Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East Strategic Contest (Cass Contemporary Security Studies)

WEAPONS PROLIFERATION AND WAR IN THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST This book examines the statecraft that relies on weapons of m...

Author: Richard L. Russell

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WEAPONS PROLIFERATION AND WAR IN THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST

This book examines the statecraft that relies on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles as strategic instruments to achieve policy objectives in the greater Middle East region. As intense power politics fuel the demand for WMD among nation-states, it is no accident that the region has now become a global hotspot for the challenges posed by WMD. This volume dissects the strategic rivalries that riddle the Middle East and South Asia to set the stage for examining the uses and limitations of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles as instruments of deterrence and war fighting. It then pays particularly close attention to the strategic rationale behind Iran’s pursuit of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as well as the strategic consequences for the region should Tehran acquire a nuclear weapons capability. The study also probes China’s behind-the-scenes aid and abetment of WMD and ballistic missile programs in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. Contemporary nuclear weapons proliferation is unlikely to lead to the strategic stability that characterized the cold war and some nation-states in the greater Middle East could rationally come to view nuclear weapons as usable instruments of war. This book culminates in recommendations for American and international statecraft to dampen and counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and to reduce the magnitude of destruction should war again erupt in this volatile region. This book will be essential reading for scholars and observers of strategic studies, arms control, foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics. Richard L. Russell is a professor at the National Defense University. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the Security Studies Program and a research associate in the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. He has served as a political-military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

CASS CONTEMPORARY SECURITY STUDIES NATO’S SECRET ARMY: OPERATION GLADIO AND TERRORISM IN WESTERN EUROPE Daniel Ganser THE US, NATO AND MILITARY BURDEN-SHARING Peter Kent Forster and Stephen J. Cimbala RUSSIAN GOVERNANCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: GEO-STRATEGY, GEOPOLITICS AND NEW GOVERNANCE Irina Isakova THE FOREIGN OFFICE AND FINLAND 1938–1940: DIPLOMATIC SIDESHOW Craig Gerrard RETHINKING THE NATURE OF WAR Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom (eds.) PERCEPTION AND REALITY IN THE MODERN YUGOSLAV CONFLICT: MYTH, FALSEHOOD AND DECEIT 1991–1995 Brendan O’Shea THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PEACEBUILDING IN POST-DAYTON BOSNIA Tim Donais THE DISTRACTED EAGLE: THE RIFT BETWEEN AMERICA AND OLD EUROPE Peter H. Merkl THE IRAQ WAR: EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS Jan Hallenberg and Håkan Karlsson (eds.) STRATEGIC CONTEST: WEAPONS PROLIFERATION AND WAR IN THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST Richard L. Russell

WEAPONS PROLIFERATION AND WAR IN THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST Strategic Contest

Richard L. Russell

First published 2005 By Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Richard L. Russell Typeset in Times by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Russell, Richard L., 1961– Weapons proliferation and war in the greater Middle East: strategic contest / Richard L. Russell. p. cm.—(Contemporary security studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Middle East—Strategic aspects. 2. Arms transfers—Middle East. 3. Nuclear weapons—Middle East. 4. United States— Military policy. 5. World politics—1995–2005. I. Title. Series: Cass contemporary security studies series. UA832.R87 2005 355.02′17′0956—dc22 2004026832 ISBN 0–415–36586–4

FOR OUR SONS, DANIEL AND RYAN May they and their children live in a less dangerous world.

The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible. Here the scholar and the charlatan part company. Hans J. Morgenthau To the question of whether war is inevitable, romanticism answers “yes” and idealism “no.” Realism doesn’t answer but changes the subject, insisting that neither war nor peace is inevitable but that continuing rivalry and competition intermingled with cooperation are the normal condition in political relations among states. Kenneth W. Thompson

CONTENTS

viii

Acknowledgments 1 Power politics: the master-key for strategic wisdom

1

2 The strategic landscape: regional struggles for power

15

3 Gulf lessons: chemical weapons deterrence and war fighting

33

4 Swords and shields: ballistic missiles and defenses

58

5 Iran in Iraq’s shadow: Tehran’s nuclear weapons bid

71

6 Fallout from Iran’s nuclear weapons

89

7 Desert realists: Saudi strategy and nuclear weapons

108

8 China’s strategic prongs: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan

120

9 Why nuclear weapons will not prevent major war

136

10 Instruments for statecraft: intelligence, diplomacy, and force

151 169 193 206

Notes Selected bibliography Index

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a milestone in a several-year trek thinking about the problems of politics, weapons of mass destruction, and war. Along the way, I have accumulated numerous debts. The intellectual foundation for the book was laid before my appointment as professor of national security affairs at the National Defense University’s Near East–South Asia (NESA) Center for Strategic Studies. My work at the NESA Center, though, has honed my appreciation for the power politics that litter the region, where the problems of politics and weapons are the most pronounced and acute in the globe. The Center’s principal mission is to provide national security seminars to senior officers and diplomats in the region to give them a sense of current strategic debates and thinking in the United States and to help lift the fog of ignorance and misperception that increasingly separates the United States from the region. It would be overly idealistic to assume that these seminars alone would be sufficient to narrow the intellectual and political gaps between the United States and the region, a gap that is immense, particularly in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. Nevertheless, the NESA Center serves as a tool of realistic statecraft to foster constructive security ties between the United States and regional partners based on clear articulations of interests and power. NESA seminar discussions have for me been an invaluable opportunity to gain first-hand insight into strategic thinking – or in many instances, the lack thereof – in the region. I am grateful for the privilege of being able to labor in a fascinating setting, equidistant between the worlds of academe and policy. In the interests of fair disclosure, the reader should be aware that this book was submitted to pre-publication security reviews at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DOD). These reviews were conducted to ensure that the author was not inadvertently disclosing classified information that he had come by in his past career as a political-military analyst at CIA or currently as a professor at the National Defense University. Neither CIA nor DOD requested any changes in the manuscript. The reader should also be aware that the views expressed in this book are those of the viii

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author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US government. In the course of thinking about the challenges posed by war and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, I have published several articles from which I have drawn for this study. I am indebted to several journals for permitting me to take liberally from my previously published articles. I wish to thank the following: Survival for permission to use “A Saudi Nuclear Option?” published in its summer 2001 volume; Orbis for granting permission to use “Swords and Shields: Ballistic Missiles and Defenses in the Middle East and South Asia,” which appeared in its summer 2002 volume; Parameters for permission to use “Iran in Iraq’s Shadow: Dealing with Tehran’s Nuclear Weapons Bid,” which was published in the autumn 2004 volume; and The Journal of Strategic Studies for use of “The Nuclear Peace Fallacy: How Deterrence Can Fail,” which appeared in the March 2003 volume. Parenthetically, The Journal of Strategic Studies may be found at http://www.tandf.co.uk. These works are the intellectual cornerstones for several chapters in this book. I could not have labored without the aid and abetment of colleagues and friends. I thank Dana Allin, Trudy Kuehner, and Joe Maiolo, the managing editors of distinguished journals who patiently coached me along in my efforts to publish earlier versions of the thinking contained in this book. I especially appreciate the attention that Robert Taylor and Greg Todd have given my work over several years. My thanks also go to Andrew Humphrys, Routledge’s Military and Strategic Studies Editor, who took an interest in this project, Marjorie Francois, Routledge’s Military and Strategic Studies Editorial Assistant, for her help in putting the book together, as well as to two anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable and constructive criticisms of an earlier draft. I am indebted to Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson, the chairs of The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s project on Iran. The project germinated the intellectual seeds for chapters 5 and 6. I thank my former NESA Center colleague Ray Takeyh for his tutelage in Iranian affairs. Also, a large thanks goes to my mentor and friend Kenneth Thompson who has long schooled me in the classical form of political realism, a flash of whose wisdom is captured in this book’s epigraphs. As was the case with my first book, I am most indebted to my wife Lilian. She is blessed with an abundance of common sense that makes up for my deficit on this score. Common sense is, or at least should be, a cornerstone of sound scholarship and strategy and over the course of several years Lilian has patiently and consistently fielded questions on power, politics, and policy prefaced with the words, “What do you think about . . .?” Her common sense is littered throughout these pages, but is probably reflected to a greater extent in the ideas abandoned to the wastebasket never to be published. Lilian and I live and work in the Washington, DC area and the events of 11 September 2001 with the attack on the Pentagon and plans to attack the White House or ix

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Capitol Hill – disrupted only by the courage of a handful of heroes – affected us deeply. Since that fateful day, on many occasions we have whispered to one another in unsuccessful attempts to be out of earshot from our young sons Daniel and Ryan, “What kind of world are we raising our children in?” This book is a modest attempt to come to grips with this question in hopes of contributing to a prudent national security strategy for dealing with profound challenges and dangers facing the United States and the world at large. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permissions to reprint from the following: Richard L. Russell, “A Saudi Nuclear Option?” Survival 43(2; Summer): 69–79. Copyright © 2001 by The International Institute for Strategic Studies. Richard L. Russell, “Swords and Shields: Ballistic Missiles and Defenses in the Middle East and South Asia,” Orbis 46(3; Summer). Copyright © 2002 by The Foreign Policy Research Institute. Richard L. Russell, “The Nuclear Peace Fallacy: How Deterrence Can Fail,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 26(1; March). Copyright © 2003 by Frank Cass. Richard L. Russell, “Iran in Iraq’s Shadow: Dealing with Tehran’s Nuclear Weapons Bid,” Parameters (Autumn 2004). Copyright © 2004 by The US Army War College.

x

1 POWER POLITICS The master-key for strategic wisdom

How are we to understand the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the dangers posed by their acquisition and use in the twenty-first century? A great deal of post-cold war discussion and debate in the United States has focused on the threat to international security posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The United States today happily lacks a major nation-state competitor in the international system that focuses American attention as the Soviet Union had during the cold war. The absence of a “clear and present danger” in the form of a nation-state, though, inhibits the development of a grand strategy analogous to that of containment. With the end of the cold war in the last century, many observers and commentators seized on the counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the intellectual centerpiece that would replace the organizing cold war concept of containment in American national security policy. For many, countering the proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is the missing piece that completes the mosaic of post-cold war American national security strategy. The events of 11 September 2001 raised alarm that transnational actors such as terrorist groups like al-Qaeda would obtain and use weapons of mass destruction against the United States. Many rightly fear that sub-state actors would be less sensitive to an American nuclear and conventional deterrent because they lack the resources of nation-states that could be held at risk to retaliatory measures. Americans were shocked at the murder of 3,000 innocent civilians and the massive destruction of the World Trade Center and the major damage inflicted on the Pentagon and in country fields in Pennsylvania. The worry that al-Qaeda will eventually launch another spectacular assault on the United States is a source of constant stress, particularly those Americans who live and work in major metropolitan areas such as New York and Washington, which no doubt remain high priority targets for remnants of al-Qaeda. The lesson that many are drawing from this tragic sequence of events is that international terrorist organizations, particularly if armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear 1

P OW E R P O L I T I C S

weapons – are the most formidable threat to international stability. That concern has been heightened by the anthrax scare in the American postal system and revelations made during the Afghan campaign that al-Qaeda had sought chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. Osama bin Laden even received briefings from two retired Pakistani scientists on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in August 2001.1 Indeed, the expertise and technological thresholds for producing chemical, biological, and radiological weapons in limited quantities are sufficiently low that they are likely to be within reach of terrorist organizations. While the technological and industrial requirements for the production of nuclear weapons is beyond their reach, terrorist organizations could clandestinely purchase such weapons on the international black market from large and poorly guarded Russian nuclear weapons stocks or from a nation-state with a clandestine program such as Pakistan, North Korea, or eventually Iran and Saudi Arabia. While there can be no gainsaying these potential dangers in the twentyfirst century, nation-states are more likely than terrorist groups to acquire the weapons of mass destruction and delivery means that pose the greatest dangers to American interests and citizens in the coming decades. The terrorist threat, though formidable, must be put into perspective. Al-Qaeda, even if armed with biological or chemical weapons, could not threaten the United States with its annihilation. Terrorist groups will probably lack the robust weapons of mass destruction and delivery means necessary to threaten the United States with its political, military, and economic destruction. On the other hand, nation-states will have the potential political, military, and economic resources needed to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons as well as the military infrastructure needed to support WMD delivery vehicles such as ballistic and cruise missiles and aircraft. While terrorist groups might only be able to acquire and maintain limited stores of WMD, nation-states could produce them on massive scales as well as mount them on delivery systems that would more readily hold American troops, citizens, and territory at risk than covert terrorist operations. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems among nation-states is a problem of uneven global proportions. The United States and Russia have eased their competition in nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles with an agreement to reduce their strategic nuclear forces to about 3,000 warheads each. In sub-Sahara Africa and Latin America the nuclear weapons proliferation race fortunately abated with South Africa, Brazil and Argentina opting to forgo their nuclear weapons programs for political and economic reasons. Although the American–Russian, African, and Latin American competitions have eased, a new competition is heating up in Asia where China is modernizing its strategic nuclear forces and North Korea is suspected of harboring nuclear weapons. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are watching developments in China and North Korea quite closely 2


and are likely to feel increasing pressure toward developing their own deterrent postures.

