In a pre-Christmas New York Times op-ed, Alan Kuperman wrote about the potential downside to a U.S.-led preventive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities:
As for knocking out its nuclear plants, admittedly, aerial bombing might not work. Some Iranian facilities are buried too deeply to destroy from the air. There may also be sites that American intelligence is unaware of. And military action could backfire in various ways, including by undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region.
However, Kuperman, undeterred by his own relevant points, drew a surprisingly nonsensical lesson from history:
But history suggests that military strikes could work. Israel’s 1981 attack on the nearly finished Osirak reactor prevented Iraq’s rapid acquisition of a plutonium-based nuclear weapon and compelled it to pursue a more gradual, uranium-based bomb program. A decade later, the Persian Gulf war uncovered and enabled the destruction of that uranium initiative, which finally deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons (a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion). Analogously, Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The lesson of Osirak is at best more complex, at worst the complete opposite of what Kuperman argues. The more likely relevant Osirak lesson is that a preventive strike on nuclear facilities will give the victim state an incentive to push its program underground and accelerate its march to nuclear capability. This happened with Iraq after 1981. Iran’s program remains shrouded somewhat in secrecy and, in the case of the Natanz plant, buried beneath several feet of concrete specifically to protect it from Osirak style attacks. Also, as Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt wrote in 2008, “it seems unlikely that the United States could now carry out a strike that would lay the groundwork for effective multilateral post-strike diplomacy or subsequent military action,” a point that remains relevant today.
Since Kuperman repeatedly points out that Iran is “violating international law” by refusing to halt uranium enrichment, “despite several United Nations Security Council Resolutions demanding such a moratorium,” it might be worth reviewing the Security Council’s reaction to Israel’s Osirak strike. In June 1981, the U.S. joined the rest of the Security Council in unanimously passing Resolution 487, which “Strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct,” “Calls upon Israel to refrain in the future from any such acts or threats thereof,” and “Considers that Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered, responsibility for which has been acknowledged by Israel,” among other things.
Kuperman might have written a more convincing argument had he grappled more comprehensively with these issues.
