OPINION:
In the wake of what looks to be a partially successful attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons complex, a lot of people are confidently predicting that President Trump has successfully threaded the needle between corroding Iran’s ability to build and launch nuclear weapons and destabilizing the regime in Tehran. This confidence remained unimpaired even though the “ceasefire” imposed by the United States lasted about six hours.
After the attack, Mr. Trump adopted, intentionally or otherwise, the regime change language of the Israelis. Mercifully, his team walked that back a bit, but not before it became apparent that regime change is a sotto voce long-term goal.
Here’s the problem with all that: If killing people or destroying things could have brought peace to the Middle East, that region would certainly be tranquil by now. The reality is that ceasefires don’t last in the Middle East and regimes tend to resist change. We are now, for better or worse, directly involved in the violence between Iran and Israel, and the bad news is that the two tribes are certainly not done killing each other.
Although the administration has made it clear that we are not at war with Iran, and we have never declared war on Iran, the impulse to attack Iran is understandable. We have never really settled accounts related to the hostage taking at the end of the Carter administration, and the current regime in Tehran has spent much of the past 46 years fomenting opposition to the United States and aiding and abetting those who have killed Americans.
At this moment, however, the question is: Why is this our problem right now? What pressing national interest exists for the United States in the Middle East?
It is certainly not about nuclear weapons or their delivery systems. At least two countries in the world have nuclear warheads sitting atop missiles pointed at the United States. Despite this, no one advocates that we use violence to change the regimes in either Russia or China. Israel has somewhere between 90 and 300 nuclear warheads, in part because the United States has looked the other way as that stockpile has been built. Nations as different as Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. Would an Iran with a handful of warheads really pose that much of an additional threat?
Let’s say we go ahead and follow the advice of the same people who turned Afghanistan and Iraq into generational disasters, and we kill enough people and destroy enough things in Iran to cause the regime to collapse. What then? What do you suppose the collapse of a nation of 90 million people might look like?
Which country do you figure will be on the hook to “rebuild” Iran? The United States does a lot of things well, but nation-building in the Middle East, whose inhabitants are different from us in every conceivable way, is not one of them.
Right now, it seems the moment is over. We dropped some bombs, and everything is rosy. Still, we didn’t destroy Iran’s desire to make nuclear weapons. In fact, we may have sharpened that desire. Nor did we destroy the knowledge the regime has gained. It is not even clear that we have set back Tehran’s weapons program more than a few months.
What will we do when we find Iran once again making advances toward having nuclear weapons?
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor to The Washington Times.
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