WMD in the greater Middle East The problems posed by weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems are most acute in the Middle East and South Asia. The region is increasingly littered with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, all of which are shrouded in nation-state secrecy. Many states in the region pay little heed to the major international treaties and arrangements designed to curtail the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or the Chemical Weapons and Biological Weapons Conventions. The Middle East and South Asia region, moreover, has experienced the use of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles in combat. Many political conflicts in the region are unsettled, which heightens the chances that weapons of mass destruction will again be used in warfare. In the not too distant future, the region could even witness the use of nuclear weapons in war, with devastating consequences to massive civilian populations, unless wise and prudent statesmanship is exercised. The terminology “weapons of mass destruction” is somewhat misleading. The term lumps chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons together, but these weapons have vastly different effects in battle and arguably as deterrents. Chemical weapons have been used in battle in several wars to include the World Wars, the Yemeni civil war in the 1960s, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war. They have been employed with varying effects, which can be substantially reduced by militaries prepared to fight on a chemical battlefield. Chemical weapons also must be delivered in large quantities to inflict mass casualties on an unprepared adversary. Biological weapons have had limited use in war. They potentially pose a more significant threat than chemical weapons, particularly to civilian populations, if they are used as an instrument of war by militaries engaged in battle or covertly against enemy populations. Even limited quantities of biological weapons have the potential to inflict massive casualties and are aptly described as weapons of mass destruction, while chemical weapons fit less well into that characterization because their effects are more likely to be limited in geographic scope and duration, and by the logistic demands for employing chemicals on a large scale.2 Radiological weapons, although they receive much press attention out of concern that terrorists might use them, are likely to have more psychological than destructive impacts on the battlefield or against civilian populations. Above and beyond these weapons, nuclear weapons clearly are properly characterized as weapons of mass destruction. Their wartime use by the United States in World War II against Japan demonstrated the horror of single bombs capable of 3


destroying major cities and killing tens of thousands civilians in the blink of an eye. Although this study throughout uses the term “weapons of mass destruction” out of deference to common usage, it is important to keep in the back of one’s mind that many features separate chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. Often overlooked by the public is the requirement for delivery systems for these weapons. The principal delivery means for nation-states to project WMD are ballistic missiles which are extremely fast, and as it stands today, largely invulnerable to defenses. Another critical delivery vehicle for WMD are combat aircraft, which, unlike ballistic missiles, are reusable and capable of generating sorties and delivering larger WMD payloads in the event of sustained combat operations. More tactically orientated delivery systems such as artillery tubes and man-portable systems such as mines and demolitions are not addressed in this study. Weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile delivery systems are spread wide and deep in the Middle East and South Asia. While no state openly declares chemical or biological weapons capabilities, those suspected of harboring clandestine programs include possibly Algeria, Egypt, possibly India, Iran, Iraq under Saddam, Israel, Pakistan, and Syria. Except for Algeria, all of these states – in addition to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates – have ballistic missiles that potentially could carry chemical and biological payloads. The states that have nuclear weapons in the region are Israel, India, and Pakistan. Tel Aviv publicly neither confirms nor denies its nuclear weapons arsenal, but New Delhi and Islamabad openly brandished their nuclear weapons capabilities with nuclear testing in 1998. Iraq harbored nuclear weapons aspirations under Saddam and Iran appears to be in the midst of a drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Algeria, Egypt, and Syria have nuclear research facilities that bear watching in the future for any signs of developments with military applications.3 The region of the world that encompasses the Middle East and South Asia is more easily captured by the concept of the greater Middle East region, even if the concept is debatable by geographers. More significant than the name is the geopolitical significance of the region. As Geoffrey Kemp and Robert Harkavy, authors who best articulate the concept of the greater Middle East, observe what we term the greater Middle East and its energy resources may now be the strategic fulcrum and prize in the emerging arena of world politics. Approximately 70 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and over 40 percent of its natural gas reserves lies within an egg-shaped catchment area from southern Russia and Kazakstan to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. What is of special relevance are the growing energy needs of Asia, including China, India, 4


and Southeast Asia, and the fact that they will all have to compete with Europe and North America for greater Middle East energy supplies.4 Kemp and Harkavy define the greater Middle East region to include the four main conflicts – Arab–Israeli, Persian Gulf, Caspian Basin, and South Asia.5 Although this study does not directly examine the Caspian Basin dimension of the region, it does treat the three other conflicts and for purposes of convenience collectively refers to the region as the greater Middle East. The paramount concern of this study is to diagnose the impact of WMD, especially nuclear weapons, on the international security environment in the greater Middle East. As Kemp and Harkavy observe, “With the exception of North Korea virtually all of the world’s concern about weapons proliferation focuses on countries in the greater Middle East, where rivalries are intense, distances short, and enemies contiguous.”6 The questions probed in this study include the following: what are the security rivalries in the region that are fueling drives to acquire WMD and delivery systems? What are the features or characteristics that pressure nation-states to acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? How do leaders and military commanders view these weapons? Are they instruments of deterrence, war, or both? What are the courses of action for the United States for grappling with the difficult policy dilemmas posed by WMD proliferation and delivery systems in a geopolitically significant and unstable region?

Classical realism for studying statecraft Much of the burgeoning scholarly and policy-relevant literature on WMD and delivery systems proliferation focuses on the technical aspects such as expertise and industrial requirements for weapons production as well as specifications and performances of weapons. Less of the literature focuses on the political and security requirements that drive nation-states to acquire WMD and delivery systems, the impact of WMD on the regional security environment, and on how these weapons could be used for deterrence and war fighting. In other words, today’s WMD literature neglects the study of strategy and the linking of politics and military thought that drives proliferation. To redress the gap in the literature, this study illuminates the statecraft that looks to WMD and delivery systems as strategic instruments to achieve policy objectives in the greater Middle East region. It is no accident that the region is a hotspot for the challenges posed by WMD. The power politics in the region is intense and fuels the demand for WMD among regional nationstates. The weapons do not cause the rivalries, but rather are a symptom of the power struggles already underway. Power politics, or the school of thought known as political realism, sees 5


individual human beings and their collective organizations in a constant struggle to accumulate power to influence, shape, or dominate their circumstances. The never-ending search for the accumulation of power achieves its height in the relations between nation-states, the political entities in which the apexes of human power are achieved. Nation-states compete in the global environment characterized as largely an unregulated condition of anarchy. As nation-states struggle for power, they frequently resort to armed force to preserve power, garner more power, or to deny the accumulation of power to other nation-states. Political realism in its “classical” version was articulated by Thucydides in his The Peloponnesian War. Donald Kagan’s expert study of Thucydides reveals that the Greek general judged that “people go to war out of ‘honor, fear, and interest.’ ”7 In more recent times classical realism has best and most notably been captured in Hans Morgenthau’s masterwork Politics Among Nations. Morgenthau spearheaded the development of the classical realist school, which flourished in the United States in the aftermath of World War II and during the cold war. Power, for Morgenthau, is “man’s control over the minds and actions of other men” and “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.”8 As classical realists, both Thucydides and Morgenthau recognized that prestige or the reputation for power – although difficult, if not impossible, for social scientists to quantify – plays a central role in the motivation of nation-states in the international competition for power. Nation-states today view ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, in particular, as invaluable instruments for garnering international prestige or the reputation for power in international politics. They harness prestige from ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons to win strategic relationships for more power and to intimidate regional rivals. Nation-states seek power by aligning with other nation-states to hedge against any one or group of nation-states from dominating the regional or international environment. This competition in the classical realist tradition is referred to as the balance of power. The balance of power is subject to a constant state of flux and requires the steady and sustained attention of statesmen if international stability or an equilibrium of power is to hold. As Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson observed, whatever stability the balance of power may achieve must be precarious and subject to perpetual adjustments in conformity with intervening changes. The other function that a successful balance of power fulfills under these conditions is to insure the freedom of one nation from domination by the other.9 In contrast to political realism, liberal philosophic notions of international relations have muddied the waters of post-cold war debate about the 6


proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The liberal or cosmopolitan view of international relations, which tends to dominate the scholarly and policy communities devoted to arms control, narrows the gaze of American policymakers to “rogue” or “evil” nation-states bent on malignant designs in international relations and on international institutions and agreements to manage proliferation. Liberals misdiagnose nuclear proliferation as a “disease” or “plague” of international relations. In reality though, nuclear proliferation is a “symptom” of the struggle for power that characterizes international relations with or without the Soviet Union. As E. H. Carr observed long ago in articulating political realism as an approach to international relations, “realism tends to emphasise the irresistible strength of existing forces and the inevitable character of existing tendencies, and to insist that the highest wisdom lies in accepting, and adapting oneself to, these forces and these tendencies.”10 The realist view of weapons proliferation looks to the regional and international rivalries, insecurities, and competitions of power that compel nation-states to undertake efforts to ensure their core national interest of survival. Classical realists see WMD and ballistic missile proliferation as manifestations of drives by nation-states for power and prestige to increase their influence and stature in the international arena. A pitfall or danger of the balance of power for the classical realists is the security dilemma. As Morgenthau and Thompson describe the dilemma, Since no nation can be sure that it calculation of the distribution of power at any particular moment in history is correct, it must at least make sure that its errors, whatever they may be, will not put the nation at a disadvantage in the contest for power. In other words, the nation must try to have at least a margin of safety which will allow it to make erroneous calculations and still maintain the balance of power. To that effect, all nations actively engaged in the struggle for power must actually aim not at a balance – that is, equality – of power, but at superiority of power in their own behalf.11 The security dilemma concept was articulated in the classical realist literature after World War II. John Herz crafted the security dilemma concept in a 1950 World Politics article. As Herz defined the security dilemma, groups or individuals are concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such 7


a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.12 Herz elaborated on the security dilemma and its relationship to the struggle for power in politics in his Political Realism and Political Idealism. “Possession of the means of living, and possession of weapons to defend oneself and one’s ‘property’ constitutes what is commonly called ‘power’ . . . a human being is liable to strive for power as a means of rendering his life more secure.”13 Herz was quick to point out, however, that power “may also consist in the possession of ‘prestige’ ” or “the esteem or credit accorded to a man by others.”14 The security dilemma – if unrecognized or poorly managed with statecraft and diplomacy – gives rise to armed conflict. As Robert Jervis explains, the security dilemma can not only create conflicts and tensions but also provide the dynamics triggering war. If technology and strategy are such that each side believes that the state that strikes first will have a decisive advantage, even a state that is fully satisfied with the status quo may start a war out of fear that the alternative to doing so is not peace, but an attack by its adversary. And, of course, if each side knows that that other side is aware of the advantages of striking first, even mild crises are likely to end in war. This was one of the immediate causes of World War I, and contemporary military experts have devoted much thought and money to avoiding the recurrence of such destabilizing incentives.15 While WMD and delivery systems do not cause the regional competitions for power, they do contribute to the severity of the security dilemmas at work in the region and threaten to push crises over the edge to war by increasing incentives to militarily strike first against an adversary. From the classical realist perspective, the goal of prudent statecraft is to mitigate the effects of the security dilemma to lessen the risk of war, although they acknowledge that its elimination is not possible in an international system of anarchy. As Herz observed, Families and tribes may overcome the power game in their internal relations in order to face other families and tribes; larger groups may overcome it to face other classes unitedly; entire nations may compose their internal conflicts in order to face other nations. But ultimately, somewhere, conflicts caused by the security dilemma are bound to emerge among political units of power.16 Arnold Wolfers argued that the security dilemma could be kept within manageable bounds short of war by trying to convince “those who might feel 8


threatened that the accumulation of power is not intended and will never be used for attack,” by avoiding sudden and drastic moves, and by exercising much self-restraint and moderation.17 Classical realism began to fade in the United States as other variants of the school emerged. As an academic area of intellectual labor, political realism is a field of battle in itself with competing conceptualizations such as neo-realism, offensive and defensive variants, and neo-classical realism.18 A fulsome discussion of these competing conceptualizations is beyond the scope of this study and awaits another work, but, as a general observation, structural or neo-realism, as articulated by Kenneth Waltz, stripped classical realism of its normative tenets and intellectual richness based on the recognition of the human dimensions of the competition for power. Waltz reduced the school of realism to a structural examination of the balance of power.19 Under Waltz’s intellectual leadership, neo-realism took the mantel from classical realism as the focus for scholarship in the 1980s, 1990s, and today. Neo-realism ultimately takes a more sanguine view of international competition for power and portrays states as more readily satisfied with the international status quo as long as their securities are secure. In comparison, classical realists are more pessimistic about the prospects for satisfying the desires of nation-states for power. The school of realism today is divided between offensive and defensive variants. As Fareed Zakaria explains the divide in the realistic school, offensive realism supposes that a nation’s interests are determined by its power (meaning its material resources) relative to other nations: nations thus expand when they can. They do not expand in a mad frenzy – anywhere, anytime – but in a rational manner, in places and at times that minimize costs and risks, in areas that are weaker then they, and when their power is on the rise.20 Defensive realism, on the other hand, “presents a more benign view of the pressures of the international system. It posits that states seek security rather than influence and so predicts that nations expand their interests abroad when threatened.”21 Defensive realists are circling around a cluster of ideas referred to as “offense–defense” theory that they assess as offering more significant explanatory power on the origins of war than classical realism. As a broad characterization, offense–defense theorists argue that war is more likely when nation-states view the offense as superior to the defense. As Sean Lynn-Jones explains the scope and thrust of the theory, Offense–defense argues that there is an offense–defense balance that determines the relative efficacy of offense and defensive security strategies. Variations in the offense–defense balance, the theory 9


suggests, affect patterns of international politics and foreign policy. Most important, offense–defense theory contends that international conflict and war are more likely when offense has the advantage, while peace and cooperation are more probable when defense has the advantage.22 In further distinguishing offense–defense theory from the security dilemma, Stephen Van Evera argues that they are concepts best kept apart: States may also develop offensive capabilities because they have aggressive aims unrelated to their security requirements. These capabilities raise the risk of war by enabling conquest by their possessor and making others insecure, but the wars they cause do not stem from the security dilemma.23 Some scholars who intellectually dwell in the neo-realist school question Waltz’s “defensive” neo-realism. John Mearsheimer has articulated an “offensive” neo-realist school: This unrelenting pursuit of power means that great powers are inclined to look for opportunities to alter the distribution of world power in their favor. They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense.24 Mearsheimer contrasts the offensive and defensive schools of neo-realism: For defensive realists, the international structure provides states with little incentive to seek additional increments of power; instead it pushes them to maintain the existing balance of power. Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states. Offensive realists, on the other hand, believe that status quo powers are rarely found in world politics, because the international system creates power incentives for states to look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of rivals, and to take advantage of those situations when the benefits outweigh the costs. A state’s ultimate goal is to be the hegemon in the system.25 Offensive realism steers clear of offense–defense theory. Mearsheimer argues that in contrast to his theory of offensive realism, the defensive realists such as Robert Jervis, Jack Snyder, and Stephen Van Evera buttress the defensive realism school by focusing on the offense–defense balance.26 Offense–defense theory’s greatest weakness, however, is that it grossly neglects the political dimensions of war by implying that weapons determine the 10


prospects for conflict and turns Clausewitz’s dictum – central to classical realist thought – that war is an extension of politics on its head.27 As classical realism appreciates, political objectives are ends in armed conflicts and the military is the means of achieving those objectives, not the other way around.28 Whereas offensive and defensive neo-realists view the critical determinant of state behavior as the international system of anarchy, classical realists have a more robust appreciation for the struggle of power in international politics that plays out at three levels of analysis: the individual level or statesmen, the state level or government, as well as in the international arena characterized as an anarchical system. These levels are what Kenneth Waltz, in perhaps some of his most insightful work, characterized as man, the state, and war or first-, second-, and third-images of analysis.29

