An article on the op-ed page of today's New York Times asserts, "Actual military action against Iran would be disastrous." The article does not contemplate what would be even more disastrous -- the chance that, while American policymakers delay and desist under the influence of op-ed pieces like the one in today's New York Times, Iran launches a nuclear, chemical or biological attack against America or Israel. The Times op-ed says, "The charge that Iran is producing weapons of mass destruction has never been substantiated. If Iran is developing a nuclear program, or chemical and biological weapons, a surgical military strike is unlikely to eliminate such projects entirely. The persistence of such threats in neighboring Iraq is a case in point."
"If"? "If Iran is developing a nuclear program or chemical and biological weapons"? Consider the testimony to the U.S. Senate by the deputy director of the director of central intelligence's nonproliferation center, A. Norman Schindler, in September of 2000. "The Intelligence Community judges that Iran is actively pursuing the acquisition of fissile material and the expertise and technology necessary to form the material into nuclear weapons," Mr. Schindler testified. "Despite international efforts to curb the flow of critical technologies and equipment, Tehran continues to seek fissile material and technology for weapons development and has established an elaborate system of covert military and civilian organizations to support its acquisition goals." As for chemical weapons, Mr. Schindler testified, "Iran has a large and growing chemical warfare production capacity and already has produced a number of chemical warfare agents, including nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents. We believe it possesses a stockpile of at least several hundred metric tons of weaponized and bulk agent."
If the Times editors don't believe the U.S. government on this, they could try reading their own newspaper. Here is 2001 testimony from the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Gary Milhollin, to a federal commission: "In 1995 my organization discovered, and wrote in the New York Times, that the United States had caught China exporting poison gas ingredients to Iran, and that the sales had been going on for at least three years. In 1996, the press reported that China was sending entire factories for making poison gas to Iran, including special glass-lined vessels for mixing precursor chemicals. The reported shipments also included 400 tons of chemicals useful for making nerve agents. This activity appears to have continued. In May 1997, the U.S. government sanctioned the Jiangsu Yongli Chemical Engineering and Technology Import Export Corporation for contributing to Iran's chemical weapon program. The same Chinese firm was sanctioned again in June 2001 for helping Iran build a plant to manufacture equipment useful for making chemical weapons."
One wonders what it would take for the Times writer -- a Yale professor -- to consider the charge that Iran is producing weapons of mass destruction to be "substantiated." Would the obliteration of New Haven by an Iranian nuclear warhead or chemical weapons attack be substantiation enough?
Galling, too, is the writer's citation of Iraq as a "case in point" of the limits of a surgical military strike. Had Israel not successfully eliminated the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in its military strike on June 7, 1981, America would have faced a nuclear-armed foe in the Persian Gulf War. Just because Saddam is still hiding some germs and chemical weapons does not mean that depriving him of the atom bomb was pointless. If there's a good argument that the 1,000-megawatt Iranian nuclear power reactor at Bushehr shouldn't get the Osirak treatment, the Times article doesn't make it.