What does Gates fear most about Iran?
The weekend’s big news was the New York Times leak of some details from Defense Secretary Robert Gates‘s January memo to James Jones, expressing Gates’s concern that the Obama administration didn’t have an adequate long-range policy for dealing with Iran and the consequences of its nuclear program. My colleagues at Foreign Policy (Blake Hounshell, Daniel Drezner, and Peter Feaver) have written their analyses of the Gates memo, all of which I recommend reading.
We already know that neither the Bush nor Obama administrations have gained any traction with this issue. According the NYT article, “the United States would ensure that Iran would not ‘acquire a nuclear capability.'” None of the policy options aimed at preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power have much chance of success. Protected by China and probably Russia, the UN Security Council will not pass economic sanctions that will change the decision calculus in Tehran. Iran’s mullahs appear to have crushed the Green movement, so regime change appears off the table. But those hoping for relief through a new government forget that Iran’s nuclear program is very popular inside Iran; a new government is very likely to continue the program. Finally, even if some deal were to lead to an expansion of IAEA inspections, events from the past few decades have soiled the reputation of inspectors to thwart the aims of determined proliferators. Gates was at the top levels of the CIA and National Security Council when both his agency and the IAEA missed Iraq’s nuclear progress in the late 1980s. Gross intelligence errors the other way followed 10-15 years later. As a career intelligence officer, Gates knows all too well the fallibility of that profession.
Starting with his service on the Iraq Study Group and leading up to the present, Gates no doubt believes his job is to extract the U.S. military from Iraq and Afghanistan under conditions resembling success. For him, this is undoubtedly a satisfying way to end a long career in government. Seeing how all other courses of action regarding Iran are doomed to fail, his January memo to Jones may have emerged from a fear that he and his department would soon be called on to execute “the last resort” against Iran, even when everyone knows that an air campaign would not be decisive but would result in another open-ended entanglement.
Having worked so hard to clean up the other messes, Gates undoubtedly doesn’t want to end his career having ordered the start of another. Did his memo help avoid that? Maybe Gates will instead arrange his retirement before “the last resort” arrives on his desk.