Classical realism and WMD in the greater Middle East Despite the advent of the information-technological revolution that has substantially intertwined the contemporary globe, little has changed to make classical realism less relevant as a theory for understanding statecraft, strategy, and the dynamics of world politics. Classical realism is a powerful analytic tool for understanding the dynamics of weapons proliferation and war in the contemporary security environment in the Middle East and South Asia. An examination that compares and contrasts the explanatory power of other variants of realism for the problem of WMD in the greater Middle East, however, lies beyond the scope of this study aside from some parenthetical references. Classical realism employed in this study undoubtedly will fail to measure up to the standards expected of “social scientific” research, which are the hallmarks of contemporary scholarship in academe. But academic and scholarly literature in international relations and foreign policy is often paltry fare for those – statesmen, policymakers, military officers, and citizens – starved of theoretical aid in grappling with political, military and moral dilemmas posed by issues of war and peace. This study is an attempt to navigate the Grand Canyon between academe and the policy community and citizenry by presenting a scholarly treatment of weapons proliferation. The book aspires to meet Alexander George’s call for general knowledge of international relations produced by scholars that can be a useful input to policy analysis.30 The study aims at illuminating the statecraft behind WMD and delivery system proliferation in the greater Middle East to aid practitioners as well as citizens whose support is needed to buttress policy as the United States grapples with critical challenges in the twenty-first century. The study begins with a survey of the strategic rivalries that riddle the Middle East and South Asia. These competitions for power and interest make up the security fabric that is the baseline for understanding the 11


problem of weapons proliferation in the region. Chapter 2 argues that classical realism’s balance of power – and the security dilemma embedded in the balance of power – is a powerful analytic framework for understanding why nation-states acquire weapons of mass destruction and build militaries for deterrence in an attempt to lessen the risk of war as well as to prepare for war in the event that deterrence fails. Nation-states engaged in these competitions for power often find themselves locked into security paradoxes; their quests for weapons and power often create insecurity in their neighbors and may lessen rather than increase the threshold for war. Nation-states in the greater Middle East region by and large are working to modernize their conventional military forces to defend and defeat perceived threats, but many are hard-pressed to fund robust conventional military modernization programs. Major weapons systems such as tanks, armored personnel carriers, and aircraft for waging mobile-conventional warfare are extremely expensive. Per unit costs for these weapon systems are increasing at steep rates. Many defense budgets in the region are ill positioned to fund major infusions of expensive weapons systems, and even the richest such as the Gulf states are reaching limits to the amount of conventional equipment that their militaries can absorb. Many nation-states in the Middle East and South Asia, moreover, view Israel as well as the outside “balancing power” of the United States as major threats to their security. They calculate that they have little chance of catching up with Israeli or American conventional military prowess and are turning to chemical and biological weapons as stopgaps or surrogates for more expensive nuclear weapons deterrence against Israeli or American military power. They also view chemical, and biological weapons as well, as an “asymmetrical” tool for warfare in the event that they must face Israeli or American forces in battle. Chapter 3 examines the uses and limitations of chemical weapons as instruments of deterrence and war fighting as seen from cases in the greater Middle East, particularly in Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran and its 1991 and 2003 military conflicts with the United States. Although in the aftermath of the 2003 war, no evidence emerged to confirm pre-war suspicions that Baghdad had substantial chemical weapons stocks, the conflict has important implications for the future of chemical weapons and deterrence in the greater Middle East. Nation-states in the region have devoted considerable resources to the development of modern air forces, to which high prestige is attached among militaries in the region. Despite the presence of large and modern combat aircraft, many leaders and military commanders are less than confident that air forces in war will be capable of achieving air superiority or penetrating the airspaces of their adversaries. Consequently, Middle Eastern and South Asian militaries are hedging their bets and devoting substantial resources into the development and production of a wide variety of ballistic missiles with increasing range and payload capabilities which are virtually guaranteed to penetrate enemy airspace to deliver WMD. Chapter 4 surveys the use 12


of ballistic missiles in regional warfare, traces ballistic missile developments since the 1990–1991 Gulf war, and explores nascent regional thinking on ballistic missile defenses. Ballistic missiles are ideal delivery platforms for nuclear weapons and chapter 5 examines Iran’s strategic rationale for the building of its robust ballistic missiles program. It also pieces together the evidence that suggests that Iran is steadily working on a clandestine nuclear weapons program, despite Tehran’s public claims that it wants a robust nuclear power program for civilian energy. Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapons inventory – which is entirely consistent with statecraft governed by political realism – would pose a formidable challenge to both US and regional security interests. The chapter proposes a number of options for American statecraft to meet Iran’s nuclear weapons challenge. But what if American and international efforts to stem Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons are unsuccessful? What would be the longer-run impact of an Iranian nuclear arsenal on regional security? Chapter 6 probes this question and examines the influence that a nuclear weapons-armed Iran would likely have on nation-states in the Persian Gulf as well as those in the Levant. Much of the attention to nuclear weapons proliferation in the region focuses on Israel, Iraq, Iran, India, and Pakistan, but one prime candidate for a nuclear weapons program largely escapes policy and public attention and debate. Chapter 7 argues that power politics and calculations of power and interest are strong motives for Saudi Arabia to acquire a nuclear weapons deterrent. The Saudis already have in place a Chinese-built ballistic missile force that could serve as a foundation for building a nuclear weapons force posture. The Saudis might be receiving strategic assistance from China and Pakistan for nuclear warheads for their ballistic missile force, designed to counterbalance ballistic missile and nuclear weapons inventories in Israel, a future Iraq, and Iran as well as to lessen Saudi dependence on the United States for its security. The latter is an especially powerful incentive for a Saudi regime concerned about its own domestic security in light of al-Qaeda and 11 September events. Behind the scenes of regional power struggles lurks Chinese security policy. While many have focused concern on the seepage of Russian WMD technology, especially given the deterioration of the Russian ability to control their decaying WMD infrastructure, substantially less academic and policy attention has focused on China’s security ties in the greater Middle East region. Chapter 8 explores the Chinese strategic motivation for security involvement in the region, the main thrusts of which lie in support for WMD and delivery systems in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. The lure of nuclear weapons is strong in the region. Some leaders and military officials in the Middle East and South Asia judge that the chances of war between nuclear weapons armed belligerents in the region is next to nil given the grave risks of major nuclear exchanges. Chapter 9 takes a critical 13


look at this attractive, but intellectually flawed notion, which could lead to missteps and great strategic misfortune and tragedy. The chapter argues that the nuclear stability achieved by the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war is not directly analogous to today’s regional rivalries in the greater Middle East region. Nation-states under numerous strategic circumstances could come rationally to view nuclear weapons as usable instruments of war. The study culminates in an examination of the implications for American statecraft. Chapter 10 discusses the strengths and weaknesses of international norms and treaties designed to stem the flow of WMD such as the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and the Missile Technology Control Regime. These efforts may slow proliferation, but they have proven to be far from leak proof. Consequently, the United States would be wise to redouble diplomatic and intelligence efforts to slow the proliferation of WMD and delivery systems as well as to plan for the preemptive use of force to stem weapons proliferation programs on a case-by-case basis. The chapter, however, warns against the American use of nuclear weapons in any such preemptive contingencies because of the political repercussions that would severely undermine overall American efforts to manage the problems of weapons proliferation in the twenty-first century.

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2 THE STRATEGIC LANDSCAPE Regional struggles for power

The greater Middle East is arguably the most politically and militarily volatile region of the world. The region is periodically swept with convulsions of war. The fallout from these conflicts affects the security of major states – Russia, China, and the United States – that lie outside the region. As Robert Harkavy observes of the greater Middle East, it occupies a crucial position with respect to some of the major issue areas of the contemporary era. Those issue areas are energy sources and availability; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems; and the dangerous pairings involving Israel and the Arabs, Iran and Iraq, and India and Pakistan. Surely, this region in its aggregate has come to be viewed by the contending and aspiring world powers – the United States, Russia, a united Europe, China – as a strategic prize, maybe the strategic prize.1 Globalization, rather than being the vehicle for international peace, has woven the world more tightly together, increasing the likelihood that events in regions of the globe will press against or engulf other regions. The increasing interconnections between what had long been considered as separate sub-regions of the greater Middle East – the Middle East itself and South Asia – is all too evident in the wake of 11 September. The policy of the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan to provide a safe haven to al-Qaeda, for example, in light of post-11 September events had implications for security interests of states stretching from Morocco to India and throughout the world. Political and military upheavals in the Middle East and South Asia are likely in the future to continue to ripple with consequences like a stone thrown into a still pond. A broad survey of the political–military struggles for power and influence that litter the greater Middle East region provides a context for understanding the strategic contest underway there for weapons of mass destruction and their delivery means. This chapter surveys existing and emerging security 15

T H E S T R AT E G I C L A N D S C A P E

relationships in the Middle East and South Asia. It begins with a review of international relations and balance of power theory. The theory, although misunderstood and contorted in contemporary international relations literature, has strong explanatory power for understanding the security relationships in the greater Middle East region. This chapter uses the theory to interpret and explain the developing strategic partnerships that are the pronounced features of the regional security landscape. The key strategic partnerships are: Israel and Turkey working to balance Syria; Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran jockeying for power in the Gulf; and, the Pakistan–India competition for power in South Asia.

Balancing power or threats? Classical realism offers balance of power as a theory to help scholars and policymakers decipher behavior that may, at first glance, be difficult to comprehend. The balance of power theory has a long history in the study of international relations dating back at least as far as Thucydides. And an enormous body of literature has probed, prodded, and dissected the theory and its practice in statecraft. Scholars steeped in the balance of power theory brought the concept to the foreground in American international relations scholarship after the World War II and it took root in American thinking for a time during the cold war. Two pioneers in the American thinking on balance of power theory in the aftermath of World War II were Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson. As they described the balance of power, “The aspiration for power on the part of several nations, each trying either to maintain or overthrow the status quo, leads of necessity to a configuration that is called the balance of power.”2 They noted that balance of power is used with a variety of meanings to include: as a policy aimed at achieving a state of affairs; as a description of the state of affairs; as a rough equal distribution of power; and, as any distribution of power.3 The variety of interpretations of the balance of power has led to confusion in the literature. Inis Claude made important intellectual progress in disaggregating the various interpretations in the balance of power literature. To provide clarity, Claude argued that “Distribution of power is a perfectly adequate phrase to designate distribution of power; equilibrium, preponderance, policy of equilibrium, policy of preponderance, struggle for power – these are expressions serviceable enough to permit us to reduce the multiple usages of the phrase balance of power.”4 Perhaps one of the greatest problems with the term “balance of power” is the connotation that relations among nation-state rivals have reached an end-state. Such a connotation is at distinct odds with the thoughts of the classical realists who viewed the balance of power as a never-ending process of maneuvering for power in international relations. In the cases from the 16


greater Middle East, the phrase “struggle for power” more often than not best captures all of the sub-regional security dynamics because the term lends itself to the notion of a continual process, not a permanent end-state or end of history. The concept of deterrence is imbedded in balance of power theory. For Louis Halle, a classical realist in the Morgenthau tradition, balance of power is simply mutual deterrence and the stability of international systems depends on the maintenance of a balance of power.5 Halle drew a major lesson from the study of international politics, war, and the balance of power; the way to avoid a great and costly war for the restoration of the balance-of-power is not to let it be upset in the first place. This means that any power which is growing, and by its growth threatens to upset the balance, should be contained at an early stage. Another way of saying this is to say that it should be deterred from expanding its power to the point where a great war may have to be fought to reduce it and thereby restore the balance.6 For classical realists, war is a mechanism for managing the international balance or distribution of power. More recent academic literature in the realist tradition – the neo-realist school – takes intellectual pointers from the classical realists, but argues that rather than balancing power, nation-states seek alliances to balance against threats. Most notably, Stephen Walt refined the balance of power by arguing that “states ally to balance against threats rather than against power alone.”7 Indeed, much of the political-military maneuvering in the greater Middle East lends strong empirical evidence to Walt’s thesis that nation-states seek alliances or less formal security relationships to balance perceived threats. David Priess, for example, found that Walt’s balance-of-threat theory explains how the rising threat from Iran after its 1979 revolution led the small Arab Gulf states to form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a means to balance Iran.8 Nevertheless, classical realists view power as the overarching concern of statesmen operating in the international system of nation-states. They see threats as closely related, but subordinate concerns to overall power in the calculus of statesmen who are all too aware that security relationships are in a constant state of flux and that one’s ally today might reemerge as a foe tomorrow. Statesmen consequently hedge their bets and monitor and adjust to measures of power recognizing that even if that power is not being harnessed as a threat today, it might be wielded in such a fashion in the future. A striking example, drawn from the greater Middle East, of this phenomenon is the United States, Israel, and Iran. During the Shah of Iran’s reign, Tehran, Washington, and Tel Aviv shared mutual interests and cooperated 17


on their security agendas. This relationship abruptly shifted from security cooperation to hostility with the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the Shah’s fall from power. Today, Iran considers the United States and Israel as bitter foes, a perception that is reciprocated by Washington and Tel Aviv. The American–Israeli–Iranian relationship is a stark reminder of the potential sudden shifts in security perceptions that underscore the importance of measurements of power, not strictly threats, in the eyes of statesmen. Much of the academic literature focuses on the balance of power and its influence on formal alliances. Alliances are formal treaties that link the security of one state to another. Much of the literature is based on the study of statecraft in Europe during the eighteenth century and during the cold war when formal alliances were the staples of international relations. Formal alliances play less of a role in the contemporary Middle East and South Asia. Instead, states form less formal security ties to advance mutual national interests. States look to beyond their borders to make up for shortages of power available only to them from domestic sources of power. As Kenneth Waltz observed, nation-states may “balance each other by ‘internal’ instead of ‘external’ means, relying on their own capabilities rather than on the capabilities of allies.”9 Nation-states throughout the region seek external power alignments to make up for deficits in their own national power. The Middle East and South Asia region has clusters of relationships based on calculations of power and interest. In many instances, two or three nation-states make alignments or tacit security arrangements rather than formal alliances. These relations exist in the greater Middle East, but are of critical security importance to major powers that lie on the periphery of the region, principally Russia, China, and the United States, which also play critical roles in the shifting distributions of power in the Middle East and South Asia. As L. Carl Brown observes, “Control of the Middle East, or denying control of this area to an enemy, has, in short, figured prominently in the strategic thinking of the great powers for some two centuries, and has made its geopolitical configurations well known to generations of Western strategic planners.”10 Major powers outside the greater Middle East region and those inside swirl in and around strategic configurations in the Israel– Arab, Persian Gulf, and India–Pakistan struggles for power.

