What the Iranians Are Probably Thinking
History News Network, WA By William R. Polk
Mr. Polk taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1961 when he was appointed a member of the Policy Planning Council of the US State Department. In 1965 he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Subsequently, he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his books are The United States and the Arab World, The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century, Neighbors and Strangers: the Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs and the just-published Understanding Iraq. Other of his writings can be accessed on www.williampolk.com.
The American military learned from the German army that war gaming is often helpful in seeing what motivates the opponent, what he is likely to do and what effect his doing it would have. So, I will here imagine that I am an Iranian policy planner doing what I used to do for the American government. Here is what I would see and what would I advise.
Reading what American officials are saying in the press I would assume that they are planning to attack the country, abort Iran’s nuclear program and destroy the regime. My job would be to make invading Iran less attractive and offer an alternative that America could accept. First, I would ask intelligence analysts what the risks are.
The first is espionage. The US could attempt through covert action to bring about a coup d’état as it did in Iran in 1952. Iranian security officers would report that the US is now doing this.
The second risk is an aerial attack like Israel made in 1981 on the Osiraq nuclear facility in Iraq. America has given Israel the weapons to carry out such an attack on Iran and itself has bases surrounding Iran from which it could launch its own attacks. But such an attack could probably not succeed with conventional weapons because the most important Iranian sites are deep underground. So, the Americans would probably use nuclear weapons. This would be a catastrophe: even a small nuclear weapon – what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called a “robust nuclear earth penetrator” — would kill thousands, perhaps scores of thousands of Iranians, and throw up about 1 million cubic meters of radioactive soil. [more]