Iran: Capabilities vs. Intentions
Recent events in Iran continue to be disturbing. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared that he has no interest in stopping his program to enrich uranium, which is seen as a prerequisite for producing nuclear weapons. Various United Nations Atomic Energy Agency reports make it appear likely that the Iranian program is intended to produce weapons rather than reactor fuel; but even a program for reactor fuel could be a first step toward producing plutonium for bombs. Nuclear weapons, moreover, seem to be the only rational purpose for the expensive ballistic-missile program Iran is currently pursuing. The Israelis have claimed that Iran has bought a new North Korean single-stage missile, BM-25, with a range of 2,500 kilometers, sufficient to reach targets in Europe (and, of course, in Israel).
All of this can be read as indications of capabilities rather than intentions. Iran has spent heavily on a parallel military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which it also uses to suppress dissent internally. Presumably any nuclear-armed missiles would be entrusted to the Guards rather than to the regular Iranian armed forces.
But the current Iranian president has also talked about his intentions. Not only has he said quite publicly that Israel should be obliterated, but also that the United States should be destroyed. To what extent is all of that rhetoric? It has been suggested, too, that Ahmadinejad believes himself to be divinely inspired, in line with a particularly messianic version of Shi'a Islam. He is said to imagine that he has a special mission to extend Shi'a Islam throughout the world. Meanwhile, he is aware that Western popular culture has penetrated deeply into the younger segment of the Iranian population. As Iran urbanizes, the segment that will unquestioningly follow the dictates of the mullahs, which also goes into organizations such as the Revolutionary Guards, may be shrinking.
Other reports indicate that the president was personally involved in the formation and indoctrination of the Basij, the suicide formations used during the Iran-Iraq War for purposes such as clearing minefields. Told that they were about to enter Paradise, the Basij apparently willingly marched through supposed minefields and carried out human-wave attacks. President Ahmadinejad currently presses for extension of what he calls the Basij spirit throughout Iran, in opposition to Western values. Other Iranians have said that a single nuclear weapon would wipe out most of Israel, whereas Iran could afford to take the few hundred thousand casualties that might result from a retaliatory strike. If Ahmadinejad's words are to be taken seriously, he does not care if Iran is wiped out altogether in a retaliatory strike-or perhaps he believes that Allah would not allow such a contingency. In either case, he may not be open to our ideas of deterrence.
What are we to make of all this? If claims regarding Ahmadinejad's logic and motivation are correct, then there is little point in negotiating with him or, for that matter, with anyone in the current Iranian regime. What we actually see, however, is intense interest abroad in achieving some negotiated end to the problem. The assumption is that the West can impose some sort of pressure that will cause the Iranians to change their position, or else that the West can offer something the Iranians want so badly that they will withdraw from their nuclear position. Underlying these assumptions is utter disbelief that Ahmadinejad and the other Iranians mean what they say-that, in our terms, they are entirely mad.
There is also the question of whether Ahmadinejad is the problem, or whether he is merely a more explicit spokesman for views that are widely accepted and applauded within the Iranian leadership. It appears that the Iranian regime has been quite efficient in maintaining its rule using secret police and terror; the recent history of Iranian politics is the failure of electoral politics to budge the regime.
Thus, a surgical attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is unlikely to provide a quick solution to the problem. An initial attack may indeed wipe out Iranian nuclear potential for the present, but it will also probably preclude any chance of regime change. Iran is a largely homogeneous country with a proud past. A Western attack would confirm the mullahs' view that the West is the enemy. Shi'a Muslims outside Iran may be inclined to agree. They may well make Iraq entirely untenable, and thus reverse the benefits the West gained from invading that country. It may be, then, that any decision for war against Iran will be a decision for an extended and costly operation. That may still be worthwhile, but it should not be imagined as a quick and inexpensive option.
The Europeans pressing for negotiations and sanctions may assume that Ahmadinejad and other Iranians are part of the same mental world as theirs, that they realize atomic warfare of any sort is madness, and that they are interested in marginal changes to their situation. If they are correct, then they are pursuing the right course. If they are wrong, then are left with few options.