The Arab–Israeli struggle for power The Arab–Israeli conflict has been a dominant feature of politics in the Middle East. War between the Israelis and Arabs erupted in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The history of these conflicts is long and the course of battle too complicated to delve deeply into here. Broadly speaking though in each of these wars Israeli was fighting for its share of space and security as an independent and viable nation-state while Arab forces – those of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and to lesser extent Iraq and Saudi Arabia – had viewed 18


Israel as an illegitimate political entity and had coalesced into opposition forcefully to end Israel’s existence early on, then later to set back its growing political, economic, and military power in the region. Although the nature of the open conflict between Arab states and Israel has subsided, its bitter history for all participants lingers in the backdrop of the contemporary environment. Egypt and Jordan have made peace and diplomatically recognize Israel’s existence, although relations – official or unofficial – are not wide, deep, or warm between the Israelis and their Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts. Nevertheless, the prospects for Egyptian or Jordanian forces taking up arms against Israel have dimmed substantially since the 1970s, in no small measure because Israel enjoys a preponderance of military power, aided by American security backing, against its Arab neighbors. Egypt and Jordan also enjoy strong security ties to the United States that Cairo and Amman would not want to jeopardize with renewed armed conflict with Tel Aviv. The greatest source of political conflict between Israel and the Arab states is the failure to negotiate a peace treaty to formally establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war. In the Arab worldview, the Israeli military occupation of many Palestinian areas in the contested territories – even if conducted to stem the tide of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel proper – is an humiliation and a festering source of Arab resentment against Israel as well as its principal security benefactor, the United States. The great tragedy for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples is that Israel and the Palestinians were very close to a final peace settlement at Camp David and Taba negotiations in 2000. Unfortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing to take the political risk attendant to compromise needed for a settlement while Palestinian Authority head Yasser Arafat was not. Notwithstanding the opportunity lost, Arab resentment against both Israel and the United States is high. Elites and publics in the Arab world constantly and loudly decry American security assistance to Israel, but they fail to note that the United States in the history of the Arab–Israeli war never intervened militarily to directly assist Israeli defenses. They also fail to note the instances in which the United States has intervened with military force in the region to directly support Arabs; to facilitate the withdrawal of Palestinian forces from Lebanon under threat from Israeli attacks in the early 1980s and to liberate Kuwait from occupying Iraqi forces in 1991. One reason for that neglect is that many Arab regimes stoke the worldview of hatred against Israel and the United States to divert public attention from their own failings at home. As Barry Rubin observers, “Regime can allow some criticism as a safety value. But it is always far preferable that the targets be foreigners (especially Israel, the West, or to a far lesser extent any Arab rivals of the moment).”11 Rubin elaborates that 19


Rather than being outraged by the failure of the Arab–Israeli peace process, Arab leaders, radical oppositionists, and intellectuals worried that it might succeed, and that they would thus lose this issue as an excuse for keeping the Arab world frozen in time. After all, with few real exceptions, the Arab states had ruling systems remarkably close to those that had prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s.12 These hostile worldviews influence the ways in which Arab populations and statesmen view the struggle for power in the region. Against this political-security backdrop, a number of security alignments are developing in the region. Syria and Iran cooperate in security spheres to counterbalance Israel as well as Iraq. These states initially began their cooperation during the Iraq–Iran war. Syrian President Hafez Asad sought Iran’s help to counterbalance Israeli power – and the potential for US intervention – to the south as well as to counterbalance Iraqi power to the east in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Late in Asad’s reign tensions between Syria and Iraq eased somewhat. As Efraim Inbar notes, in 1997 Asad opened Syria’s borders with Iraq for the first time since 1980, the countries exchanged trade delegations, opened a bus service between the two capitals, closed radio stations which broadcasted anti-regime propaganda, and Syria became a transit route for Iraq’s external trade and refurbished an Iraqi oil pipeline that ran through Syrian territory.13 Syrian relations with Saddam’s Iraq improved further under the reign of Asad’s successor, his son Bashar, in no small measure due to the economic benefit that Damascus received for helping Iraq evade United Nations economic sanctions placed on Baghdad for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Syria’s relations with Iraq today are unsettled as the government in Baghdad takes shape. Israeli military preponderance has denied Syria the option of moving militarily to settle its outstanding political disputes with Tel Aviv, primarily the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights captured during the 1967 war. Syrian conventional military capabilities are deteriorating because Damascus has lost is primary military benefactor. The Soviet Union essentially built the Syrian military at the height of Arab–Israeli conflict during the cold war. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia has been most interested in the sale, and not the grant, of military assistance to the region. Syria’s poor economy leaves the military with little wherewithal for major purchases of conventional military hardware from Russia. As Eugene Rumer reflects, Economic subsidies and arms transfers had been one of the pillars of the Russia–Syrian relationship during the cold war and had made it possible for Moscow to project its power and influence in the Middle East. With Russia’s economy in trouble throughout the 1990s, these subsidies and transfers quickly dried up.14 20


Syria and Iran use Lebanon as a pawn in the regional struggle for power. Instead of attempting militarily to retake the Golan Heights – a reckless bid in light of Israel’s conventional military power – Damascus supports a surrogate insurgency with Hezbollah attacks mounted against Israel from Syrian-controlled Lebanon. Syrian–Iranian relations have deepened with their bilateral support of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as a instrument for undermining Israel in a sub rosa fashion. Both Damascus and Tehran calculate that Hezbollah operations allow them to harm Israeli security interests while at the same time avoid the Israeli threshold for open military retaliation against either Syria or Iran. Syria acts as a conduit for Iranian supplies to Hezbollah. Tehran in 1982 deployed a 1,500-man contingent of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to Baalbak, Lebanon that organized, trained, supplied, and supported Hezbollah and although Iran in the 1990s reduced its IRGC presence in Lebanon to about 150 fighters, Iranian–Hezbollah ties remain strong.15 Iranian exploitation of Lebanon with the aid of Syria is a function of Iranian security policy leveled against Israel; “there is almost universal agreement that the Jewish state is an active regional rival bent on checking Iran’s political and military power and undoing Iran’s achievements.”16 Although Israel is confident of its security relationship with the United States, Tel Aviv is improving security ties with Turkey to buttress its security. The Israelis and the Turks share a confluence of interests in that both want to hedge against the powers of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Turkey signed military agreements with Israel in February and August 1996 that provide for joint air and naval exercises, access to port facilities, and allow the Israeli air force to conduct training exercises in Turkish airspace. They also allow for increased intelligence exchanges and technology cooperation.17 The military cooperation could be used in a future regional military contingency. As Dov Waxman observes, for example, the ability to launch attacks from or refuel over Turkey would greatly increase the striking range of Israeli aircraft, particularly for military contingencies against Iranian WMD and ballistic missile programs.18 Israel and Turkey are also sharing intelligence. Efraim Inbar reports that in February 1996, the countries formalized an intelligence sharing partnership: The two countries decided to act together in the area of electronic surveillance. The main target country was Syria, with Iran as the second priority. Turkey also probably receives information from Israel on Russian military systems used by its neighbours. Turkey also receives access to information collected by the Israeli intelligence satellite Ofeq.19 Ankara remains concerned that Syria could one day resume support for Kurdish insurgency in Turkey even though Damascus – under the threat of 21


Turkish military action in the fall of 1998 – signed an agreement with Turkey to end support to the Kurdish insurgency.20 Turkey is bolstering its security ties with Jordan to further squeeze Syria. Turkey has had a military cooperation agreement with Jordan similar to the one with Israel since 1984. However, cooperation has intensified since the mid-1990s. In late 1996, Turkey and Jordan agreed to hold joint exercises and conduct bilateral training for their pilots in winter and desert conditions. Turkey also agreed to help Jordan strengthen its defense industries.21 Jordan, for its part, no doubt sees security ties with Ankara as a hedge against Syrian and Iraqi power. Turkey’s growing security ties with Israel as well as NATO membership serve to hedge against Iranian power. Turkish policymakers, especially the Turkish military, remain wary of Iran because of the fundamentalist character of the current Iranian regime and its support for international terrorism. The Turkish military’s crackdown against Islamic fundamentalism, moreover, has increased its sensitivity about Iran’s influence and involvement in Turkish domestic politics.22 Tehran, from its vantage point, is worried about the burgeoning Israeli–Turkish alliance and the access to Iran’s borders that this alliance might offer Israel. Iran’s leaders have expressed their fears to Ankara, drawn closer to Syria, and broadened their regional contacts by working more closely with rivals of Turkey, such as Greece, Armenia, and Georgia.23 Turkey’s relationship with Iraq is still taking shape as the government in Baghdad establishes itself. Ankara was anxious about the regional security consequences of the 2003 war and the Turkish parliament refused to allow American forces to stage operations from Turkish territory against Iraq. The Turks today worry that Iraqi Kurds will exploit the unsettled security environment to establish a separate Kurdish state, a development that would threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. The Turkish military would be prepared to move into northern Iraq to prevent the establishment of a independent Kurdish state.

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The Persian Gulf struggle for power The most violent military conflicts between Israel and the Arab states occurred in the late 1940s to the early 1980s, but the epicenter of interstate war in the Middle East shifted to the Persian Gulf in the 1980s and remains there today. The United States has played the “balancer” role of Gulf power by shifting alignments from Iran, to Iraq, to Saudi Arabia, and to the smaller Gulf Arab states to maintain a rough balance of power in the Gulf. The geopolitical significance of the Gulf lies in its oil wealth. As L. Carl Brown notes, the Middle East is the world’s largest reservoir of petroleum – which is critical to the world economy – and the states that border the Persian Gulf alone (Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) posses an estimated two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves and account for about a quarter of the world production.24 The clash of Gulf titans Iraq and Iran in war was the key feature of the Gulf struggle for power from 1980 to 1988. Before the Iranian Revolution, the Shah’s regime had looked to the United States to shore up its political and military dominance in the region. For its part, the United States looked to Iran as the bulkhead against a potential Soviet military drive to capture warm water ports and threaten American access to Gulf oil. The fall of the Shah, the Iran Revolution, and the Iranian military threat to Kuwait as a possible spillover of the bitter war between Iran and Iraq led the United States to shift its power to Baghdad in an effort to stabilize the Gulf. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Iraqi military’s occupation of Kuwait threatened the oil-rich eastern areas of Saudi Arabia and offered the specter of Iraqi political, military, and economic dominance of the Gulf. The United States again shifted its power and acted as the “balancer” in the Gulf and militarily threw Iraqi forces out of Kuwait to reestablish the balance of power equilibrium in the Gulf. After shifting American power backing from Iran and to Iraq, the United States in the aftermath of the 1990–1991 Gulf war swung its geopolitical weigh to support Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The United States established fairly significant military presences in these countries to hedge against the threat of renewed Iraqi ground force operations and Iraqi political intimidation tactics. Washington also used both countries to support air operations over Iraq to police a no-fly zone in the southern part of Iraq, a legacy of the Gulf war. Saddam’s then widely suspected shielding of his weapons of mass destruction programs from United Nations monitoring and refusal to make full and final disclosure of his weapons programs as called for by the terms of the 1991 Gulf war ceasefire agreement casted a dark shadow over the Gulf balance of power. Classical realists were concerned that Saddam was clandestinely reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction programs to again pose a renewed threat to the Gulf distribution of power. The events of 11 September increased Saudi anxiety over Riyadh’s

