"We now recognize that the Israeli bombing of the Osirik reactor - the most obvious analogy for preemptive action against Iraq - was a long-term counter-proliferation failure."
How so ?
If you mean we ended up invading and occupying Iraq anyway that's a separate question from the effect the Osirak attack had on Iraq's capacity to build an atomic device.
One strike (at best) can only delay a program's timetable and that is what the Israelis accomplished.
Because it both drove underground and accelerated Iraq's nuclear program. Osirik failed. The Iraqis were, unbeknown to the world, on the brink of nuclear capability when the Gulf War broke out.
This is a similar problem we face, apparently, in North Korea. We don't know where the nukes are. I've been told that the locations we would've bombed (when we came close to doing so under the Clinton administration) now appear to have been basically empty.
Concur. It triggered a shift among proliferators from the easily detectable plutonium road to the bomb to the less obvious HEU road, which had been considered technologically more difficult. Unfortunately, this view underestimated the engineering talent available to Pakistan, South Africa, Iraq etc, and also the possibility that a black market in equipment might exist. (Building a bomb requires both centrifuges and subterfuges!)
I have never agreed with the conventional wisdom that Iran was "encircled by American bases" after the invasion of Iraq and therefore in a strategic bind. In Iraq, they surround us, not the other way around, and one could even make a case for an Iranian grand strategy based on SCIRI plus nukes, using the insurgency to checkmate any serious intervention whilst the bomb is built and then the nuclear deterrent to protect the new Shia empire.
Which is a bit tinfoil'n'tongs, but it's more sensible than Bang! Slam! Chalabi!=Peance and Freeance!
I'm sorry, but I don't find this unicausal reasoning as impressive as either of you gentlemen.
If North Korea and Pakistan could both implement parallel programs to develop nukes without anyone bombing Pyongyang or Islamabad, then it is safe to assume Saddam Hussein could have figured that out as well. This is a man, after all, who had programs to weaponize Aflatoxin and more obscure substances. Osirak was not the origin of Saddam's drive to acquire WMDs but an early reaction to it. The only way to guarantee the end to such ambitions was to remove the regime.
As I said earlier, the most that an Osirak attack could do, in the best-case scenario, is delay a program's timetable by degrading what nuclear infrastructure that a regime has built. I have neither seen nor read any evidence that the Israelis ever believed otherwise that their attack was a magic bullet that would permanently stop Saddam's nuclear program. Dan's yardstick for success here would rate anything short of a preemptive nuclear attack on Iraq as a failure.
And finally, had Osirak *not* happened, Saddam having a bomb by 1991 would have been far likelier.
Mark: To be clear, I am not making an argument either way about the justifications for invading Iraq; rather, we seem to be discussing one sub-argument of three claims I made about why it wasn't appropriate to draw inferences about the "weak-kneed" nature of the Europeans from their current failure to conclude successful negotiations with Iran.
Fair enough, we were arguing past one another to some degree.
The Europeans, with some reason during the Khatami era, believed that Iran might be bribed into putting substntial brakes on their nuclear ambitions. The current president of Iran has dispelled all such illusions.
Even Rafsanjani and Khameini, it must be said, while sharing a Khomeinist hatred of the West and the desire for Iran to possess nuclear weapons, were not itching to provoke a war with Israel and/or the United States. Or even to push the EU to the point of UNSC referral.
"The Iraqis were, unbeknown to the world, on the brink of nuclear capability when the Gulf War broke out."
Is this true? As far as I can tell, this was a talking point throughout most of the 90s and the Bush presidency, used to justify pre-emptive action as far as Iraq was concerned. But my understanding is that its far from a fact, that no convincing evidence has ever been provided for it, and that it was disputed at the time by many experts, for example,
http://www.thebulletin.org/
artic...r91albright_015
Europeans too soft, ineffectual and feminized (and Islamized)? If their diplomacy fails, as now seems likely, and if they then refuse to turn from diplomatic dialog to something more coercive and less dialogical, then the charge should stick.
Americans too hard, gung-ho, and macho? If the British Brigadier (featured a few days ago on the Duck) is right, then the US military is failing in Iraq because it is too hard, gung-ho, and macho. And the mess in the Iraq war makes it much more difficult to deal with Iran.
Moral of the story: better to be neither feminized nor macho, neither too hard nor too soft. Better to be neither from Mars nor from Venus, but from planet Earth.
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