Dore Gold on Iran...Certainly Not Worth It's Weight

Earlier today, Dore Gold, the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a former Israeli ambassador, gave a talk at Heritage to promote his book, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies The West. Gold argued that Iran will soon pose a threat to the entire Middle East. Gold made two main arguments.

First, he said engagement with Iran would fail. He relied heavily on the failed negotiations between the EU-3 and Iran to prove his point. Gold argued that Iran continued to advance their nuclear programs during negotiations and had no intention of giving up their nuclear program. He then warned that the US should not waste time with engagement because Iran is moving closer to the "nuclear finish line."

Second, Gold argued that the US had a "Plan B Issue." By that, he meant that the US didn't have an effective solution if engagement fails. Gold argued that if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, they would poses a unique threat and would not behave like other regimes. Gold cited Ahmadinejad's intent to "wipe Israel off the map" and said deterrence would not work with Iran like it did during the Soviet Union. To draw the distinction Gold said, "I don't remember Communist suicide bombers." He then argued that Iran's support for Hezbollah and actions during the Iran/Iraq war prove that they are an irrational regime that is willing to sacrifice its own people.

There are a number of problems with Gold's claims.

First, we shouldn't give up on engagement. Gold made it sound like Iran was just around the corner from developing nuclear weapons. At one point, he said that we should not waste more than a couple of weeks with engagement because it would allow Iran to quickly develop a breakout capability. Gold's argument doesn't account for Iran's current progress on it's nuclear program. According to a recent testimony by Dennis Blair, the Direction of National Intelligence,

Blair’s testimony to the Senate states that although Iran has "made significant progress since 2007 in installing and operating centrifuges, INR continues to assess it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce HEU before 2013."
The testimony also states that "Iran probably would use military-run covert facilities, rather than declared nuclear sites, to produce HEU."
According to Blair, the broader intelligence community has "no evidence that Iran has yet made the decision to produce highly enriched uranium, and INR assess that Iran is unlikely to make such a decision for at least as long as international scrutiny and pressure persist."
The INR’s estimate is in line with other recent intelligence estimates suggesting that Iran is years away from a deliverable weapon, if it chose to pursue one.
Meir Dagan, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, said in June that Iran would be capable of launching a bomb by 2014.
But more alarmist estimates have frequently been circulated in the media, providing grist for hawks who suggest that time is running out to prevent an Iranian bomb.

Therefore, even if Gold is right and Iran will continue to develop a nuclear capability during negotiations, it will not pose an immediate threat to either the US or our allies. Therefore, a more prudent approach would be to try negotiations and make a realistic offer to gauge Iranian intentions. If Iran will not engage in meaningful negotiations and really is as evil as Gold makes them out to be, then we would find that out in negotiations. If Iran's foreign policy is more nuanced and the US can make can offer them something more important than nuclear, then there could be a diplomatic solution. Some have argued that the EU-3 negotiations failed because there was no US involvement. Either way, since we have time before Iran can actually develop weapons, we should use it to make sure we don't make a mistake by rushing to new sanctions or a military option that could be counterproductive.

Second, Gold's evidence of Iran's irrationality is suspect. Gold relied on the go-to quote of neo-cons that Ahmadinejad wants to "wipe Israel off the map." However, shortly after the original speech by Ahmadinejad that the quote comes from, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian wrote a criticism (you can find tons of other articles if you don't like Steele's) of the quote,

Now we face a similar propaganda distortion of remarks by Iran's president. Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".
Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.
He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.
But the propaganda damage was done, and western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the recent annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group, huge screens switched between pictures of Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map" statement and a ranting Hitler.

The context of the quote was also clarified by Iranian officials. For example, in a CNN interview when pushed on whether Iran in fact wanted to have Israel "wiped off the map," an Iranian Ambassador clarified:

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?
SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.
It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.
BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?
SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.
But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

Ahmadinejad's statement was not a military threat to use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead, it was a statement, similar to those of a number of other leaders in the Middle East, in support of the Palestinians.

The other example cited by Gold is irrationality during the Iran/Iraq War. According to Gold, Iran escalated the war even though it was unnecessary because they wanted to enter Iraq. However, others see the Iran/Iraq War differently. For example, Justin Logan and Ted Galen Carpenter cited the Iran/Iraq war as an example of Iran's rationality,

Consider the Iran-Iraq War. Smoldering with radicalism from the Islamic revolution, Iran's early rhetoric was uncompromising, and in November 1981, it issued clear proclamations that it had no intention of stopping the war as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power.
By 1988, however, a long string of devastating tactical routs had made clear that outright strategic defeat was possible, so the Iranian leadership changed course. They sued for peace, jettisoning their original objective of deposing Hussein and taking a deal that left Iran on the light side of the postwar balance of power.
That the clerical leadership saw this reality and decided to end the conflict suggests that for all its religious bombast, it was making rational strategic calculations. In hindsight, even extreme radicals like Khomeini — who were viewed at the time as irrational — did not meet the description.
The evidence indicates that Iran's leadership remains rational today. Though it would certainly terrify the Israeli population, Iran has never passed chemical or biological weapons to Hezbollah or other client organizations.
Why? Most likely because they fear Israeli reprisals. And if the Iranians fear Israel's response to a chemical or biological attack, they are certainly aware how much more severely Israel would respond to a nuclear assault, whether by proxy or directly launched from Iran.
Never in history have leaders made a decision that was absolutely certain to destroy their own country in a matter of hours. Until someone can come up with definitive evidence that Iran is the first such country, we must work from the assumption that Chirac's reasoning is right.

Hooshang Amirahmadi also points out that even if Iran did develop a nuclear capability, they would be unlikely to use it offensively,

The view of Iran as a nuclear threat also ignores history and fact. Specifically, the nuclear state with closest link to terrorism is Pakistan, not Iran; even if Iran were to successfully develop a “second strike” nuclear capability, it would only use it defensively. In the last two hundred years or so, Iran has not initiated a single regional conflict. The only state toward which Iran remains hostile is Israel but, as the history demonstrates, much of the anger Iran directs toward Israel is rhetorical, some in response to Israeli rhetoric and others initiated by Tehran for domestic consumption.

Dore Gold paints a scary picture of the threat posed by Iran through a select reading of history. But in reality, the situation is not as dire. The US should give engagement a shot.