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reliance on American power backing. The Saudis were incensed at American press coverage after the attacks that focused on the domestic problems in the Kingdom. The Saudis also became apprehensive about American discussions about waging war in 2003 against Iraq. Saudi officials publicly pronounced that the Kingdom would not allow US forces to operate from its soil for a war against Iraq. From a Saudi perspective, the prospects of an American military occupation of Iraq threatened Saudi influence on the global oil market. The royal family undoubtedly also feared that the American war effort could be a spark that could light broad, uncontrollable domestic unrest which is being fueled by political repression, royal family corruption, and years of state-supported criticism of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Washington and Riyadh, after Saddam’s overthrow, agreed that American forces would depart the kingdom because they were no longer needed to deter Saddam’s regime. The American troop departure also worked to lessen the Saudi Royal family’s vulnerability to charges of acting as an American puppet which had been coming from Saudi domestic opposition, especially al-Qaeda, which has grown into a formidable insurgency inside Saudi Arabia. Against this backdrop, Saudi Arabia has moved cautiously to improve ties with Iran, in part, to balance both Iraq and to hedge its relationship with the United States. As Lawrence Potter and Gary Sick track the warming of Saudi–Iranian relations: Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s attendance at the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Tehran in December 1997 was a major watershed, and President Khatami’s triumphant tour of the Gulf in May 1999, with visits to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Damascus, set the stage for a new politics of rapprochement. The signing of an unprecedented security pact between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April 2001 signaled greater Arab trust of Iran and could prove to be a harbinger of improved regional relations.25 Nevertheless, both Saudi Arabia and Iran remain suspicious and competitive below the surface of warming ties, and the lingering competition for power between these states undercuts optimistic appraisals of a new era of cooperation in the Gulf. As a RAND study astutely captures the situation, Tehran is troubled by the close ties the Gulf states have to Washington and their support for the US military presence in the region. More generally, Iran seeks to be recognized as the preeminent regional power – a goal in keeping with its nationalist ambitions. To this end, it wants the Gulf states to respect its wishes and interests. In the past, it also has pursued its claim to Abu Musa and the Tunb Islands aggressively, even though these are also claimed by the UAE. Tehran still regards Saudi Arabia as an ideological rival, in Central Asia and 24


in west Asia, and as a close ally of the United States. Riyadh is conscious of the latent threat Iran poses to its interests in the Persian Gulf and beyond, but is more keen at present to develop the friendship with the pragmatic Iranian leadership and carve for itself the role of a mediator in Iranian–American exploratory discussions.26 The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was established as a security arrangement for the Arab Gulf states to balance both Iraqi and Iranian influence in the Gulf. As Ibrahim Karawan recalls, in 1981 the leaders of six Arab countries in the Gulf region, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, ended their summit meeting in Abu Dhabi by declaring the establishment of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The main objective of this organization was to enhance cooperation, coordination, and integration between member states. Meetings of the GCC states have tried to develop common foreign and security policies. The foundation period of the GCC was strongly influenced by the Iranian revolution, which threatened to destabilize the Arab regimes in the region and remake them in its own image. That stage also witnessed the outbreak of war between the two strongest states in the region, Iraq and Iran, a war that threatened to escalate and spill over into the region.27 The smaller Arab Gulf states do not see all of their interests aligned with those of Saudi Arabia under the GCC and look to the United States as a balancing power to prevent them from being dominated by the Saudi regime. As J. E. Peterson observes, Saudi Arabia estimates its population at more than 22 m, while the total population of the other five combined is not likely to be more than 9 m. The Saudi GDP of $185 bn (in 2000) far outstrips the others’ cumulative total of $128 bn. Thus, the historic fear of Saudi expansionism blends with present concerns about becoming submerged in a larger Saudi economy.28 The smaller Arab Gulf state resistance to Saudi domination has been a major reason for the GCC’s inability to marshal an effective military counterbalance to Iraqi and Iranian power in the Gulf without seeking assistance from the United States. The Arab Gulf states have only made half-hearted measures to pool their military resources to increase their security self-reliance, but these efforts have fallen short of the levels needed to challenge Iraq or Iran in the Gulf struggle for power. The GCC has tried to field joint forces without much success. As Muhammed Saleh Al-Musfir recounts, the 25


GCC defense project – Dara al-Jazirah (Peninsula Shield) – was too small for an integrated force. Moreover, it was inadequately trained to constitute a viable military organization, especially after GCC heads of state rejected Sultan Qaboos’ 1994 recommendation to enlarge it to a 100,000-man army. Instead, Saudi Arabia proposed the expansion and modernization of the Dara al-Jaziriah. Because both defense schemes have proven stillborn, each GCC government has relied on its bilateral defense ties with key Western Powers.29 Saudi Arabia wields the largest share of influence among the smaller Gulf States, but the states in the Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Yemen see their interests and power aligned more with those of the United States than Saudi Arabia in many important respects. Kuwait especially sees a more direct threat to its security coming from Iraq and Iran than does Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE – which sees the largest threat coming from Iran – had been more supportive of American military operations in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda than Riyadh and were less vocal in opposition to the American military ouster of Saddam’s regime. Yemen also has worked with American counter-terrorism efforts, in part, to redress the poor relationship with Washington over support for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and more recently for being a hub for al-Qaeda operations. Yemen undoubtedly worries that if left unchecked, al-Qaeda operations in Yemen would risk direct American military operations in the country. In general, the small Gulf States look to the United States to deter threats coming from Iraq – even from a post-Saddam government in Baghdad – and Iran as well, and to act as a counterbalance to Saudi political and economic power in the Gulf. Iran would be poised to be the preponderant player in the struggle for power absent an American presence in the Gulf. As Abdullah K. Alshayji explains, Iran is convinced it should be the superpower of the Gulf region because it is the largest and most populous littoral state, because of its strategic position between the Gulf and the Caucasus and its huge military might. Just as a comparison, the whole GCC native population is not larger than the population of the Iranian capital, Tehran. The total military manpower of the GCC states (half of it comprised by the Saudis) is less than one third of the Iranian military personnel including the Revolutionary Guards.30 Iran has little room for maneuver to increase its power with security relations in the Middle East and South Asia because regional states have moved to counterbalance Tehran’s potential power. Consequently, Tehran is looking to Russia and China as outside balancing powers to the United States in 26


the Gulf, much as Baghdad had done under Saddam. Moscow is eager to nurture ties with the Gulf states, especially Iraq and Iran, to win lucrative economic, political, and military ties. As Brenda Shaffer observes, Moscow and Tehran’s bilateral ties serve an important role in advancing aspects of their respective international agendas. Both are interested in preventing “US hegemony” and the emergence of a “monolithic international system,” and this shared goal has played an important role in cementing their relations. They see their mutual cooperation as a means of countering US supremacy and US attempts to sideline each of them.31 The Iranians are especially seeking support from Russia and China for suspected weapons of mass destruction programs. Tehran has heavily invested in ties with Russia for nuclear power production facilities and ballistic missile programs. Eugene Rumer notes that Russia analysts “dismiss the Iranian threat to Russian security interests, citing primarily the lack of strategic motives on the part of Iran in threatening Russia.”32 The Iranian desire for a robust nuclear power infrastructure to support domestic electrical power demands is highly suspect because the Iranians could rely on their enormous oil wealth to meet that demand. More likely, the Iranians could use these facilities and expertise to nurture a clandestine nuclear weapons program. As for China, Bates Gill assesses, Contrary to widely held views, it is clear that Beijing’s interest over the 1980s and early 1990s in building closer ties with Iran – including the provision of weapons – had as much or more to do with strategic and political considerations as with profit-taking. Iran’s revolutionary policies and strong stand against outside influence meshed well with China’s policies during the 1980s of maintaining independence from the superpowers while building Chinese regional influence.33 The Chinese have provided materials and technical expertise to support Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Meanwhile, Tehran conducts a sophisticated balancing act with diplomatic links in South Asia to both Islamabad and New Delhi. As Ahmed Hashim observes, Iranian–Pakistani relations have a strategic bent, In 1994, the Iranian and Pakistani navies conducted joint exercises for the first time. Links in the military field would benefit Iran more than Pakistan because the latter has a more formidable military, a more developed arms industry, and a nuclear infrastructure. But Iran is constrained from developing closer relations with Pakistan by its 27


desire not to alienate India, which it views as a major global power and a potentially important economic power.34 This consideration aside, Iran and Pakistan appear to be cooperating in the nuclear weapons related field. As Hashim notes, In 1986, Pakistan reportedly offered to train Iranian scientists in return for financial assistance with Pakistan’s own nuclear programme, and in 1987, both countries signed an agreement on technical cooperation in the military-nuclear field that included dispatching 39 Iranian nuclear scientists to Pakistan for training.35 Shahram Chubin points out, however, that Pakistan’s decision to cross the nuclear threshold in 1998 also gave Iran cause to consider the wider implications of nuclear rivalry beyond the subcontinent. Iran has reason to seek a stabilization of relations between Islamabad and New Delhi, for security reasons as well as for the prospect of finding a market for its future gas exports to the subcontinent, which would be routed overland by pipeline.36

The India–Pakistan struggle for power The competition for power in the Gulf is influenced by the struggle for power in South Asia. As Ibrahim A. Karawan explains, The Arab Middle East is not the only subsytem with which the GCC states interact and have major political, strategic, economic, and demographic linkages. The Indian subcontinent is another such region. No wonder then that the overt nuclear proliferation in South Asia in May 1998 attracted considerable attention in the Gulf region. In response to this proliferation, Arab analysts in GCC states discussed at great length the significance of that development for the region. Some of them have asserted that Pakistan’s nuclear tests brought joy to the “Islamic street” and concluded that Pakistan’s tests should be viewed as an occasion to rejoice because a fellow Muslim country had become member of a most prestigious club.37 The South Asian struggle for power is dominated by the bitter Pakistan– India rivalry that has resulted in several wars. Stephen Cohen observes that One of the puzzles of India–Pakistan relations is not why the smaller Pakistan feels encircled and threatened, but why the larger India does. It would seem that India, seven times more populous than 28


Pakistan and five times larger, would be more secure, especially since it defeated Pakistan in 1971. This is not the case, and Pakistan remains deeply embedded in Indian thinking. Historical, strategic, and ideological, and domestic reasons all play a role in India’s obsession with Pakistan, and Pakistan’s concern with India.38 Cohen judges that from the Indian perspective Pakistan is a threat, in part, because “it still claims that Partition was imperfectly carried out, it harbors some revanchist notions toward India’s Muslim population, and it falsely accuses India of wanting to undo Pakistan.”39 In contrast, “The dominant explanation of regional conflict held by Pakistan’s strategic community is that from the first day of independence there has been a concerted Indian attempt to crush their state.”40 The danger posed by the conflict between India and Pakistan was heightened in 1998 when both countries conducted nuclear tests and demonstrated their nuclear weapons capabilities. India had detonated a nuclear device in 1974 ostensibly for “peaceful purposes” but never declared that it had a nuclear weapons program. Pakistan and India since declaring their nuclear weapons capabilities have come to within a knife’s edge of war. In the 1999 Kargil crisis, the Pakistan military actively supported insurgent forces in an operation on the Indian side of the line of control in the disputed Kashmir province. Although Pakistan denied its direct military involvement, documentation revealed in the course of battle clearly shows that they were involved. The Pakistani military has deployed as many as five infantry battalions into India’s area of control.41 In late 2001 and early 2002, India conducted a major military mobilization of forces along the border in response to a terrorist attack against India’s Parliament building. India suspects that the terrorists received paramilitary training in camps in Pakistan supported by Pakistani intelligence services. The Indians are nurturing security ties with Israel, a state that also worries about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. New Delhi’s ties with Tel Aviv give India access to weapons technology and expertise that Washington is reluctant to provide India, in part, because of the United States’ efforts to strengthen ties with Pakistan to pursue al-Qaeda networks still operating inside Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. As P. R. Kumaraswamy explains, Israel enjoys certain unique advantages over other arms suppliers: its experience with weapons and systems of both the former blocs; the no-questions-asked policy that governs its arms trade; and its reputation as a reliable supplier and expertise in technological innovation and upgrading skills.42 Israel, for its part, benefits from ties with India as a means to balance Pakistani power. Tel Aviv no doubt is especially concerned that Pakistan 29


might assist nuclear weapons programs of other Islamic states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Indians are nurturing security ties with the United States to balance both Pakistan to the west and China to the north. During the cold war, India looked to the Soviet Union as its largest military and security backer. Much of the Indian military was designed around Soviet-built weapons systems such as tanks, armored personnel carriers, and combat aircraft. After the collapse of the cold war and India’s emergence as an economic power, particularly in the information and technology sector, New Delhi has warmed ties to the United States. New Delhi views ties with the United States as a means to counterbalance China power in Asia. As Ashley Tellis observes India’s strategic predicament now that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery capabilities, “Pakistan – the traditionally weaker adversary – has now neutralized India’s conventional and geostrategic advantages, while India remains weaker than its other major adversary, China, by most indices of strategic capability – including geopolitical importance, economic growth, and nuclear capacity.”43 As China’s economic, political, and military power grows and expands into South Asia it is likely to come into contact with growing Indian power in the region. This clash of growing interests and power are likely to add to long-standing Chinese and Indian tensions. The United States shares India’s concern about the long-run potential for Chinese power in Asia. From Washington’s vantage point, security ties with India offer a potential means to hold Chinese power in check in Asia. The Pakistanis also look to the United States to balance India, but they are cautious of the relationship given the disruptions in past relations. Pakistani– American security ties drastically reduced after the end of the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan that fueled close American–Pakistani security cooperation in the covert aid program to support the Afghani insurgency fighting Soviet forces. The relationship also was bruised by the American stoppage of security assistance to Pakistan because of American legislation – the Pressler Amendment – that required the United States to cut off security assistance to Pakistan because of Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program. China has been by far Pakistan’s most reliable partner for balancing Indian power in South Asia. Beijing has been especially instrumental in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. China gave Pakistan critical technologies for Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program to include ring magnets, diagnostic equipment, heavy water, highly enriched uranium, tritium, the Khushab research reactor, for the production of weapons-grade plutonium, as well as complete nuclear weapons designs, including one design that is reported to have involved a 20- to 25-kiloton solid-core implosion device.44 Pakistan’s relationship with China has also yielded invaluable assistance in acquiring delivery means for nuclear weapons. Tellis details that 30


Chinese assistance is suspected even in the development of Pakistan’s first indigenous missiles, the Hatf-1 and Hatf-2, both of which derived from the sounding rocket technologies imported from France by Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Organization (SUPARCO) in the 1960s. This assistance reached its high point in 1992 or thereabouts, when Beijing sold 34 M-11 ballistic missiles to Islamabad. These missiles, which are capable of a range of 300 km, while carrying an 800-kg payload (or 250 km with a 1000-kg payload), represented the first Pakistani missile system that was capable of carrying nuclear weapons.45 Tellis further notes that The delivery of the M-11s, a transaction that clearly skirted the Missile Technology Control Regime even if it did not directly violate it, was apparently followed by extensive Chinese assistance in the establishment of a missile production complex at Tarnawa outside of Rawalpindi – where, through the provision of blueprints, equipment, and possibly machine tools, Pakistan would be able to domestically produce M-11s, now designated the Hatf-3. Thanks to these transactions coupled with other indigenous R&D contributions, Pakistan has managed to acquire a reliable, solid-fueled, short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) that could assuredly deliver conventional or nuclear ordnance to any point at operational depths along the eastern frontier with India.46 Pakistan also is nurturing security ties with Saudi Arabia. The Pakistanis have deployed troops in the past to help shore up Saudi forces in the Kingdom. The deployment offered the Pakistanis an opportunity to make money while the Saudis benefited from a cushion of security on the ground separate from the American ground force presence. The Pakistanis and the Saudis appear to be building upon their security relationship. The Saudi Defense Minister has visited sensitive Pakistani nuclear weapons and ballistic missile production facilities over the past several years raising concerns that the Pakistanis and Saudis are cooperating in the ballistic missile and WMD fields. The Saudis might be interested in funding Pakistan’s money-strapped nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in return for some of the fruits of Pakistani labors.

