’t have to have it. If it becomes necessary, if the diplomatic efforts, the sanctions to stop Iran in its tracks were to fail, we can manage a nuclear Iran, just as we managed a nuclear Soviet Union, communist China, North Korea, and Pakistan. Thank you.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well the debate is shaping up nicely. Next up is Amos Yadlin. Amos, the podium is yours.
AMOS YADLIN: It is 2 a.m. in Tel Aviv, and I am the only one who does not speak
English every day. So please be patient with me.
It is much more frightening to have a real gun barrel pointed directly at your face than watching it on CNN or reading about it in the Washington Post. Last week, Israel was showered with 1,500 rockets and missiles from Gaza, aimed at innocent Israeli people, innocent citizens, women, and children. Those were Iranian rockets
and missiles that were supplied to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Thank God they were not nuclear missiles.
Iranian leaders are the only state leaders calling for the destruction of a U.N. member state. The Supreme Leader, the president, the chief-of-staff, are using
expressions every day like “annihilation,” “cancer removal,” and “wipe off the map,” and they aim those expressions at Israel. Iranian leaders are also Holocaust deniers. Our grandparents in Europe, seventy years ago, in their wildest dreams, never imagined that Hitler intended to do exactly what he had said. I suggest that we take this current Iranian threat very, very seriously.
Why? Because Iran has a cruel and radical regime, both regarding internal and external issues. They hang sixteen-year-old gays on cranes, publically; they torture their own citizens and kill them in prison. You know of Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian photographer who was arrested, tortured, ***, and killed in Iranian prison in
2003? This is usual behaviour for this regime.
They tamper with election results and crack down on the opposition. Iran is also the number-one sponsor of state global terror, and for many years they have exercised terror all over the world. In the ’80s, in Beirut, they bombed — through Hezbollah
— the U.S. Embassy. They killed more than 200 marine soldiers in the marine barracks in Beirut. In the ’90s, they attacked and bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires as well as the Jewish Community Centre in Buenos Aires
What are they doing today? In Syria, they are supporting President Bashar al-Assad in killing more than 30,000 of his own citizens. This is Iran; it backs every negative regime in the world. And imagine Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Would these be passed on to terrorists, just as the best Iranian weapons have made their way to Hezbollah? Hezbollah is the only terror organization in the world with ballistic missiles and UAV1 drone bombers. Why, then, not Iranian nuclear weapons?
But there is not only the terror aspect. A nuclear Iran will be the end of NPT, or nuclear non-proliferation, as we know it, and the Middle East will become an even worse neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia, they really care, they are concerned about a
1 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones.
nuclear Iran, more than Israel. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, the Saudis will go to Pakistan the next day for a bomb — they have already paid for it. They only have to bring it back home to their Chinese missiles
Egypt, Turkey, Iraq — every country believed to be a regional superpower will go nuclear. A nuclear balance that will include many participants is not stable. And even if it is just Israel against Iran, then the main concept of MAD — mutually assured destruction — which basically stabilized the Cold War, is not there anymore. Remember that there is no communication between Iran and Israel.
We are currently celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time the Soviet Union had an embassy in Washington D.C. Bobby Kennedy, the brother of the president, went to Anatoly Dobrynin, the ambassador in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and they closed a deal on how to de-escalate the situation, and save a world that was about to have a nuclear war.
There is no Iranian embassy in Israel. There is no red line between the prime
minister’s office and the Supreme Leader.
The world must stop Iran. This is not just an Israeli problem. The Iranian regime stands against everything and every value that we stand for — freedom, human rights, rule of law, women’s rights, everything.
If you believe the international press and David Sanger’s new book about covert campaigns,2 I am the only one in the world who has taken part in three counter- proliferation operations. Two were very successful, and spared the world from nuclear weapons in the hands of cruel, bloodthirsty dictators. The third campaign, the international community must take care of, lest the barrel of a gun — and this
time a nuclear gun — will look at all of us squarely in the face. Thank you.
2 David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of
American Power, 2012.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: So there you see on display, the discipline of an Israeli Defense Force officer who always completes his mission, regardless of the casualties! Fareed Zakaria, you’re up next.
FAREED ZAKARIA: Thank you so much. I really understand the position of the opposing team. I understand the fear, I understand the danger, and I understand the
challenge. Let me put this in some historical perspective. After the Cold War, the United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons. And then the Soviet Union acquired a nuclear weapon, and there were many people who felt — many very serious people — that this was an absolute calamity, and that the only recourse the United States had was a pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union.
This was not a position held by wacky war-mongers. Bertrand Russell, the pacifist philosopher, argued in favour of that. Harold Nicholson, the cool, unsentimental British diplomat, argued in favour of that. But a man like Dwight Eisenhower understood that “rollback,” a strategy of pre-emptive war, would have huge costs and incur huge consequences. So he opted instead for a strategy called “deterrence and containment.”. Keep the Soviet Union in a box; put pressure on them so that they found it difficult to operate and maintain the deterrent that says to them, “If you try to do something, you yourself will be annihilated.”
Now remember, the Soviet Union at the time was regarded as a wild, crazy, revolutionary power bent on global revolution. Remember that Stalin had just sacrificed tens of millions of his people in World War II on the eastern front, something that was unfathomable to Western statesmen. They were routinely called “irrational,” crazy,” “wild-eyed,” “messianic.” All the things you have heard about Iran.
But we learned that the proper course of action was not rollback and a pre-emptive war but containment and deterrence. And then we watched this again in China. John
Kennedy feared that if China went nuclear, twenty-five countries would go nuclear. Well China did go nuclear. And Mao was truly crazy. Mao openly talked about the need for nuclear war. He said it would cause sacrifices but it would be educational, and he said half the world would be destroyed but the other half would be socialists.
Now that is a crazier, more messianic comment than anything the Iranian mullahs have ever said. Yet, what we learned was that Mao could be contained and deterred.
And then, as Vali mentioned, we watched this in the country I grew up in, India.
India and Pakistan fought a war every fifteen years. After independence, they fought three wars in thirty years. And then they got nuclear weapons. And in the last forty years they haven’t fought a war since.
