Broad daylight? Western resolve for confronting Iranian nuclear ambitions might be weakening

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Updated: March 25, 2012 8:13AM

The campaign by the United States and Britain against an Israeli strike aimed at Iran’s nuclear program raises a fateful question: Is resolve weakening in the West to prevent one of the globe’s most radical regimes from acquiring the world’s most lethal weapons?

It wasn’t just the very public nature of the admonitions against Israel coming from America’s top military officer and Britain’s foreign secretary, though that was worrisome in itself. The warnings showed, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) put it, that there “clearly is some . . . daylight between America and Israel in our assessment” of the Iranian threat.

It’s hard to see how Tehran can interpret that as anything other than a chink in the West’s solidarity to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The counter-argument is that the Obama administration and Britain simply want more time for sanctions to work. The problem is that it’s difficult to find anyone who believes sanctions can deter Iran’s atomic ambitions. The official line is that no U.S. option is off the table. But it’s not likely that a president so eager to get out of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that he dismissed the advice of his generals on troop withdrawals would order a military operation that could mean a new Mideast war.

The most foreboding part of this episode was the assertion by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor.”

If Iran is a rational actor, the logical conclusion is that, while it would be bad for it to acquire nuclear bombs, Tehran would be constrained by the same rational considerations that applied to the Soviet Union even in the most tense moments of the Cold War.

In other words, the world could live with a nuclear Iran.

But does the “rational actor” argument hold water?

This is a regime of radicals motivated by Islamist revolutionary fever for hegemony in the Middle East and beyond. Some of them are inspired by millennial visions of the apocalyptic return of the 12th Mahdi. Holocaust denial is promoted. Wiping Israel off the map is advocated, as is chasing “the great Satan,” the United States, out of the Middle East. International law is flouted with state-sanctioned mobs taking U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and last November ransacking the British embassy, and Iran plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Let’s not forget Iran is the No. 1 state supporter of terrorism.

Dempsey also said the Israelis “consider Iran to be an existential threat in a way that we have not concluded that Iran is an existential threat.” More daylight.

Whenever I write about Iran, I get emails calling me an “Israel first” advocate and a “traitor.” I suspect these come from the same people who opposed the Iraq war and howled in outrage whenever they imagined someone had questioned their patriotism. Yet they have no problem questioning my patriotism. Ironically, their complaints came at a time when U.S. and Israel policy were the same.

Now there’s a divergence, at least a short-term tactical one: When is the right time to strike Iran’s nuclear program? If not a long-term strategic one: Can we live with a nuclear Iran? The possibility that Tehran might pass on nuclear weaponry to terrorists makes Iran’s nuclear program much more than just an existential threat to Israel.