Limits of power alignments The struggles for power that litter the strategic landscape in the greater Middle East region provide the political-military context for discussions of weapons proliferation and war. By way of analogy, these power struggles 31


form the playing field that set the boundaries for the strategic contest in which nation-states are the players on the field, weapons are the equipment they use, and the game is politics for prestige, power, and interest. These external moves and security partnerships are the means by which nationstates in the greater Middle East region seek to augment and complement their domestic sources of power. The next chapter examines internal efforts – specifically the acquisition of chemical weapons – that Saddam’s Iraq took to augment its power. Although Saddam’s regime is no more, its chemical weapons path is a well-trodden one that other states in the greater Middle East are still traveling.

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3 GULF LESSONS Chemical weapons deterrence and war fighting

Strategically wise statesmen realize that nation-states are constantly reevaluating the equations of power in the cascade of never-ending strategic circumstances. This is especially true in the Middle East and South Asia where nation-states are locked in ceaseless regional struggles for power. They are constantly nurturing security relationships with other nation-states inside and outside the region – particularly with the United States, Russia, and China – to enhance their power and interests. But ultimately, the security of all nation-states rests on their own power. Nation-states must hedge against the all too real contingency that in the heat of the competition for power and interests they might abruptly lose their foreign security partners. Military power remains a critical, but by no means only, ingredient to ensure the security of nation-states. Countries in the Middle East and South Asia keenly gauge the military prowess of their competitors and security partners. In the Arab–Israeli struggle for power, Arab states recognize that those of Israel, which won all of the Middle East wars, dwarf their conventional military capabilities. Syrian President Bashar Asad, for example, in an interview with a British newspaper early in 2004 said that any move to destroy Syria’s chemical and biological capabilities would come about only if Israel abandons its nuclear weapons capabilities.1 In the Persian Gulf struggle for power, the Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, and small Gulf Arab states witnessed first-hand the unparallelled American power projection capabilities demonstrated in the military defeat of Iraqi forces in both Gulf wars. In the South Asian contest for power, Pakistan judges itself vulnerable to India with its massive geography, demography, and military forces. In making their gross military balance of power calculations in these regional power competitions, many nation-states conclude that they lack the money and means to achieve a rough measure of conventional military capabilities to at least match or balance those of their rivals. The procurement and maintenance of large-standing conventional forces is increasingly an expensive undertaking, which strains the economic means of many nationstates. Consequently, many nation-states are turning to WMD, which they judge will give them the means in the first instance to deter armed conflict 33

GULF LESSONS

with adversaries or in the second instance to wage war in the event that deterrence fails. In the latter case, many nation-states hope that WMD will compensate for conventional military shortcomings in battle. How effective, however, are WMD for deterring adversaries and waging war in the event that deterrence fails? This chapter explores the rich case history of chemical weapons that stems from the strategic contest for power in the Persian Gulf. The history of warfare in this region is ripe for examining the strengths and weaknesses of the contributions that chemical weapons make to the security and national interests of nation-states. This chapter discusses the use of chemical weapons in the 1960s civil war in Yemen that set the precedent for chemical weapons use in the region and gave an impetus to other chemical weapons programs in the greater Middle East. It then examines the large-scale and militarily significant use of Iraqi chemical weapons during the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war. The Iraqis at the time were in an advantageous position because they had more robust and sophisticated chemical weapons capabilities than their Iranian foes. The study of Iraqi chemical weapons use in the Iran–Iraq war provides a stark contrast to the Iraqi non-use of chemical weapons in combat with American forces in the 1991 and 2003 wars. The impact of biological weapons – which are commonly lumped together with chemical weapons under the rubric of weapons of mass destruction – receives only parenthetical treatment because they have not been used in Gulf combat on a scale comparable to that of chemical weapons. The chapter synthesizes lessons learned and draws implications on chemical weapons deterrence and warfare for the future greater Middle Eastern contingencies. This chapter draws on rich repositories of primary sources, which have not received adequate scholarly attention. These materials include declassified US Government documents from the American intelligence community to include Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) human intelligence reporting, CIA finished intelligence analyses, defense attaché reporting, and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) finished intelligence analyses.2 These materials contain a wealth of under-exploited information on Iraq. They were declassified and made available to the public as part of a US government effort to release information possibly related to the Gulf war illness controversy, in which veterans of the 1990–1991 Gulf war suffer from medical ailments they suspect originated from Iraqi use of chemical or biological weapons. The declassified reports are a windfall for scholars, students, and the general public seeking to understand Iraq’s chemical weapons programs and capabilities under Saddam’s regime.

Conventional force inadequacies and the WMD default Military power is relative in international strategic contests. The Israeli military has time and again demonstrated on the fields of battle that it is 34

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superior to Arab forces. What is it that accounts for the dramatic Israeli military achievements against Arab forces in battle? Are we to believe the Arab worldview that Israeli military power is due to the equipping of Israeli forces with American military hardware that is qualitatively superior to Russian-built arms around which many Arab militaries have centered their militaries?3 Or are other factors at work to account for the conventional military superiority of Israel? Much to the dismay of Arab officials and officers a wide array of factors – other than the single casual explanation of American security assistance, to which many ascribe – contributed to Israel’s military prowess. Arab observers shy away from examining the sources of the poor battlefield showings of Arab forces in no small measure because critiques of ruling regime policies are neither permissible nor tolerated. Nevertheless, the assessment of an American scholar, Kenneth Pollack, in an exhaustive study of Arab warfare is that Four areas of military effectiveness stand out as consistent and crippling problems for Arab forces: poor tactical leadership, poor information management, poor weapons handling, and poor maintenance. These complications were present in every single Arab army and air force between 1948 and 1991. All had significant and identifiable effects on the performance of Arab armed forces.4 As Pollack elaborates, “The lack of initiative, improvisation, adaptability, flexibility, independent judgment, willingness to maneuver, and ability to integrate the various combat arms effectively meant that Arab armies and air forces were regularly outfought by their adversaries.”5 These Arab shortcomings are substantially more difficult to correct than the mere supply of American military hardware as the Arab diagnosis would have it. These findings, in fact, strongly suggest that Arab forces even if qualitatively and quantitatively equipped with American military equipment on a par with Israeli inventories still would be no match for Israeli military power. Perhaps more damaging to the prospects for Arab development of robust conventional military capabilities is that all of their weaknesses are critical requirements for exploiting the Revolution of Military Affairs (RMA) – or more modestly, the transformation of military affairs – which offers the opportunity to magnify the destructive capabilities of militaries and increase the uses and effectiveness of military power. Arab military shortcomings, stemming in no small measure from stagnant economies and societies, portend dismal prospects for Arab militaries tapping the military capabilities offered by the RMA. The Iranians like their Arab counterparts have formidable conventional military shortcomings. The Iranian armed forces lost their principal military equipment supplier in the United States after the Iranian revolution. The 35

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regime largely dismantled the Iranian armed forces because it saw the Shah’s instruments as a threat to its hold on power. Iranian forces given their mass were roughly comparable to the capabilities of Iraqi forces until the last stages of the Iran–Iraq war, in which Iraqi forces showed greater military capabilities on the battlefield while Iranian forces increasingly suffered the effects of an eight-year war of attrition which led Tehran to capitulate politically in 1988 to Iraq. The Iranians have failed to rebuild their conventional military forces that were in tatters after the Iran–Iraq war. As Michael Eisenstadt assesses Iran’s conventional weapons procurement effort seems to have run out of steam in the past year or so. This is not because Iran no longer feels the need to expand and to modernize its conventional forces, but apparently because it believes that, given its current financial constraints (in large part owing to the dramatic decline in world oil prices in the past year), available funds are best spent augmenting its WMD and missile delivery capabilities.6 The drive for WMD in the greater Middle East is a reflection of an acute security dilemma embedded in regional struggles for power. The Israelis, early in their national security history, had felt the strategic pressure of the Arab states, numerically greater populations, armies, and weapons. Their response was to feel the dire need for a nuclear weapons deterrent. After consistently prevailing against Arab states in war, Tel Aviv feels less threatened from conventional military threats, but reserves its nuclear deterrent to deter the use of such weapons by adversaries. By the same token, Arab states and Iran judge that the Israeli nuclear deterrent needs to be balanced with chemical and biological weapons, perceived by many as the “poor man’s nuclear weapon” in the short run. Nation-states in the greater Middle East are pursuing WMD programs to compete for regional power between them, but also to deter or even fight the United States whose interests are often at odds with those of nation-states in the region. As Steven Spiegel explains, they seek WMD because they fear rival states; the weapons, particularly chemical and biological weapons, are cheaper than a large arsenal of conventional weapons as well as easier and require less technological sophistication to produce; and WMD serve as a deterrent against United States or regional power military action.7 Greater Middle Eastern states know from direct demonstrations of American military power in the region with wars against Saddam’s Iraq and the Taliban’s Afghanistan that they cannot match American military forces in a straight-up fight. In an elaboration of these points, Susan Martin observes, to the extent that the RMA increases the conventional military power of the United States and/or the willingness of the United 36

GULF LESSONS

States to use its power, the RMA may spur the acquisition of WMD and especially biological weapons in an effort by states to counter a perceived threat from the United States.8 The Arab states as well as Pakistan and Iran find themselves in a similar set of circumstances and are turning to the default of “asymmetric” warfare to include chemical warfare to compensate for conventional force shortcomings. The term asymmetric warfare has recently become a mainstay in the contemporary strategic studies literature, but its usage reflects a somewhat narrow frame of historical reference. As Colin Gray insightfully observes, In the history of strategic ideas, the contemporary American fascination with asymmetry comprises rediscovery of the stunningly obvious. To behave in ways different from those expected by an enemy can be simply good tactics, operational art, and strategy. Since asymmetrical merely means different, it is a little hard to understand quite why the notion has been elevated as the latest fashionable Big Idea.9 Gray continues, “To a greater or lesser degree, all tactical, operational, and strategic behavior is asymmetrical. There are no identical belligerents, with identical forces, who behave identically.”10 A full examination of the uses and limitations on the concept of asymmetric warfare lies beyond the scope of this chapter, but for our purposes here, asymmetrical warfare simply refers the use of weapons and tactics designed to attack vulnerabilities in the military capabilities of adversaries. Often overlooked in the United States is the view of regional states that WMD are usable instruments of war. The use of biological weapons has been rare in modern combat, in part, because they are difficult to use because of the dangers posed to the user’s troops and population outweighs the limited immediate impact on the course of battle with the last suspected use by the Soviet Union and Japan in World War II.11 The use of chemical weapons, however, has been more substantial in combat, particularly in the Middle East. In the United States and the West the common wisdom is that WMD are for deterrence, but states in the greater Middle East are unlikely to fully accept that notion as evident from the history of warfare in the region. Chemical warfare has been used in war in the greater Middle East for deterrence as well as war fighting over the past forty years, most extensively in the Persian Gulf.