Now, you will of course see tensions and you will of course see crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis, because these powers are in conflict with one another. But what is extraordinary is that during the Cold War, despite this intense geopolitical rivalry — all history would have suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union would have gone to war with one another — they didn’t, because of nuclear weapons, because they were deterred, because of the fear of what it would mean.
Margaret Thatcher understood this. In 1989 she gave a speech standing with Mikhail Gorbachev and she said: “You and I, Mr. Secretary-General, know that conventional weapons have never deterred war in Europe. But nuclear weapons have done so for forty years.” She was speaking in 1989, so make that seventy years.
When North Korea went nuclear we were told that all of Asia was going to go nuclear — Japan would go nuclear, South Korea would go nuclear. You can understand why. South Korea is still in a state of active arms. It is at war with North Korea. And yet that hasn’t happened. South Korea hasn’t gone nuclear, Japan hasn’t gone nuclear.
The lesson of North Korea has been that if you’re a third-rate dysfunctional country that manages to acquire a couple of crude nuclear devices, you remain a third-rate dysfunctional country with a couple of crude nuclear devices. Power does not flow from the barrel of crude nuclear weapons. It flows from your GDP, from your innovation, from your technological prowess.
And so we come to Israel. And we come to the challenge that Iran places there. And what I would argue is that the Iranians, as Vali has pointed out, are cool, calculating, and shrewd, far more so in their rhetoric and certainly in their actions than any of the regimes we are talking about. They will be deterred. They will be deterred by Israel’s 200 to 500 nuclear weapons. Remember also that Israel has many submarines, so that they have second-strike capacity. Iran will be deterred by America’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons.
And recall — they don’t have any yet. We are talking about a hypothetical situation, and yet what we are talking about is a war in the Middle East where we will go and strike a regime pre-emptively. And what would happen? The regime would gain support at home. Every time a regime has ever been attacked by foreigners pre- emptively it has had the effect of rallying people around that regime. We will be able to destroy part of their infrastructure but they will be able to rebuild it very quickly.
Israel’s own estimates are that they would delay the program by two years. You would radicalize the Middle East and turn the mullahs and this regime into a much more popular force in the Middle East than it is now. Meanwhile, we have a containment strategy and a deterrent strategy. We have enormous pressure on them. The sanctions have been crippling their economy. They have not been able to develop a nuclear weapon. The Israeli intelligence that I have received in my ten years as a journalist has suggested — every year for the last ten years — that Iran is one year away from getting a nuclear bomb. Either Israeli intelligence is very bad or we have been very good at deterring and containing Iran.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well there’s a professional broadcaster for you — one second to spare. Well done, Fareed.
There’s so much that we need to discuss, from proliferation to deterrence, but what I think is on the mind of many of the people in this room, gentlemen, is what’s happened in the last few weeks, the conflict between Israel and Gaza. Vali Nasr, let’s start with you. You’ve argued that Iran is seeking to acquire a nuclear device to dominate the Arab world, not to destroy Israel. Yet, as we heard from General Yadlin, those very missiles — those very long-range missiles that were fired for the first time by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Jerusalem and on Tel Aviv — were proudly provided by Iran. So, why is General Yadlin wrong about the intent of destruction, and why are you right about the impetus towards domination?
VALI NASR: First of all, Iran and Israel have been in low-level warfare with one another for a number of decades. You referred to the back and forth over what happened in south Lebanon with the bombing and then the retaliation that Iran did in Argentina, and there have been attacks on Israel here and there. Currently, as we are speaking, there are cyber-attacks on Iran as well as assassinations of their scientists, and they are also hitting back. But launching nuclear weapons is a whole different order of magnitude in terms of escalation, particularly against a country that has several hundred nuclear warheads with a much more accurate ability to deliver them.
And, as Fareed said, Israel is a country with a second-strike capability of submarines. Iran is in no way in a position to be able to take Israel on, at that level.
Of course Iran would brandish these missiles very proudly. It wants to change the conversation in the Middle East from Syria and itself to the Arab-Israeli issue. It wants to also tell the Arabs that it is providing ammunition to the Palestinians to stand up to Israel. In the past week it has got a lot of ground in the Arab world because of these two things, because the limelight has shifted from them and what
they are doing in Syria to the Arab-Israeli issue. It is seen as the only government in the region that is providing material support to the Palestinians.
Again, it is cold calculation about what would promote their position in the region.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Charles, it sounds rational. Cold, calculated, moving forward to shift attention away from what is happening in Syria. Why don’t you buy that analysis?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This argument that Iran is acting purely from nationalistic motives — that it is merely cold and calculating — simply makes no sense in relation to Israel. Iran and Israel were allies, friends, until the revolution. There is nothing intrinsic about Iranian national interests that drives it to want to destroy Israel. It is precisely the ideology of the mullahs, it is precisely the theology of the mullahs, it is precisely the idea that the revolution in Iran — as Ayatollah Khomeini
explained it — the revolution in Iran was the harbinger, the beginning, the spark for the return of the Twelfth Imam,3 the restoration of the Caliphate, and the restoration of Islam’s place in the world.
And in order to achieve that, as they have been saying for the last year, the destruction of Israel is necessary as the beginning of the redemption of humanity. Is that nationalism speaking? Is that national interest speaking? Our opponents
tonight are trying to pretend that somehow the Iranian regime is cold and calculating and nationalistic — then why is it risking everything by supplying arms to Hezbollah and to Hamas? How does that promote the Iranian national interest, to involve itself in the civil war in Syria, where they are becoming hated by the Sunni Arabs because they are arming and protecting and even sending revolutionary guards into Syria to kill, imprison, and torture Sunni Muslims trying to achieve
freedom in Syria?
3 According to ***’ite Islam, the Twelfth Imam, a messianic figure, is expected to return to save the world when it had descended into chaos.
No, this is a highly ideologically driven regime, and at the top of its ideological and theological list is the annihilation of Israel. And our opponents are saying, “Oh, it’s rhetoric. This is a nation that is only interested in its own national well-being.” But it’s plainly the opposite.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Charles, let’s have Fareed come back on this critical point of what
the most recent conflict between Israel and Gaza says.
