http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425107/print Why the Iran Deal Ensures War
The Iran agreement will remake the Middle East — for the worse.
By Victor Davis Hanson — October 6, 2015
There are several scenarios the Obama administration may be entertaining as it pursues its diplomacy in the Middle East. It may believe that the new agreement with Iran will lead to “engagement” with reform-minded theocrats. The idea is that this will insidiously liberalize the regime, empower a younger generation of pro-Western reformers, and put the theocracy on “an arc of history” back into the “family of nations.” Or perhaps an Obama-inspired second green revolution will overthrow the regime, and we will see a Euro-socialist Iranian republic renounce nuclear weapons — or at least, having inherited custodianship of the existing arsenal, oversee it in the fashion of democratic Israel or France.
Alternatively, the administration may imagine that a Shiite Axis — Iran, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas — empowered by Putin’s Russia, will balance the region, either, strategically, convincing the Sunni monarchies to accept the new balance of power, or, morally, ensuring that formerly outlaw anti-American radical regimes find parity with the pro-American conservative and right-wing regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies. Or, less concretely, the United States may simply wish to abdicate the Middle East and let the players there all fight it out, reentering when the players are worn out and defeated.
All these scenarios are probably fantasies. In truth, the deal will make the world a much more dangerous place. Here are five reasons why.
I. How to Negotiate a Bomb
The U.S. has now established an official blueprint on how to get nuclear weapons without being relegated to pariah status. Iran, unlike Pakistan and North Korea, is not renegading its way to nuclear weapons, but is negotiating its pathway with the approval of the West. Yet Iran’s government is just as unhinged as those of the last two nuclear newcomers, is more centrally positioned in the Middle East, and has far more financial resources, given its singular reserves of natural gas and oil. Other would-be nuclear nations will make the necessary adjustments, asking for similar sorts of American-backed supposed non-proliferation protocols, as they shadow Iran step by step into nuclear readiness. The combination of Iran’s transition to nuclear status under the aegis of the U.S., and the Obama administration’s simultaneous renunciation of America’s prior Middle East role, amounts to a one-two punch to the Sunni world, which will assume that neither conventional arsenals nor American guardianship will deter Iran. Again, the Sunni nations will eventually make the necessary nuclear adjustments in the manner that worked for Iran. A nuclear Middle East will be the bastard child of this treaty.
II. The Logic of Israel
Conventional wisdom assures us that the Iranian nuclear facilities cannot be completely destroyed militarily. Any attempt to do so supposedly would fail to eliminate all the hidden and fortified enrichment plants and would only elicit both an Iranian conventional response and an asymmetrical terrorist response. Thus, Israel, for example, would not be so foolish as to try. Perhaps. But conventional wisdom does not always work in the Middle East in general, and in particular not for Israel, which has no margin for error, given its size and location. Instead, the impossible may in truth become the most likely. Israelis remember what the world’s assurances and civilized veneer got their ancestors the last time a head of state talked about eliminating Jews.
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