Chemical warfare in the greater Middle East Officials and diplomats from the greater Middle East with their public faces will deny that their countries have chemical warfare programs, but privately 37

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they might argue that their nation-states primarily have chemical weapons as a “poor man’s deterrent” to counterbalance an adversary’s superior conventional or nuclear forces. To be sure, this is an important dimension of the proliferation problem, but that observation fails to take into account the perception in the Middle East and South Asia that chemical weapons (CW) offer important benefits on the battlefield and may offer potential war winning capabilities to the possessor. States in the greater Middle East in many respects are retracing the experiences of European states in the World Wars. As Frederic Brown discovered, the Europeans came to realize by 1918 – after about one million chemical weapons casualties in the course of World War I – that chemical warfare was extremely versatile, usable in tactical situations, but that logistic requirements complicated the battlefield and their employment demanded sophisticated training and was effective only if it could be used unilaterally.12 John Ellis van Courtland Moon confirms that latter finding in his study of World War II in which “Japan, relatively protected from retaliation and far better prepared for CW than its enemy, may have used gas and germs against Chinese field armies and civilians.”13 The history of combat in the greater Middle East attests to the belief in the region that chemical weapons are important battlefield instruments. Egypt used chemical weapons in counterinsurgency operations in the 1960s during the civil war in Yemen. The Libyans used chemical weapons against the Chad in the 1980s. And the Soviets used chemical weapons in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The battlefield effectiveness of chemical weapons in these cases, however, probably does not measure up to the expectations of the common, if unofficially unannounced, military perceptions in the greater Middle East region. Egypt set the precedent for chemical weapons combat use in the greater Middle East. Andrew Terrill recalls that “Chemical weapons use in the Middle East dates back to the early 1960s, when an Egyptian expeditionary force made sporadic but escalating use of chemical-filled aerial bombs against royalist tribesmen in the country of Yemen.”14 The combat effectiveness of Egyptian chemical weapons appears to have been marginal. Egyptian forces primarily used mustard gas and phosgene and appear not to have used more deadly nerve agents.15 Terrill assesses that chemical weapons in Yemen were used in a limited way without decisive military results and at some political cost and the total number of chemical attacks may have been about 40. Casualties are more difficult to assess. One Israeli source suggests that Egyptian chemical attacks produces about 400 dead and 900 seriously wounded. Any estimates, however, must be considered quite tentative.16 Libya too resorted to chemical weapons to fight irregular forces. Joshua 38

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Sinai recounts that in 1987, Libyan’s military occupation in Chad was threatened by a string of battlefield losses at the hands of Chadian forces, backed by French support. Libyan leader Qadhafi ordered his forces to counterattack Chadian forces assaulting a Libyan military base with Iraniansupplied mustard gas bombs dropped from a transport aircraft. The use of Libya’s chemical weapons, however, was not extensive enough, in Sinai’s assessment, to be militarily decisive.17 The Soviets also made use of chemical weapons in counterinsurgency operations in the greater Middle East. A declassified 1982 CIA analysis found that Soviet forces in Afghanistan have used lethal and casualty-producing agents on Mujahedin resistance forces and Afghan villages since the December 1979 invasion. There is some evidence that Afghan Government forces may have used chemical weapons provided by the USSR against the Mujahedin even before the invasion. No agents have been identified through sample analysis, but we conclude from analysis of all the evidence that attacks have been conducted with irritants, incapacitants, nerve agents, phosgene . . . mustard, lewisite, and other unidentified toxic smokes.18 The report found that “fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters were usually employed to disseminate CW agents by rockets, bombs, and sprays. Chemicalfilled landmines were also reportedly used by the Soviets.”19 In a 1983 analysis, CIA concluded that the “The Soviets have continued selective use of chemical agents throughout the past year against resistance forces and against villages that did not cooperate with the Afghan authorities.”20 The Soviet Union’s use of chemical agents in the 1980s against insurgents in Afghanistan is strikingly similar to the pattern of Egypt’s employment of chemical weapons in the 1960s counterinsurgency campaign in Yemen, although on a much larger scale.

Chemical weapons deterence and warfare: the Iraq cases The use of chemical weapons for both deterrence and the fighting of wars are striking features of conflicts in the Persian Gulf over the last twenty years. The Iran–Iraq war witnessed the most massive use of chemical weapons in the modern world. And the perceived threat of chemical weapons use hung over the United States’ armed conflicts with Iraq in 1991 and 2003. The study of these weapons in the Persian Gulf conflict – specifically Iraq’s possession of the most robust chemical weapons program and inventory and the most sophisticated use of these agents on the battlefield – benefits from a richer documentation than the earlier cases of chemical weapons use in Yemen, Chad, and Afghanistan. 39

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Iraq took many tactical pointers from Egypt’s experience with chemical warfare in Yemen. As Terrill explains, Iraq paid careful attention to the Egyptian use of chemical weapons in Yemen, and the Iraqis appear to have been impressed with the military potential of these systems. Accordingly, in the late 1960s, the Iraqis began research on chemical weapons and even appear to have developed preliminary plans to produce mustard gas. This program was later expanded to include an effort to produce nerve agents by the 1970s.21 According to Terrill, “After a series of temporary setbacks, the Iraqis were able to find European suppliers for the equipment to produce massive amounts of these agents. This acquisition was accelerated greatly at the beginning of the Gulf war in September 1980.”22 The Iraqis obtained substantial and direct assistance from the Egyptians in establishing Baghdad’s chemical weapons program. Dany Shoham recalls that in the late 1970s Cairo began secretly to cooperate with Iraq. Baghdad offered considerable financial support to increase Egypt’s output of CW agents and chemical munitions. In the 1980s Egypt began modernizing its military chemical warfare production capabilities centered at Military Plant No. 801 at Abu Za’abal with the aid of West European companies for key nerve-agent precursors, and built an enlarged manufacturing facility for nerve gas.23 In a secret 1981 agreement, Iraq gave Egypt $12 million to expand its CW capabilities and, in return, Egypt assisted Iraq in the production and storage of CW agents, the establishment of chemical manufacturing facilities in Iraq, and the purchase of raw materials for the production of CW agents.24 It should be noted parenthetically – with full appreciation for the fluidity of the balance of power as discussed in chapter 2 – that ten years after the major Egyptian assistance to Iraq’s chemical warfare program, two Egyptian army divisions were preparing in Saudi Arabia to participate in war against Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait. That history underscores the power politics adage that in international politics there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Iraq’s incentive to build up its chemical warfare program was fueled by battlefield demands in the war with Iran. Baghdad faced a numerically superior force and turned to chemical weapons as a battlefield “force multiplier.” By the end of the war in 1988, Iraqi forces had been quite proficient in integrating chemical fires into offensive operations against Iranian forces. Iraq had later hoped that chemical weapons would deter the United States 40

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from militarily intervening in the aftermath of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Saddam and his lieutenants might have concluded from the course of the 1991 Gulf war that American forces were deterred by Iraqi chemical weapons from marching on Baghdad and limited the American campaign to the Kuwaiti theater of operations. Baghdad, too, may have been deterred by ambiguous American threats to retaliate massively if Iraq resorted to WMD in the battle for Kuwait. Despite American and British assessments that Saddam was harboring a clandestine chemical weapons stockpile in the run up to the 2003 war, post-war investigations strongly suggest that Iraq’s chemical weapons program had substantially decayed in the aftermath of the 1991 war.

The 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war: Baghdad’s chemical weapons advantage Iraq turned to chemical weapons during the Iran–Iraq war for several reasons. Baghdad was facing a numerically superior foe, which at the earliest stages of the war lacked the means to retaliate against Iraqi chemical weapons with chemical weapons of its own. CIA analysis judged from the Iran–Iraq war that CW’s effectiveness was maximized when surprise was used against unprepared troops.25 Iraqi tactical chemical weapons doctrine was probably influenced by Iraq’s Egyptian chemical warfare mentors. And the Egyptians, in turn, might have received a fair amount of chemical warfare training from their Soviet patrons. The Soviets, too, were in a position to provide direct chemical warfare training assistance to the Iraqis. Former United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq made the assessment that Iraqi chemical warfare doctrine was “heavily influenced by Soviet thinking and training, Iraqi chemical warfare doctrine stresses that the use of chemical weapons to demoralize and provoke fear in an enemy is as important as inflicting battlefield casualties.”26 Counter-intuitively, chemical warfare may yield greater battlefield results if chemical fires produce more casualties than fatalities. “Iraqi military strategists understood that it is more debilitating to the adversary to injure rather than kill troops, because dead soldiers require far less attention than wounded ones.”27 CIA reporting during the war indicated that “Iranian rear area support troops occasionally sustain large numbers of casualties because they are less prepared and equipped to cope with chemical attacks. In this regard, rear area chemical attacks may be a force multiplier for Iraq.”28 The Iraqis sought to use chemical weapons in the earliest stages of the war to make up for manpower shortcomings to cover the defense of large swathes of territory. Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner observe that “Chemical weapons offered a potential solution to the problem of mountain or rough-terrain warfare, and in many cases, it allowed Iraq to secure a mountainous area with relatively few troops.”29 CIA analysts judged that 41

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Saddam Husayn’s initial political and military decision to use chemical weapons against Iran seems to have been made in an effort to compensate for Iraq’s limited military manpower pool. Iraq was able to use CW to minimize personnel and territorial losses by stalling or preventing Iranian human wave attacks and because Iran had only limited CW protective capabilities and could not retaliate in kind.30 CIA wrote, “In our judgment, the Iraqis perceive chemical weapons to be an effective complement to their conventional arsenal.”31 Iraq’s combat use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces evolved over the course of the eight-year war, moving from defensive tactical purposes to offensively orientated tactical uses in the later stages of the war. CIA analysts in evaluating chemical weapons use in the Iran–Iraq war judged that Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Iran can be divided into three distinct phases. The first phase, which continued until 1986, involved the use of CW agents in a strictly defensive role, to disrupt or halt Iranian offensives. In a transitory phase lasting from late 1986 to early 1988, Iraq used chemical weapons preemptively against staging areas prior to Iranian offensives, while continuing to rely on CW to disrupt these offensives. Finally, and most significantly, Iraq used massed nerve agent strikes as an integral part of its well-orchestrated offensives in the spring and summer of 1998. The success of these offensives prompted Iran to accept a cease-fire in August 1988.32 These phases show that with the benefits of trial and error, experience, practice, and time, Iraqi forces progressively became more sophisticated in meeting the demands of waging chemical warfare. Iraq’s initial use of chemical warfare was poor and ineffective in the earliest trial stages in the first Gulf war. “When Iraq first used chemical weapons in February and March 1984 during operations in the Majnoon Marshes, for example, the wind shifted and blew back mustard gas against the Iraqi forces, causing casualties.”33 As the war went on, Iraqi forces learned to tailor the delivery of chemical agents to the specific tactical situation. For example, the Iraqis learned to launch chemical strikes to maintain the momentum of ground engagements or to deny terrain to the enemy. Nonpersistent, volatile agents such as sarin (GB) were used to attack targets that would be overrun quickly by advancing forces, while more persistent agents such as mustard gas or cyclosarin (GF) were used for missile or aerial-bomb attacks against supply depots, assembly areas, and command-control nodes in the Iranian rear, causing poorly protected rear-echelon soldiers and volunteers to flee.34 42

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The Iraqis in the earliest stages of the war held tight political reins over chemical weapons fires. Foremost in Saddam’s mind was the security of his regime, and he no doubt worried that too free a delegation of command and control over chemical weapons could be turned against him by elements within the Iraqi armed forces. From the initial use of chemical weapons in August 1983 through late 1986, chemical release authority was held exclusively by Saddam Hussein. The General Staff could request chemical fires – as could corps and division commanders in the event they were in imminent danger of being overrun or defeated – but Saddam would approve or deny the request.35 But as time wore on the tight command and control of chemical fires proved to be too cumbersome to react to the fluidity of the battlefield. Saddam consequently loosened the command reins on chemical fires, fearing more the prospect of Iranian battlefield successes than the potential actions of internal Iraqi military dissidents. The lessening of tight control gave Iraqi operational commanders greater leeway and flexibility in integrating chemical fires into offensive battle plans. CIA assessed that In 1986, CW release authority was delegated to corps-level commanders as the result of Iraqi losses during the Al Faw and Mebran campaigns and after the military apparently convinced President Husayn to change release authority for chemical weapons to permit better integration of CW into battle plans.36 As the tight political control over chemical fires loosened, Iraqi combat capabilities increased. CIA analysts assessed that Iraq appears to have become more competent in its capability to integrate chemicals into its conventional battle strategy. As chemical weapons have become more available and have been successfully employed, Iraqi political and military leaders appear to have accepted them as a tactically useful and effective weapon. We believe that chemical munitions, in a few cases, have been significant in the context of specific battles.37 Towards the end of the Iran–Iraq war, Baghdad was making effective and extensive use of chemical weapons and integrating them into battle plans. CIA analysts asserted that In 1988 Iraq began to fully integrate CW into its successful offensives. In the battles of Al Faw, Fish Lake, and Majnoon Islands 43

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during the final months of the war, Iraq made heavy use of chemical weapons. For example, in the April 1988 battle to recapture the Al Faw Peninsula, we estimate that the Iraqis used well over 100 tons of CW agent. The suddenness and severity of this attack disrupted Iranian command and control, decimated key units, and threw the Iranian defenders into disarray. The resulting victory took only 30 hours, which surprised even the Iraqi military planners. Subsequent offensives were preceded by massed chemical attacks and met with similar success.38 During the final offensives of 1988, Iraqi commanders integrated chemical weapons into their offensive battlefield operations. The Iraqis first laid down persistent mustard agent in the Iranian force’s rear area and then bombarded the front with the nonpersistent nerve agent sarin, so that Iranian troops retreating from the sarincontaminated area would be exposed to the mustard agent as well.39 What then were the overall effects of Iraqi chemical warfare against Iranian forces? In an analysis of chemical warfare in the Iran–Iraq war, CIA analysts wrote “Overall, we believe the frequency of chemical weapons use, initially constrained by availability, has increased while the effectiveness of Baghdad’s CW employment in major battles is improving.”40 As Cordesman and Wagner assess, As for the overall impact of chemical weapons, it is clear that Iraq had substantially greater success in using such weapons after 1987. While 45,000 casualties from gas was a relatively minor part of the well over one million military and civilian casualties that resulted from the war, chemical weapons also seem to have had a critical effect on Iranian military and civilian morale in the Iraqi counteroffensives and “war of the cities” in 1988. Sheer killing power also is not the issue. Troops that feel they are defenseless may well break and run after limited losses.41 The Iraqis, while waging war with Iran, were also waging a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Kurds. From Baghdad’s perspective, the Kurds were a “hidden column” of Iran-backed opposition to Saddam’s regime. The Iraqi turn to chemical weapons to wage a counterinsurgency campaign against the Kurds was reminiscent of the Egyptian, Libyan, and Soviet resort to chemical weapons in their counterinsurgency campaigns in Yemen, Chad, and Afghanistan, respectively. The Iraqis, however, used chemical weapons on a greater scale and with greater brutality against civilians than in earlier greater Middle Eastern histories of chemical warfare. The Iraqi regime used chemical weapons against the Kurds for a variety of tactical purposes. These included the attack of base camps and Kurdish force 44