FAREED ZAKARIA: There are two points. Let me answer Charles’s question first. The reason that the Iranians are espousing the Palestinian cause so vociferously is because this is a ***’ite Persian regime that is trying to have dominance of the
Middle East. How do you do that with a bunch of Arabs? By appropriating their most important cause.
If you go to the streets of Cairo, which I have done many times, is striking when you talk to shopkeepers, because the photograph they have in the shop is of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a ***’ite Persian. And you ask them, why do you have that
photograph? And they say, because he supports the Palestinians. The Iranian regime
very cannily understands that by appropriating the core cause of the Arab street they are in effect outwitting the Arab regimes themselves. They are saying to the Arab street, your governments are too scared of Washington to support the Palestinians fully, but we will support them. It gives them enormous street credibility. And by the way, it is what makes Arab countries very scared of publically opposing Iran’s rise to power.
As to your question about what the Gaza incursion tells us. The Gaza incursion tells us one thing very clearly, particularly if you look at the reaction of Egypt and
Turkey. There is now a new Middle East, and Israel is the superpower in that Middle East. The Egyptians under a new government, we were told, were going to be different, they were Islamists, they were ideological — you know Muslims are crazy
and you put one of them in power like that and you know what is going to happen… Well guess what he did? He followed the [Hosni] Mubarak policy, which is basically to try and broker a deal between Hamas and Israel. And why did he do that? Because Israel’s defense budget today is larger than that of all of its neighbours put together.
That doesn’t even begin to get into the technological advantages it has, the qualitative advantages it has, the enormous advantage of being the only country in the Middle East that has sophisticated nuclear weapons on sophisticated delivery systems. And so, when confronting that, yes, the Turks will make very fine speeches in favour of the Palestinians and the Egyptians will shed crocodile tears, but none of them will do anything because, if I may say it in a word, they are deterred.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Let’s—
FAREED ZAKARIA: If Israel did not believe in deterrence, why has it gone through the enormous expense of building a nuclear arsenal? It is presumably to deter its enemies, not to use it.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Amos, let’s bring that direct point to you, because some people have commented that what the conflict between Israel and Gaza suggests is in fact that Israel needs some deterrence on its military action, on its range of military action, to force it to the negotiating table to find a solution through negotiation rather than conflict. How do you respond to that line of argument?
AMOS YADLIN: I think we have to go back to Iran. I don’t know what we are doing in Gaza right now, because we are speaking about Iran. And basically, the arguments that the Cold War deterrence principles are going to work in the Middle East are wrong. Just listen to Rafsanjani. He was the president of Iran, and what he said was that Israel is a “one-bomb country,” very tiny, very small. And the proud Islamic
nation can absorb three to four bombs, he went on to say. Is that deterrence? No, it is not.
When the Americans and the Soviets were doing deterrence calculations, both of them lived in this world, and they wanted to continue to live in this world. When we deal with Iran we have a business with people who think about the second world,
the second life. They invented suicide bombing. They sent kids to open field mines in the war with Iraq. Yes, these people are rational but it’s not our rational. It’s
different. They have to call somebody “over there.” And I am very, very worried
about the way they are making their decisions.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Ok, let’s spend one more moment on this before moving onto the question of proliferation, because that is a big one. Vali, you’ve written a series of books on Iran and it is the country in which you were born. Why is General Yadlin wrong to think that there is an irrational messianic force, maybe not amongst the Iranian people but amongst the elite and the leadership who could make the decision of whether to engage in a nuclear conflict or not?
VALI NASR: The fact that people are willing to die for a cause is not unique to Muslims. During World War II you had Japanese kamikazes. Suicide bombings are the poor man’s weapon missile system. And they have been proven very effective, and that’s the reason they’re being used. Secondly, rulers always can manipulate the popular beliefs of foot soldiers to get them to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause. It is not unique to Iran; it has happened all over the world. And not only in Iran but across the Muslim world, the person, the foot soldier willing to commit suicide for a cause, can believe in anything, but you know the generals don’t believe in that thinking.
The Iranian leaders are old men. They didn’t get to that age by actually believing in suicide bombs. Not one of them carried suicide bombs against the Shah’s regime, not one of them has sent his own sons to carry out suicide bomb missions. Yes of course,
General Yadlin is right in that the morality and ethics of this regime are abhorrent and they use, obviously, poor uneducated, fanatical kids to achieve their strategic objectives. But, you know, there is no evidence that Iranian rulers actually make
their calculations on the basis of wishing to expedite their own departure to the next world.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Let’s move on to the theme of nuclear proliferation because it is a key one. To do that, over the last week or so, we’ve caught up with a few international policy thinkers to get their reflections on this debate, and we are going to bring them to you in the form of video clips now. The first of these was Senator George Mitchell, whom we spoke to in Washington D.C. earlier this week. He is the former U.S. Senate Majority leader but more importantly, he was Barack Obama’s
U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace until 2011. Let’s listen to that clip, and then
I am going to have Charles react.
GEORGE MITCHELL: Thank you, Rudyard, and good evening. The debate on this subject has tended to focus on the threat to Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran. That is a serious concern which I share and I am sure it will be discussed this evening. There is another aspect of this subject that I think deserves discussion as well. And that is the threat to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime; or stated more simply, the danger of the rapid spread of nuclear weapons to many countries.
The United States led the world into the nuclear age, and ever since has also led the effort to restrain the spread of these highly destructive weapons, with some success. In the half-century since the first atomic bomb was exploded over the desert in New Mexico, nine countries have come to possess nuclear weapons. But the number of countries with the capability to possess those weapons is many times more than nine. Those countries, which have voluntarily refrained from developing nuclear weapons, one of which, of course, is Canada, have relied instead on the NPT and on American leadership.
