A preventive war against Iran would likely feature a large-scale aerial attack that had the aim of setting back Iran's nuclear program and destroying other aspects of its military capability. The U.S. government has given consideration to other options, ranging from stepping up assistance to groups aiming to overthrow the Iranian regime to a full-scale invasion by American ground forces. However, the likely insufficiency of the one and the prohibitive costs of the other make an aerial assault the most probable course of action, were the decision made to use force against Iran.

The assumption that the Iranian regime would be weakened by such an attack is almost certainly wrong. Such an attack on Iranian national territory would rather seem calculated to rally support for the regime and to enable it to demand great sacrifices of the population to carry on a long struggle with the United States. Already, Ahmadinejad's position has been strengthened by the sense that legitimate Iranian national interests are under attack from abroad; an actual attack could not fail to have the same effect in spades. Domestic unanimity among the American people was the result following the attacks of Pearl Harbor and of 9/11, and the phenomenon holds even when an unpopular regime suffers a surprise attack--witness the effect of the 1941 German invasion on Stalin's Russia. The only plausible forecast is that a U.S. attack would stiffen Iran's spine rather than break its back.

War carries with it so many unknowns that it is difficult and hazardous to speculate on its immediate consequences, to say nothing of its long-term effects. But clearly a U.S. attack has the potential to make untenable the American position in Iraq. The Shi'a groups that the United States has brought to power all enjoy close ties to the Iranian regime, and the Iraqi Shi'a would be far more likely to sympathize with victims of an aerial assault than with its perpetrators (especially if, as is probable, the attack were attended by significant civilian casualties). A vast Shi'a insurgency, aided and supplemented by Iranian forces, could easily result from a U.S. preventive war. Just as the Iraqi war compromised the ability of the United States to successfully complete its mission in Afghanistan, so an Iranian war would likely compromise the U.S. position in Iraq. Indeed, given Iranian ties to various Afghani warlords, the prospect of a vast arc of instability extending from Afghanistan to Iraq seems a very likely consequence of an American preventive war.

It is the effect on the geography of oil production and on world oil prices that is likely to be of most immediate concern to the American people. The price at the pump is, oddly, for Americans a sort of litmus test for the success of a presidential administration, and woe to those--like Jimmy Carter and, now, George W. Bush--who have the misfortune to rule in an era of rising prices. How high oil prices would rise, and how long they would remain in the stratosphere, is a function of how much and for how long production capacity is shut down. Here, too, there are a host of imponderables. Would the Iranians attempt a closure of the Straits of Hormuz, and could the U.S. Navy thwart such an attempt if made? Would Saudi production be partially disabled, either because of Iranian missile strikes or the long awaited internal revolution by Shi'a oil field workers in the Saudi Eastern Provinces? Would Iran's four-million-barrel-per-day production be taken off the market?

Various probabilities might be assigned to each of these scenarios, but the truth is that we cannot know the answer in advance. At a minimum, however, the present tightness in world oil markets creates the decent possibility of an explosive rise in oil prices, above and beyond the $150 per barrel price often bruited about--a development that could easily threaten the stability of the world financial system. That system--and the American economy--is beset with a range of imbalances that make it susceptible to crisis even in the absence of an external geopolitical shock. The litany of ills is familiar and includes the slow bleed of the dollar and growing doubts that it can function much longer as a reserve currency, a huge and expanding current account deficit now running at some $800 billion a year, a budget deficit much worse than the official figures let on, and an unbalanced U.S. economic recovery heavily dependent on low interest rates.

Much of the U.S. economic recovery from the downturn experienced after the crash of the Nasdaq and the 9/11 attacks has been centered on the housing sector and the inflated prices that arose when the Federal Reserve injected massive amounts of liquidity into the system by bringing short-term interest rates down to very low levels. This has made the economy much more vulnerable than it was even in the 1970s to the rising interest rates that explosive spikes in the oil price would surely bring. The stagflation of the 1970s, captured in Ronald Reagan's "misery index", may be in the cards even without an Iranian war; it is a virtual certainty with it. Theoretically, it is undoubtedly true that the United States could afford a much higher level of military expenditure. Practically, however, the evidence indicates that higher levels of military spending are palatable to the public only on the condition that they are paid for through deficit financing and not higher taxes.

Above and beyond these tangible consequences is the deepening of the legitimacy crisis that has bedeviled American power in the last several years. That crisis has been centered on uses of force that the rest of the world has deemed both reckless and unilateral; a preventive war against Iran would confirm the diagnosis of the harshest critics--that the United States is an out-of-control imperial power that has lost its sense of restraint. Apart from a few states, like Japan, that have thrown in with the United States and seem determined to support it regardless, world public opinion would undoubtedly run decisively against the U.S. action. Even in Britain, whose support was so important in the Iraq war, public opinion would undoubtedly be hostile. A straw in the wind was former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's characterization of such a preventive attack as "inconceivable." The neoconservative assumption that such hostility can be safely neglected strains credulity.

Nor can American domestic support be taken for granted, especially if, as is probable, the war were to go on for a long time. It may be that public opinion could be brought to support the war initially. The public is clearly susceptible to the demagogic prophecies that would allegedly ensue from the Iranian possession of nuclear weapons. Once the true costs of the war became apparent, however, public support would probably falter. The public would almost certainly oppose the "solution" that some neoconservatives have favored--a ground invasion of Iran that would sweep away the regime--for this would require the return of conscription and the mobilization of resources on a scale far beyond anything now contemplated. Finding itself committed to a protracted war that the United States did not know how to win but could not afford to lose, the public might well turn against the Iran war, as they have turned against the "war of choice" against Iraq.

When Karl von Clausewitz observed that defense was the stronger form of warfare, he was not thinking of public opinion, but today it is precisely the importance of public opinion that gives defensive war a decisive edge over offensive war. This applies not only to the United States but also to Iran; not only to the participants in a conflict but also to the bystanders who judge of its rights and wrongs, its expediency or recklessness. The twentieth century's judgment that aggressive war counted among the great crimes of humanity--a judgment registered in the United Nations charter and in repeated declarations of American statesmen--bears not only on the morality but on the expediency of preventive war. Wars of choice cannot sustain public support if things go badly, as in war they often do, whereas wars that are begun defensively and from necessity fortify public support behind a regime and its cause. It is not a contradiction, but a reflection of the character of contemporary warfare, to insist that a war of aggression undertaken by Iran would risk the fall of the regime, whereas a war of aggression undertaken by the United States against Iran would strengthen it.1

A Grand Bargain?

In late May 2006, the United States dropped its previous insistence on refusing negotiations with Iran and offered to join in the negotiations led by the EU-3 powers (Britain, France and Germany) if Iran suspended its enrichment activities. China and Russia were persuaded to embrace a proposal, presented by EU negotiator Javier Solana, that demanded an end to enrichment on Iranian territory and offered Iran in return a program of light-water nuclear reactors together with various economic incentives, including Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization. Conspicuously missing from the proposal was a willingness on the part of the United States to either open diplomatic relations with Iran or offer security guarantees against a preventive U.S. attack. Though force was to remain an option if diplomacy failed, security guarantees, said Secretary Rice, are "not on the table."

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