Unfortunately none of the evidence is easy to read because each item can be read in alternative ways. Is Ahmadinejad mad, by our reckoning, or is he a master poker player? Did the Ayatollah Khomeini introduce a kind of extreme death wish into Iranian thinking, or was he trying to balance Iraqi material superiority with human fanatics? Is all the talk about Basij spirit now a way of evading responsibility for a million dead Iranians, or is it current fantasy? How much does the current regime worry about responsibility for the way it fought what was, in any case, a defensive war? How many Iranians should now be asked to die for their rulers' rhetoric?
Taiwan Develops New Weapons
In the war of nerves between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Taiwanese are beginning to reveal weapons that may help them neutralize the offensive build-up across the Taiwan Strait. A new air-launched GPS-guided Wan Chien cruise missile, with a range of 600 kilometers, has recently been tested. It can follow an evasive path near its target, and it carries bomblets to destroy airfields or missile bases. The 500kilogram (1,100 pounds) Wan Chien is to be deployed on board fighters. Work began in 1999, and was spurred by a 2002 U.S. rejection of a Taiwanese request for JDAM guided bombs (the Taiwanese were told that the joint standoff weapon (JSOW) glide missile would be more useful for them; Wan Chien has about nine times the range of JSOW).
CSIST, which developed Wan Chien, has developed several other offensive weapons that are now being revealed: the Hsiung Feng IIE surface-to-surface cruise missile (range 600 kilometers, now being deployed, with 100 produced in the initial batch); the Hsiung Feng III supersonic antiship missile (to be deployed in 2007 on board the Kidd-class destroyers and Perry-class frigates); and the Tien Kung ballistic missile, derived from the Tien Kung antiaircraft missile (range 600 kilometers, already being mass-produced and deployed). There is also an anti-radar version of the standard Taiwanese long-range air-to-air missile (range 100 kilometers).
From a Taiwanese perspective, an important point about this program is that it is all indigenous. The United States cannot shut it down in response to pressure from Beijing. Although the current U.S. administration is clearly sympathetic to Taiwan, that may not be true of the next. The strong economic relationship between the PRC and the United States gives, or may seem to give, Beijing considerable leverage, and the Taiwanese are well aware of that. They may also feel that the revelation of their home-grown weapons will make it far easier for the United States to sell them equivalents. That may have been true of Harpoon, which was sold after the Hsing Feng II antiship missile emerged, and it may also apply to AMRAAM-and now to weapons such as the joint air-to-surface standoff missile or Tomahawk.
Taiwan is not alone in this view. Several Israeli weapons, such as Gabriel III and IV (long-range antiship missile) and Derby (active radar air-to-air missile), can be interpreted as attempts to prove that U.S. sales rejections were pointless because equivalents could be home-grown. When the United States did export the weapons, they were much less expensive than the home-grown equivalents, which do not appear to have been produced in quantity.
On the other hand, South Korea did receive Harpoon and yet went ahead with an apparently equivalent weapon, announced last year. In its case the motive seems to have been to help build an indigenous arms industry, which is ultimately to compete for the world market. In this, South Korea followed a classic pattern, initially buying or license-producing foreign equipment, but then going it alone.
For that matter, much the same can be said of China, whose industry began with license production of a wide array of Soviet prototypes. The difference in the Chinese case was that the Russians left in 1960-62, at which time the Chinese were left without advanced sellers happy to replace them. They began to reverse-engineer the later Soviet equipment, some of which they obtained when the Russians shipped it to Vietnam through China. Only in the late 1970s, with the rapprochement with the United States, were NATO countries encouraged to sell modern equipment to China. Such exports largely ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, but by that time the Chinese had developed the basis for their modern military industries. Moreover, they kept receiving dual-use equipment. Finally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. the Russians were once again willing suppliers, the old Sino-Soviet split having been shelved. The Chinese story, incidentally, would seem to explain the Taiwanese decision favoring home-grown weapons: today's supplier may lose interest rather suddenly.