If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, that could change. It could trigger an arms race in the Middle East as several countries there move quickly to get their weapon. And it is already a highly volatile and very dangerous place. Right now, Israelis and Palestinians are dying. The ancient hostility between Persian and Arab remains high, as does the internal conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims, which has gone on since the founding of Islam.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Charles, it was a big part of your opening argument, the case for stopping Iran in order to allow the non-proliferation treaty to continue. Go deeper on that for us. Why do you think this particular region is so different from the examples that Fareed and Nassr have given with China, with Russia, with India and Pakistan and most recently with North Korea?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Because the conditions, geopolitical conditions, are radically different. And they keep referring back to this stable, Cold War deterrence in a bilateral relationship between two established world powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
First of all, the nostalgia is slightly overdone. Anybody who lived through October
1962 knows how close we came — within hours — to a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. So even this, the great one example of how we can live with this indefinitely shows — and Kissinger himself talked about this — shows how inherently unstable it is. But it was the only alternative. Once the Soviets had 10,000 weapons and the U.S. also did, there was no alternative.
But we’re now in a situation in history where Iran has none. And we can avoid that
— we can avoid a Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis which, by the way, would be at a much higher, much more elevated level if Iran ever went nuclear.
Why would we choose a world in which Iran, this unstable, extremist Islamist aggressive power, would possess these weapons, a country that declares its
intention to annihilate a member state of the U.N.? And you will have noticed that our opponents have said nothing about the issue of hyper-proliferation. They keep referring to this single example of stable, bilateral deterrence. But what will happen in the Middle East, as everybody understands, is that you will get all these countries
— small but some of them rich, some technologically advanced — developing nukes,
and then you will have a situation where you go from nuclear checkers, which is relatively easy – U.S. and Soviets — to three-dimensional chess.
That is the difference in the situation between the U.S. and the Soviets, and what we would have in this case — a nuclearized Middle East, with shifting alliances, revolutionary governments and unstable regimes.
Imagine, in the hands of seven or eight of these countries, nuclear weapons; countries where they could easily have accidental and unauthorized use. They don’t have a tradition of civilian control of nuclear weapons as in the West. How easy it would be to turn one officer or another, as we have seen in Afghanistan. Every day, an Afghan officer will turn on a Western ally. And there is also the issue of regime—
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I’m getting signals from people who want in on this, so I’m going
to go quickly to Fareed, to Amos and then to Nasr.
FAREED ZAKARIA: Well it turns out we have an actual historical experiment as to whether or not there is proliferation in the Middle East. You see, it turns out there was a Middle East that had no nuclear weapons, and then one Middle Eastern power introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East. The name of that country is, of course, Israel. Israel now has, as I said, between 200 and 500 — depending on
whom you believe — very sophisticated weapons. As it turns out, none of the countries surrounding Israel, which are technically still at war with Israel, have gone nuclear as a result of that.
So if the hyper-proliferation scenario that Charles is so devoted to were true, why is it that, when their sworn enemy — the country that the opposing team keeps reminding us the Arabs hate and want to get rid of — got nuclear weapons, it did not trigger proliferation?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Let me answer that.
FAREED ZAKARIA: The truth is that every country that has received some kind of security guarantee from the United States has not chosen to proliferate. That is true of Japan; that is true of South Korea; that is true of Canada. Charles Krauthammer’s touching faith in the NPT from is rich. The truth of the matter is that the reason that people are not proliferating is that they get guarantees from the United States, guarantees that the United States has provided to the moderate Arab states, and of course, has provided to Israel. But you ask—
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: A quick rebuttal—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You asked a question. Is it rhetorical or were you asking a real question?
FAREED ZAKARIA: Well you were asking several, sir, so—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You asked: Why is it that when Israel acquires a nuclear weapon you don’t get hyper-proliferation? The answer is easy and simple. Israel has no intention of annihilating any neighbouring countries. Do you think Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others live in terror that one day, out of the blue, Israel is going to destroy Cairo or Riyadh? No. The reason that the Israeli weapon is not a threat and that it doesn’t cause fear or—
FAREED ZAKARIA: Charles,—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Wait a minute. I am trying to answer your rhetorical question. You can ask rhetorical questions and make a speech, or you can ask questions and I’ll give you an answer. Everybody understands in the region that Israel is not going to start nuclear aggression. It is simply inconceivable; whereas Iran, which is intervening in Gaza, arming Hezbollah, intervening in Syria and elsewhere, is a nation that, when it threatens to annihilate another, people take seriously. And the Saudis aren’t acting or pretending or being cynical when they say that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon—
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Wait a second Charles, equal time for all of the debaters. I’m
going to go to Vali Nasr and then back to Amos.
VALI NASR: Well first of all, as you’ve already said, threat is in the eyes of the beholder and the Arab countries do take Israel’s nuclear capabilities as a strategic game changer — maybe not annihilation, but it is a strategic game-changer. But there is no evidence that actually hyper-proliferation would happen. It seems to be more of an American argument in order to make the case against Iran going nuclear.
In fact, it looks like we have done more to try to goad countries to try to say that they want to go nuclear. We are supporting Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, all of them, to actually establish nuclear facilities. And I don’t think countries can easily build nuclear capabilities in the Middle East. Iran’s nuclear program goes back several decades to the time of the Shah. Most of these countries we are talking about don’t have the infrastructure to build a nuclear weapons program and, as General Yadlin said, “Saudi Arabia can go to Pakistan and get it.” Then, what are we doing here? These two countries are our allies. UAE is our ally. We have much more leverage to prevent proliferation in this region than we had with Iraq. [Verification needed.] It seems to me we are making the case for all of these countries to go nuclear because it proves our case against Iran, but there is no real evidence for it.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: General Yadlin?
AMOS YADLIN: I think the fact that you repeat a lie and repeat it again and again does not make it the truth. I am speaking about the number of bombs that Israel has. Israel declares that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. Israel will not be the first to use them in a conflict. Israel is the only country that is under the threat that it will be “wiped off the map.”
I don’t recognize any other country in the Middle East under this threat. And whenever our neighbours will make peace with us, I guess even the capabilities we have will not be there. This is historically true.
So Israel has behaved very responsibly. As Fareed has said, we have had four wars with Egypt and never spoken about anything besides conventional weapons. So it’s different behaviour if you compare it to the way the Iranians are speaking and to what they are doing. And I am describing what they are doing all over the Middle East, and you cannot ignore it or deny it.
