At at time in our history when so many seem eager to brush aside even the most serious threats to our security, we are honored to have a chance to share the following essay (courtesy of our friends at The Wall Street Journal) penned by a true expert on the great challenge of our time... Former Lt. General, Thomas McInerney...

Print This Page

Military Options in Iran

by Thomas G. McInerney

President Ronald Reagan once famously quipped that his strategy in confronting the Soviet Union in the Cold War was this: “We win, they lose.” Today, we need similarly clear strategy to confront Iran, if we are to successfully counter its aim to drive the U.S. from the Middle East and intimidate Western powers into inaction.

That strategy begins not with the Kabuki Dance now underway at the United Nations. Turtle Bay is usually, and seems destined to be again in this case, a diplomatic sideshow meant more to distract us than to disarm a rogue regime. While we dither the Iranians will acquires nuclear weapons, give support to our enemies in Iraq and undermine our credibility with our European allies. We need to demonstrate now that there are viable military options in dealing with a rogue regime in Tehran and that not all of those options will leave us embroiled in a shooting war with yet another large, sprawling nation in the Middle East.

I believe that our options in dealing with Iran are more numerous and could be more productive than many of our policy makers in Washington have heretofore argued. Let us remember that Iran is a very diverse nation whose population is only 51% Persian. The rest is Azari (24%), Kurdish (10%) and a mix of other ethnic minorities including Turkman, Arab and others. This is a rich environment for unrest and one reason why there were an estimated 4,300 protest demonstrations in 2005 alone. In recent weeks, we may have benefited from another form of protest. Former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asgari appears to have used a trip to Turkey to defected with his family. If he is now talking to Western intelligence officials, we’ll soon know a lot more about the inner workings of the Iranian regime.

And the Middle East itself is no monolithic bloc of support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel, of course, is a natural ally in gaining intelligence and lining up support against the Iranian regime. But Iran is bent on destabilizing and dominating the Arabian Peninsula from Lebanon thru Gaza into Iraq with a stopover in Bahrain. That makes Saudi Arabia as well as Jordan potentially strong—if not overt—allies in countering Iranian influence. The situation has gotten so serious that King Abdullah of Jordan called it a Shia crescent sweeping across Arabian Peninsula and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia summoned Vice President Cheney to Riyadh last fall.

If we demonstrate that we are sufficiently serious in countering Iran, we could form a coalition of the willing with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Gulf States, Turkey, Australia, and those European allies with the courage to consider what their future will look like with a nuclear armed Iran within missile range. No more denial or hoping Iran will negotiate their nuclear weapons development away. The criteria for joining this coalition would be to join in making the following demands of Iran: Stop developing fissile material, submit to unambiguous International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, turn over all al Qaeda operatives within its borders and stop supporting Hezbollah.

The hard part, of course, of forming any meaningful coalition is the consequences of noncompliance. And this case is no different. The obvious punishment for a defiant Iran could be an air strike that aims to destroy its nuclear development facilities and overt support for Iranians working to overthrow their government. This is where the discussion of taking stringent actions against Iran usually breaks down. Few people believe Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations would join a coalition that carried out a military strike and there is little reason to believe many European nations would either.

This is were President Reagan in confronting the Soviets is instructive. The Gipper was elected in 1980 at a time when it appeared inevitable that the Soviet Union would dominate world affairs and just as inevitably that the U.S. was unable to do anything about it short of waging a bloody, military campaign that would have few allies in fighting and not every chance of success. In the end, as they say, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

We have similar options now. One of which is to enact drastic economic sanctions that, oddly, would involve forcing a gasoline crisis in Iran. Tehran is kept afloat on oil revenues, but it has done so at the expense of its oil industry. While it exports large quantities of crude oil, Iran imports 40% of its domestically consumed gasoline and each gallon at the pump is heavily subsidized. Shutting off or even restricting the supply of gasoline flowing into the country would put the regime in a crunch and drive up public discontent without creating a corresponding humanitarian crisis.

We could also apply minimal military pressure without straining our relations with our allies. To date Iran is responsible for killing more that 200 American soldiers and wounding over 635 through the introduction of what the U.S. military calls Explosively Formed Penetrators. These EFPs are shaped charges specifically designed to pierce the hulls of our armored vehicles and are much deadlier than what al Qaeda and run-of-the-mill insurgents could have come up with on their own in Iraq. Enough is enough. We could develop a tit-for-tat strategy for each EFP that is detonated in Iraq that could target nuclear support facilities or Iranian leadership or other targets calculated to put heat on the regime without endangering civilians. Many of these responses may be written off as mere happenstance or accidents in a dangerous part of the world. But even as Iran becomes the unluckiest country in the world, our allies in the region could hardly blame us for a calculated response.

The U.S. also has the capability to assemble a large-scale force capable of an air offensive. This would serve a similar role to Reagan’s military buildup that forced the Soviets into an arms race that they ultimately couldn’t maintain. The immediate strike force could be composed of some 75 stealth attack aircraft—B2s, F117s and the F22s—and some 250 nonstealth F15s, F16s, B52s, B1s and three carrier battle groups. Each carrier battle group is composed of over 120 F18s and cruise missiles galore. We also have over 750 UAVs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in Iraq today. There is more than enough to support a campaign aimed at demonstrating to the Iranian regime that with 48 hours we could hit the nuclear development facilities, command and control facilities, integrated air defenses, Air Force and Navy units and the Shahab 3 missiles using over 2,500 aim points.

Back in Washington, Congress also needs to exercise its responsibility and fund missile defenses, bunker busters and other technologies specifically designed to counter the Iranian regime. Tehran has the world scrambling to respond as it sets about assembling a nuclear weapon that may be more advance than Fat Man and Little Boy, but which are still the product of a military apparatus that is far less technologically advanced than the weapons systems we trust 20-somethings to operate every day in our military. Forcing Iran to expend its resources to keep pace with our technological advances is central to any strategy of defeating them.

We don’t need to drop leaflets from the air spelling it out for the regime in Tehran that if we were to carry out an air campaign it would probably unleashed a new Iranian revolution. But the leadership in Iran has to first come to understand that we neither fear a Hezbollah uprising over such a strike—as Hezbollah is already carrying out terrorist attacks, we’d welcome an open fight on our terms—and nor would we need the main-line coalition ground forces we used in Iraq. Instead, we could simply use the Afghan model of precision airpower supporting covert and indigenous forces.

We’re the United States of America. We don’t threaten any nation. What Iran must come to realize—and we must now decide for ourselves—is that we are in this confrontation to win it.

Lt. Gen. McInerney is retired assistant vice chief of staff of the Air Force & Fox News military analyst.

Ready to take action? Click here to sign up for our free activist alerts, today!