Vali, you know, and you read as I read, the Wikileaks. And the Saudis are saying, “We are not going to tolerate a nuclear Iran,.” And believe me, they are your allies, allies
of the United States, but they don’t trust you anymore. They don’t trust you because of what happened in Egypt; they don’t trust you because you are not stopping Iran from becoming nuclear; they don’t trust you because of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And they will become nuclear, no doubt about it.
We’ve already spoken about a multi-player balance in the Middle East, which is so unstable, and so dangerous. It is not only us that don’t want to live in this neighbourhood. It is you that don’t want to live in this neighbourhood. Because if Iran becomes the hegemon, the price of oil will be $200 or $300 a barrel and it will stay there forever. So it is your problem and not only ours.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Two final interventions on this point. We’re going to go to Fareed, and then, Charles, you’ll have the last word. Then we’ll move on to another topic.
FAREED ZAKARIA: I think it is very important for us to have a conversation about what happens if the strategy that the opposing team wants takes place. That is to say, we are living in a world of bad choices. That’s the world of international relations; that is the world of international politics. You don’t have wonderful, clean solutions that make the problem go away. So, imagine the scenario: what happens is that the
United States or Israel goes and engages in the third Middle Eastern war in a decade.
We go and strike Iran. What is going to happen? AMOS YADLIN: We haven’t suggested it, by the way.
FAREED ZAKARIA: If we cannot tolerate it, the logical consequence is one you will have to live with, so let’s play it out. What will happen is that the regime will get strengthened. It happens everywhere. One week after 9/11, George Bush’s approval ratings were 91 percent. The Green Movement will be destroyed in Iran. The regime will be able to rebuild its capabilities very easily. The nuclear budget for Iran — for the nuclear civilian program — is currently $300 million. They make about $50 billion off their oil revenues. This is a drop in the bucket for them. They will have radicalized the Middle East. They will have gained purchase on the Arab street.
All of this for a two-year delay, a three-year delay? What are you then going to do? Bomb them every two years? Hope that one day, that somehow in our fantasy version, the country that we keep bombing turns into a moderate, liberal democracy and suddenly embraces Western values? What is far more likely is of course that they will get radicalized, and they will get even more radicalized.
Imagine if we had done what Charles wanted in the 1950s and had a rollback
strategy. He says we couldn’t do it with the Soviet Union because they got 10,000
missiles. But they didn’t in the 1950s, and there were many people arguing that we should have had a pre-emptive war. Imagine what would have happened then. Imagine if we had done that in China and engaged in pre-emptive war with China — would any of these regimes have mellowed? Would they have gotten integrated into the world the way they have? No, they would have been radicalized, violent, unstable regimes, and that is the fate we are condemning ourselves to if we launch another war in the Middle East.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, Charles—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’d like to answer. If we’re going to ask questions in here, we should at least accept that there might be an answer to them. Fareed is giving us this scenario about what will happen if and when Israel or the United States attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities — people will rally to the government, the Green Movement will be destroyed. And he went on and on, and elaborated with all these imaginary details.
The problem with his analysis is that we have two actual, empirical, historical examples of exactly what he is talking about – the pre-emptive, de-nuclearization of a country. General Yadlin here beside me was involved in the first — he dropped the bombs on Iraq’s nuclear site in 1981. What was the reaction from Iraq? Zero.
FAREED ZAKARIA: They rebuilt their nuclear program, however. AMOS YADLIN: It took many more than two years.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Did they attack? Did they go to war and rally? No. That is
number one.
FAREED ZAKARIA: They rebuilt their nuclear program, though — precisely what I pointed out. When the Gulf War happened, what the inspectors found was an Iraqi nuclear program, which had been built after Osirak—
AMOS YADLIN: It took ten years, not two years.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This was ten years later. The West went into Iraq and found that it had not rebuilt and created a bomb, so it gained a decade. Number two example: in 2007 there was an attack on the Syrian nuclear facility they had got from North Korea. Reaction? Zero. Syria didn’t even announce the attack. Second, imagine if we had not done that, if the Israelis — acting on behalf of the West, I would argue — had not done that, what would be happening in Syria today?
The world is terrified about the loose chemical and biological weapons that are in Syria and that we know are there, that the regime has declared, and that the jihadist and the Al-Qaeda elements in Syria could easily acquire. That is why we are so vigilant in the United States. Standing on the border with Jordan is a way to pre- empt the transfer. The reason there are no nukes involved is because of the pre- emption. That is why the consideration of hyper-proliferation is so important, and the blind assurance that we get from our opponents, that somehow there would be this great reaction of rallying to the regime, is absurd.
This regime in Iran is detested by the overwhelming majority of the people and particularly by the young, as we saw in the Green Revolution when it was suppressed. If there were, for example, a U.S. attack that not only attacked nukes but attacked elements of regime strength, like the Revolutionary Guards, that could be the occasion for a revival of the Green Revolution.
Remember, the Revolutionary Guards who tortured the young people on the streets are not heroes, and they would not become heroes were they to be the victims of a U.S. or Israeli attack on nuclear facilities. I believe an attack could have the opposite
effect — galvanizing a population that hates an oppressive, theological regime at a time when the regime would be at its weakest.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Vali, you’re the expert on Iran. Tell us why that is not true.
VALI NASR: First of all, to the first point, Syria and Iraq are not Iran. In terms of size, capability, location, size of population, the amount of weight they have in the Middle East, they are different. The reaction from Iran could potentially be orders of magnitude different. Secondly, I don’t know of any population that is going to side with the outsiders bombing its country, especially because this is not about democracy. We are not putting sanctions on Iran because of democracy and human rights. We are not bombing Iran because of democracy and human rights. We are bombing them and pressuring it for something that potentially the Iranian people actually believe in.
It’s their technology — and their government has told them this is for peaceful purposes — and the Iranians are probably about as affectionate about their nuclear program as the Pakistanis and Indians are about theirs.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: What about Libya last year? We bombed, and the population applauded us.
VALI NASR: When you bombed them you, were not bombing them for their nuclear program, you were bombing them to protect them from an authoritarian regime.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You just said you know of no case when a government is attacked and its people rally on behalf of the attacker. I just gave you an example that happened within the past two years.
VALI NASR: No, the pretext matters. What makes you think that Iranians would rally to us? Because of the example of 1953 when we intervened in Iran and the reaction
we got suggests the Iranians would side with us? Or the example of the Iran-Iraq war when as soon as Saddam attacked, even the moderate liberal democratic population—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Because they hate a regime that shoots young women in the street, tortures demonstrators and then delivers the body to the family. That is why they would rally, because—
VALI NASR: There is no evidence to suggest—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Are you saying in Libya, they—
FAREED ZAKARIA: Charles, did you get the last letter mixed up? Because we heard all this about the Iraq war: the Iraqis were going to love us because we were bombing them into freedom and democracy and—
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Gentlemen, I just want to give our guest, who has come all the way from Israel to be here, some time on the stage.
AMOS YADLIN: I’d like to remind the audience of the resolution today. The resolution is not whether to attack Iran or not. The resolution is whether the world can live with a nuclear Iran. And since our opponents don’t have arguments, they went to
the topic of a possible attack. We are not suggesting attacking Iran — we suggest not letting Iran be nuclear, by having tough sanctions, by doing everything short of war, and this has not been done yet.
Only in the last year has the world imposed crippling sanctions. If we had done it a decade ago, the question would not be here right now, because the regime is a hated regime. It is a hated regime and I have often heard the argument that if you just sanction them the people will rally behind the regime — it never happened. It has never happened. The people hate the regime. There are not so many old Iranians.
Sixty-five percent of them are very young and they never knew the Shah, and they blame the Islamic Republic for all the bad things in Iran. And I think that the amount of time that we will buy by tough sanctions will change the regime. We are not calling to attack in Iran unless it is the last resort.
And once again, I am really not speaking about invading another country. What you did in Iraq was a mistake. But you have a very good air force that can surgically solve the problem. I am not recommending it yet.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, let’s move on to another topic. You know, what is a Munk Debate without a little bit of a contribution from Dr. Henry Kissinger? So we caught up with Dr. Kissinger in New York last week — let’s listen to his intervention in this debate. Roll tape.
HENRY KISSINGER: Thank you, Rudyard. For a decade and a half, American presidents from both political parties have declared that an Iranian nuclear military capability is unacceptable, and that no option is off the table in preventing it. If Iran emerges from this process -- which was joined also by other members of the U.N. Security Council — with a military nuclear capability, the psychological and strategic balance in the region will be transformed. The countries of the region and elsewhere will look to the development of nuclear weapons for their own security, and non- proliferation as an international goal will be ended or severely jeopardized.
The credibility of Western strategy will be severely damaged. It is essential that the United States and its allies define what they mean by “Iranian nuclear military capability” and what they mean by the term “unacceptable.”
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Fareed, let me start with you. I want to zero in on that key line of what Dr. Kissinger said — “the credibility of Western strategy will be severely damaged.” Your president, in the context of this recent election, had to walk towards a red line on Iran that is very close to our resolution tonight. And it is about
capability — it’s about the ability to assemble a device as opposed to having a working device. In some ways, has the train already left the station? Is the U.S. position able to walk back from what Dr. Krauthammer and General Yadlin are arguing?
FAREED ZAKARIA: Well, first of all, how do you argue with that accent, right? Dr. Kissinger was my debate partner the last time we did the Munk Debates and so I naturally have great respect for him.
I think that the United States’s position on this issue, which is a somewhat technical point, but worth going into, is understandably ambiguous. You do not want to signal in advance exactly at what point you would go to war. Do you know who else has exactly the same position? The government of Israel.
Even though the Israeli prime minister has been asking Washington to draw a red line, Israel itself has not drawn a red line, and I would argue they are right not to draw a red line. You want to keep the other guy guessing. You want to keep the pressure on. You don’t want to be entirely clear as to when you would take action. You don’t want to give the other person your timetable for war.
It’s one thing if they do something — like invading a country — that triggers an obvious response. But in a situation like this we retain much more room to manoeuvre and much more flexibility if we maintain some degree of strategic ambiguity, as the Israelis are doing. It is important to point out that the Iranians do not have nuclear weapons. And in fact there is something worth pointing out here — not only do they not have nuclear weapons, but the Supreme Leader of Iran has issued a fatwa, a religious edict, saying that it would be un-Islamic to have them, and that the founder of the regime, Ayatollah Khomeini, believed it was un-Islamic to have nuclear weapons.
Now, of course they could be lying. But it would be rather odd for a regime that relies for its legitimacy on religious edicts to unnecessarily issue these edicts. Nobody is asking them to say this stuff, right? So the fact that they are doing so may also suggest that Iran may have a complicated calculation of its own; that they want some kind of capacity that will buy them a certain degree of influence, but they are not seeking to have an arsenal all ready to go.
And that reality is the one we have to live with in trying to figure out exactly what Iranian action would trigger an American or Israeli response. And that’s why the Americans and the Israelis, understandably, are maintaining that ambiguity.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Can I comment on that? “Of course he could be lying.” That is an interesting understatement.
Here is a regime that, as Fareed has argued, has allowed its currency to depreciate by 60 percent, has had its economy completely wrecked, has been isolated because it is pursuing a nuclear program. And you are asking us to believe that the Ayatollah’s saying, “Oh we aren’t really interested,” ought to supersede what we are seeing in front of our eyes?
FAREED ZAKARIA: Saddam Hussein did all of those things and he didn’t have a nuclear
weapon, it turned out, and—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Do you think Iran is faking a nuclear program? Do you think the facility outside of Qom is a theatrical set?
FAREED ZAKARIA: I’m pointing out that Saddam Hussein—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m talking about the real world and what is happening right now.
FAREED ZAKARIA: Saddam Hussein was in the real world, not in a fantasy, I don’t know
if you got that.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Saddam Hussein didn’t have a nuclear weapon. And you’re
saying that therefore Iran is faking it, too? Iran is faking its nuclear program? VALI NASR: Saddam Hussein—
FAREED ZAKARIA: Both of you are coming at me at the same time.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’ll ask you a question. Is Iran faking its nuclear program?
FAREED ZAKARIA: No, it has an active nuclear civilian program. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Civilian?
FAREED ZAKARIA: You want an answer? I believe that serious Iran scholars and intelligence analysts are unsure about whether they have made a final decision as to whether they want to weaponize completely or whether they want to stop short because that gets them most of the benefits and the influence that they seek, without actually incurring the costs. That is an issue, for example, on which American intelligence and Israeli intelligence—
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: It’s great that you brought that up because that is an absolutely
key point, and I want Amos Yadlin to respond to that.
FAREED ZAKARIA: …and the former head of Mossad would agree with me—
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: It’s about walking up to that line and not going over it.
AMOS YADLIN: I think somebody has to understand the Iranian strategy. As Vali Nasr knows very well, the Iranians are smart, sophisticated—
FAREED ZAKARIA: But crazy.
AMOS YADLIN: …and they have learned history. And history told them that Libya, Syria and Iraq did it wrong, but that Pakistan, India and North Korea did it well. And they have learned the lesson. They are not going towards making the bomb as fast as possible. They are going towards the bomb in as safe a way as possible.
And the strategy that we have discovered is a sophisticated strategy. It is to develop a nuclear program that Zakaria and others will believe is, and call civilian, but it is not civilian. It is very redundant, wide, and covert, and when it is revealed it will be joining the so-called civilian program.
They have developed all the capabilities that will enable them to become nuclear at the time of their decision, of their choosing. Strategically, they have decided to go to a nuclear weapon.
Otherwise they would not suffer all the sanctions and all the difficulties that they are suffering now. They would not do that just for a civilian program. They want to go to the nuclear weapon at the time they will it. And it will be very difficult to stop them at that time. They are smart and they know this. Remember that Iran was referred
to the Security Council — not by Israel, not by the “Zionist movement” — but it was referred to the Security Council by the U.N. watchdog in Vienna, the IAEA,4 because they cheat, because they conceal, because they lie—
FAREED ZAKARIA: On which we agree.
4 The International Atomic Energy Agency.
AMOS YADLIN: …because the IAEA found a high level of enrichment, because Iran didn’t let the IAEA interview their scientists and their heads of programs, and they didn’t let any intelligence officers know exactly where things were going. Strategically, they are there. They only have to do the last mile, and that is what they intend to do if we let them continue with the program.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I want to be conscious of our time, and we need to get to closing statements so that we can have a final, second audience vote within our timelines. So Vali Nasr, I want to give you the last word here before we move on to our closing statements.
VALI NASR: Well, there are many strategic reasons why Iran would want nuclear capability, a virtual nuclear program, or an actual bomb. As I said, it has to do with regime survival and national interests. But if what you are saying is true, then sanctions and diplomacy will not work and we are back to our previous argument. Do we want to go to war to stop it or are we going to agree that we can handle this through containment and deterrence?
Because, you know, you said that aggressive sanctions may work and that international pressure may work, or maybe diplomacy in the second term may work, but according to you, they have already made the decision that they are going to do this because it comes down to the fact that they don’t want to have the fate of Syria, Iraq and Libya, and they want to have the security that North Korea and Pakistan feel. And if that is the case, then the only option on the table is that we either contain them and deter them, or that we go to war with them.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: We’re now going to bring the podium out so that closing statements can take place. We’re doing to do the closing statements in the opposite order of the opening statements. So, Fareed Zakaria, that means that you are up first.
FAREED ZAKARIA: You know, when I was a kid in college, I invited Caspar Weinberger, [Ronald] Reagan’s defense secretary, to campus to speak. There was a huge amount of commotion and many protests against him, all from the left. There were people, many people, from an audience of this size, that started standing up and chanting against him. And what they kept saying — the phrase they kept using one after the other — was, “Deterrence is a lie.” Because in those days it was the left that didn’t understand deterrence, because they were emotional and irrational and they felt, “surely there has got to be a better way around this.”
And it was the wise heads, the sane people on the right, steeped in realism and history and tragedy, who reminded us of the need for deterrence. One such person put it very brilliantly, when he said: “Almost once every twenty-five years, a new generation discovers the horrors of the bomb and the paradoxes of deterrence and looks for a way out. But alas,” he said, “there is no way out. Deterrence, like old age, is intolerable, until one considers the alternative.” That was Charles Krauthammer, about twenty-five years ago.
So what I want to say to Charles is, “Come home, Charles Krauthammer.” Come home to the sad, necessary task of building a powerful containment and deterrence strategy against Iran. Of course, nobody wants an Iran with nuclear weapons. Of course, one wishes to place every obstacle in their way and put as much pressure as is possible on them to desist.
And of course, we want to have precisely the same strategy we had in the Cold War, of detaining and deterring them so that eventually we create circumstances where the young people of Iran can take their country back. And they will have acquired a desire for modernity and for an integration with the West, and for freedom and liberty.
And that is the course we are trying to move on. But there is no fantasy solution out there that says, we cannot tolerate this and we are going to go to war instead, and
we are going to pre-emptively strike another country in the Middle East, and they will love us for it and they will embrace us, and all of a sudden the problems of the Middle East will go away because we will have gotten rid of that evil thing, deterrence.
Alas, that isn’t how it works. International politics will persist, international rivalries will persist, and the Middle East will continue to be a complicated place. Haven’t we just gone through a decade of two wars in the Middle East, both of which were sold
to us on the promise that this was going to usher in a new era in which everyone was going to love the United States and the West, and all the problems that existed would go away? And yet we find ourselves in the same situation.
So I say, come home Charles Krauthammer, come home to the kind of reason and history and logic that you once so powerfully believed in and argued for. Don’t give in just because these guys are different, and they’re brown and they’re coloured. Don’t believe that because of that, we have to have fantastic solutions.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Oh, Google! The things it allows us to find out about each other! Up next, Amos Yadlin.
AMOS YADLIN: Once again, I have to remind you that this debate is not about attacking Iran. This debate is about not letting Iran become nuclear, because the world cannot afford a nuclear Iran. It is not the same story. It is not really the same story as the Cold War, either. This is a regime calling for destruction of another country. I do not remember that the United States wanted to destroy the Soviet Union and vice versa. So it is another story today, and I think people underestimate what will happen to the NPT. And they underestimate what kind of world we will live in after Iran becomes nuclear, if it becomes nuclear.
It is not about the issue of deterrence vis-à-vis Iran. It is about the issue of proliferation all over the Middle East. I am a general — I have fought in many wars.
Nobody hates wars more than me. I have been there. I saw the blood, I saw the pain, I saw the waste of life, I saw the waste of resources. I heard the cries of the widows and the orphans. We don’t call for wars. We call for the world to wake up and stop Iran before there will be a nuclear war.
And when you run out of arguments, as our opponents did, you speak about the war that nobody advocates. We advocate a very tough sanctions regime against Iran, and isolation. And we advocate having the whole world join, not only the West — the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians — because Iran must be stopped.
Iran is not North Korea. North Korea is not threatening the whole of East Asia or the Far East. They don’t want to be the hegemon. Iran wants to be the hegemon in the Middle East. And what will happen if Iran becomes the hegemon is very similar to what happened in Europe in the 1940s. And remember, we cannot allow that anymore.
As an intelligence officer you have to answer two questions: what is the enemy’s capability and what are the enemy’s intentions? With capabilities, if you have good sources you have good answers. How many missiles, how many centrifuges spinning, how many kilograms of enriched uranium do they have? On intentions, you have to be much more cautious. But the Iranians openly tell everybody their intentions. They want to destroy Israel — we have to take it very seriously and stop Iran from being nuclear. Thank you.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Dean Nasr, you’re next.
VALI NASR: Well I take General Yadlin’s cautions and warnings quite seriously, and I do think that there are important and stark choices that face us and will face the new American administration going forward. Obviously, we think of the biggest issue in the Middle East being Iran, not only because it is a dictatorial regime that is
abusing its population, that is taunting Israel and its neighbours, and supports terrorism and now, to boot, is going nuclear.
But when we think about decisions about Iran, we also have to remember that every decision has a context. The context is the following — Iran is not the only issue in
the region. We are also seeing a Middle East that is falling apart all across the board: from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Bahrain, regime after regime is becoming unstable. We are seeing a rise in extremism. We are seeing a major shift in this region. We are not going to be dealing with Iran in a vacuum, and therefore the decisions we make have to be made with a view to what it means for the region.
We are also dealing with a United States that is tired of war; it has not done well in the two big wars it conducted in the Middle East; it doesn’t have a record to show for its efforts. It has spent trillions of dollars — a lot of blood and treasure — and it has not been able to accomplish its objectives, whether in Afghanistan or in Iraq. And it is very clear that the Americans are more interested these days in nation- building at home, as the president put it. These are important contexts to bear in mind.
Now hopefully, the Iranian regime will change, as Dr. Krauthammer and General Yadlin have said. Hopefully, the administration will take diplomacy very seriously and by some miracle there is a breakthrough in the short run, or that sanctions really change the Iranian government’s mind and they change course.
But the clocks for diplomacy, for sanctions, for regime change in Iran are not synchronized with the clock for building Iran’s nuclear capability. It is quite likely — it is quite possible — that Iran may go nuclear before any of these things take effect, before sanctions, as rigorous as they are, produce a result, or before there is a successful democracy movement. Then we are really left with two choices: we either find a way to contain and deter a nuclear Iran or we go to war with it.
And if we go to war with it, then we have to be prepared for what that war would entail. And it could very well be that it would be far more costly and far more destabilizing to the region than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were. We started sectarian war in the Middle East. The Shia-Sunni war that our commentators lamented was our doing. Another war would be equally intolerable. Thank you.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Charles Krauthammer, you have three minutes on the clock and the final word.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: So much error, so little time. But I will address two points. Yes, I believe in every word I wrote in defence of deterrence in 1984 when dealing with the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And it remains true today. But the idea that some technique like deterrence, because it worked in one context, will therefore always work, is mindless.
I would say to my friend Fareed, “Wake up.” Wake up to the reality that Israel-Iran is not the U.S.-Soviet Union. Wake up to the fact that the nature of the regime is completely different, that the regime in Iran, unlike the atheistic regime in the Soviet Union, has an apocalyptic, millennialist idea of history and sees itself as the instrument of that idea. Wake up to the idea that in the seventy years of the Soviet Union they never once sent out a suicide bomber, but that for Iran, martyrdom is the royal road to heaven.
Wake up to the idea that for the jihadists that we are fighting around the world, in the words of al Qaeda, “You love life, we love death.” Try deterring that. Wake up to the fact that the nature of the Cold War dispute was completely different. Russia was engaged in an ideological contest with the United States; it never sought to wipe it
off the map. Iran believes that the existence of Israel is a crime against humanity and an illness that it has to cure.
And lastly, wake up to the fact that the Iranians themselves, the mullahs, have told us what they intend in a nuclear exchange. Again, President Rafsanjani said that application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but in the Muslim world the same thing would just produce damages. In other words, Israel would forever and instantly be wiped off the map, whereas the Ummah, the Muslim nation of 1.8 billion people, would endure with some damage, but would endure. There is a radical difference in history between deterrence in the ’80s and deterrence today. To mindlessly apply it and say, well it worked in the past so it will work in the future, is, I think, completely unwarranted.
And remember the stakes — we are assured by the other side that deterrence will work. They don’t know, and we don’t know, if deterrence will work. But imagine the risks if they are wrong. Six millions Jews are dead, the eradication of Israel, hyper- proliferation in the Middle East, and Iranian domination of the Middle East and of the oil economy of the world. Do any of you want to live with that? Thank you very much.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear why people have called this debate one of the toughest global foreign policy challenges of a generation. We’ve had two sharply contrasting arguments tonight, eloquently presented by two teams of debaters. So, a big round of applause for all of our speakers. Well done.
Let me reiterate something Peter Munk has said at these debates in the past: it is one thing to give a set-piece speech on a subject you are intimately familiar with; it is another thing to come before an informed audience like this and to make your case with passion and conviction. Now, the question before all of us is, which of these two teams of debaters has been able to sway public opinion in this hall?