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concentrations, to harass and kill retreating Kurdish forces, to inflict exemplary collective punishment on Kurdish civilians who supported Kurdish peshmerga forces, and to cause terror among the civilian population to force them from villages for capture, relocation, and killing.42 The Iraqis also used chemical weapons delivered by aircraft bombs to kill civilians and prepare for invasion and occupation by Iraqi ground forces.43 Avigdor Haselkorn also notes that Iraqi CW use against the Kurds was used “as a deliberate effort to spread fear among the opposition.”44 Iraqi chemical weapons use during the Anfal campaign was particularly extensive and brutal against Kurds and to a lesser extent against Iranian Revolutionary Guards in and around Halabja in Kurdistan. Based on eyewitness testimony and field interviews, Human Rights Watch determined that at least sixty villages, as well as the town of Halabja, were attacked with mustard, nerve agents or a combination during Anfal operations from 1987 to 1988.45 Human Rights watch estimates that up to 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed in chemical attacks on Halabja in March 1988.46 A Kurdish survey team found that more than two hundred towns and villages in the Kurdish region of Iraq were attacked by chemical weapons.47 The Iraqis in many attacks used a combination of mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin and VX, and some suspect that a biological weapon, aflatoxin, which causes long-term liver damage, was also used.48 Many segments of Saddam’s security apparatus were charged with orchestrating the Anfal campaign. Human Rights Watch researched extensive Iraqi government documents which established that “the central actors in Anfal with the First and Fifth Corps of the regular Iraqi army, were the General Security Directorate, and Military Intelligence.”49 Human Rights Watch determined that The main military thrust of Anfal was carried by regular troops of the First and Fifth Corps, backed by units from other corps as they became available from the Iranian front. The elite Republican Guards took part in the first phase of Anfal; other units that saw action included the special forces, commando forces, and the emergency forces – the Ba’ath party-controlled urban counterterrorism squads. Finally, a wide range of support activities – such as preceding regular army units into populated areas, burning and looting villages, tracking down fleeing villagers, and organizing their surrender – were handled by the Kurdish paramilitary jahsh.50 The campaign – with the brutal and deliberate targeting of civilians – was intended to terrorize the Kurds and even to threaten their very existence. Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, was heard on a tape, which was captured by Kurds and later obtained by Human Rights Watch, addressing members of Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath Party that “I will kill them [the Kurds] all 45

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with chemical weapons!”51 Human Rights Watch conservatively estimates that 50,000 Kurds were killed – in conventional as well as chemical attacks – in the Anfal campaign.52

1990–1991 Gulf war and mutual deterrence The Iraqi track record of chemical weapons use in the Iran–Iraq war lent strong empirical evidence to the judgment by American intelligence that Iraq could use chemical weapons to counter an American military bid to dislodge Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait. Despite this anticipation, there is no solid evidence that Iraq employed chemical weapons during the 1991 Gulf war. The Iraqis appear to have been deterred by the threat of massive American retaliation from employing them in defense of Iraqi positions in Kuwait. Saddam, however, might have jettisoned reservations had American forces pushed on to Baghdad instead of halting offensive operations in the Kuwaiti theater of operations. In the run up to the war over Kuwait, the Bush administration was concerned that the Iraqis would resort to the asymmetrical response of chemical and biological attacks to compensate for their conventional military inferiority vis-à-vis American and coalition forces. Secretary of State James Baker conveyed the American retaliatory warnings to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz from a letter from President Bush to Saddam Hussein in a meeting in Geneva in January 1991 prior to the war. President Bush wrote, “the United States will not tolerate the use of chemical or biological weapons or the destruction of Kuwait’s oil fields and installations.” Bush warned, “The American people would demand the strongest possible response. You and your country will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable acts of this sort.”53 Parenthetically, it is worth noting that Iraqi forces torched and destroyed Kuwait’s oil and civilian infrastructure as they were retreating from Kuwait, but the US military campaign was not escalated in any appreciable way, as Bush had warned in his letter to Saddam. Although Bush did not explicitly warn of nuclear retaliation, the threat was ambiguously implied. The Iraqis received Bush’s implied threat and appear to have been deterred from using chemical and biological weapons, at least over the war for Kuwait. Former UN weapons inspectors in Iraq report that senior Iraqi officials “stated that they were deterred from using unconventional weapons by fears that the United States or Israel would retaliate with nuclear weapons.”54 Likewise, former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer said of his 1995 discussions with Iraqi officers that “the impression was conveyed that the President [Hussein] thought if Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against the coalition, retaliation would end his regime and probably him personally.”55 American intelligence reporting and analysis supports the conclusions of 46

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former UN inspectors that the Iraqis were deterred by the fear of American nuclear retaliation for Iraqi chemical or biological attacks. CIA analysts judged that “The prospect of coalition retaliation probably deterred Saddam from employing weapons of mass destruction as part of Iraq’s initial defense against a coalition ground advance.”56 According to CIA analysts, “A variety of reporting indicates that Baghdad initially was probably deterred from employing chemical or biological weapons as part of its first line of defense because of the expectation that the coalition might retaliate massively, possibly even with nuclear weapons.”57 CIA human intelligence reporting indicated that former Iraqi Minister of Industry and Minerals Husayn Kamil Hasan al-Majid claimed that “the Iraqi command became convinced that the United States would use tactical nuclear weapons against Iraq if Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against the coalition.”58 Fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation may have also worked to deter Saddam from launching his ballistic missiles armed with chemical and biological weapons against Israel. CIA analysts judged that Saddam was probably similarly dissuaded from launching his Scuds with chemical or biological warheads out of fear of US or Israeli nuclear retaliation. Once Saddam realized that conventional missile attacks had failed to drag Israel into war, he may have calculated that even if Israel was finally drawn into the war, resorting to weapons of mass destruction would have caused disproportionate damage to Iraq.59 Amatzia Baram’s assessment is that The Iraqi leaders had to consider the possibility that a WMD strike on Israel could lead to the destruction of Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, and his own hometown, Tikrit, and environs. There was no reason to take such a huge risk, as long as there was no immediate danger that Baghdad would be occupied and the regime toppled.60 On the other hand, the Iraqis judge that their possession of chemical and biological weapons deterred the United States from staging a ground invasion of Iraq after defeating Iraqi forces in the battle for Kuwait. Duelfer notes from his exchanges about the war with Iraqi officers that my interlocutors went on to describe how they had loaded BW and CW agent into various missile warheads and bombs before hostilities in 1991. Moreover, they dispersed these weapons and pre-delegated the authority to use them if the United States moved on Baghdad. The Iraqis stated that these actions apparently deterred the United States from going to Baghdad.61 47

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Duelfer assesses that “clearly they are convinced that the possession of WMD contributed to keeping the Americans away and thus was vital to their survival.”62 The Iraqis may have also come to the conclusion that the fear of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons retaliatory strikes deterred Israel from retaliating with WMD for Iraqi ballistic missile attacks that were armed with conventional payloads. In a February 1990 meeting with visiting US senators, Saddam said that he had predelegated authority to launch a retaliatory chemical attack in the event of an Israeli nuclear strike on Baghdad. He stated that I repeat now, in your presence, that if Israel strikes, we will strike back. I believe this is a fair stand. A stand known in advance is what helps peace. . . . For if Israel realizes it will be struck, it might refrain from striking. . . . If Israel uses atomic bombs, we will strike it with binary chemical weapons. . . . We have given instructions to the commanders of the air bases and the missile formations that once they hear Israel has hit any place in Iraq with the atomic bomb, they will load the chemical weapon with as much as will reach Israel and direct it at its territory . . . we have told them that if they do not receive an order from higher authority and a city is struck with an atomic bomb, they will point toward Israel any weapons capable of reaching it.63 The Iraqis may have planned to wage chemical and biological warfare to defend Baghdad notwithstanding the fear of nuclear retaliation. According to Kenneth Pollack, in 1994 the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service who defected from Iraq told the United Nations that despite what it had been led to believe, Iraq had developed VX nerve agent (one of the most lethal forms of chemical warfare) and loaded it onto missiles during the Gulf war for use if the coalition had marched on Baghdad or used nuclear weapons; it had a far more advanced and extensive biological warfare program than inspectors knew, and this program was largely intact and operational; and Iraqi had held on to a secret stash of chemical and biological munitions along with more than forty modified Scud ballistic missiles.64 The defection in August 1995 of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and key figure in Saddam’s WMD programs, revealed more details of Iraqi clandestine WMD programs. According to Pollack, inspectors learned from Kamel that “Iraq had an offensive BW program, but also that it had weaponized biological agents and had loaded them into 166 bombs and 48

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25 missile warheads for use during the Gulf war if the coalition marched on Baghdad.”65 A variety of intelligence sources indicated that the Iraqis were preparing for chemical and biological warfare in the run up to the war. CIA assessed that “It is clear that the risk of Iraqi employment of at least chemical weapons during the war had been very high. Baghdad’s preparations for chemical warfare indicate that use of chemicals was considered an option early in the crisis.”66 The Iraqis had been prepared for the potential use of chemical weapons in the aftermath of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, perhaps in preparatory moves for a possible follow-on thrust into Saudi Arabia. According to Pollack, a CIA military analyst at the time of the war, in early August 1990 there was “unmistakable evidence that the Iraqis were loading CW munitions onto strike aircraft at several of their airfields in southern Kuwait.”67 The Iraqis also had prepared ground forces for the use of chemical weapons. Pollack reports that Baghdad moved thousands of CW-filled artillery shells and 122 mm rockets to storage facilities, one of which was located in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations. Most were left in depots about 100 kilometers back, however, where they could be moved quickly to the frontline troops if Saddam ordered it but where they were unlikely to be fired accidentally.68 Based on analysis of the Iran–Iraq war, CIA analysts in weighing Iraqi options for further pressing the attack into Saudi Arabia after the successful invasion of Kuwait, speculated that Sarin would be the agent of choice for targets that Iraq wants to occupy quickly – including oilfields and other key objectives – as well as on battlefield defenses. Mustard might be used to protect Iraqi flanks and, against key transportation nodes, to hinder movement and resupply of opposing forces. The semipersistent nerve agent GF could be used in place of Sarin if the target need not be captured immediately.69 The Iraqis had a robust inventory of chemical and biological weapons on which to draw for fighting American forces. Iraq filled 13,500 artillery shells (155 mm) with mustard agent before 15 October 1990, between December 1990 and January 1991, Iraq filled 8,320 12 mm rockets with a sarin/ cyclosarin (GB/GF) mixture, and in January 1991, Hussein Kamel (presumably at Saddam’s request) asked the Ministry of Defense to provide thirtyone trailers to forward-deploy these munitions to depots in southern Iraq.70 United Nations inspectors determined that Iraq on the eve of the war had seventy-five “special” chemical and biological missile warheads that were 49

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produced in late 1990. Fifty were chemical warheads – sixteen of which were filled with live agent (GB or GB/GF mix) and thirty-four were Iraqi-type binary (precursors mixed manually shortly before launch) – and twenty-five were biological warheads, some were filled with anthrax while others contained botulinum toxin and aflatoxin.71 With the benefits of UN inspections after the Gulf war, a sharper image of Iraqi chemical weapons programs came into focus. Iraq was able to produce several chemical weapons agents, including mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun (GA), sarin (GB), cyclosarin (GF), and VX. Baghdad could also fill these agents into a variety of delivery systems to include artillery and mortar shells, 250- and 500-kilogram bombs for combat aircraft, 122 mm surface-tosurface rockets, and 90 mm air-to-surface rockets for attack helicopters. The United Nations also destroyed an enormous amount of Iraqi chemical agents from 1991 to 1994; 28,049 Iraqi chemical munitions and more than 481,000 liters of chemical warfare agents and precursors, although the United Nations was unable to find or eliminate Iraq’s suspected VX stockpile.72 United Nations weapons inspections, moreover, shed some light on what had been a very dim understanding of Iraqi biological weapons. Baghdad had initiated a “crash” program of large-scale production and weaponization of biological weapons during several months after the invasion of Kuwait. The UN determined that Iraq had produced at least 19,000 liters of concentrated botulinum toxin, 8,500 liters of a concentrated slurry of anthrax spores, and 2,200 liters of concentrated aflatoxin. Although the Iraqis claimed that they produced anthrax only in slurry form, UNSCOM suspects that Iraq was capable of producing dry anthrax spores, which have a much longer shelf life and can be disseminated as an aerosol cloud over greater distances.73 The UN determined that Iraq had filled at least 157 aerial bombs and 25 Al-Hussein missile warheads with biological agents, as well as modified a “belly” drop tank for the Mirage F-1 aircraft as a spray tank for aerosol dissemination of biological agents.74 Despite these massive inventories of chemical and biological weapons during the 1991 Gulf war, numerous tactical factors might have worked against the effective delivery of Iraqi chemical and biological warfare had American forces marched on Baghdad after liberating Kuwait. CIA analysts assessed that The battle developed so rapidly that Baghdad probably was never able to effectively target coalition forces. In the war with Iran, aircraft and guard [Republican Guard] artillery were Baghdad’s principal chemical delivery means. Total coalition air supremacy precluded air-delivered chemical weapons and much of the Guard artillery was destroyed by air attack or overrun by coalition ground forces. Reports indicate that Iraqi chemical attacks during the war with Iran were normally planned in advance prior to drawing chemical rounds 50

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from theater reserves. The disruption of Iraqi supply lines and the lightning speed of the coalition campaign made this impossible.75 In Pollack’s analysis, The vast majority of Iraq’s chemical munitions were not filled before the war because filled munitions begin to degrade fairly quickly. Thus the Iraqis would have had to have filled large numbers of shells and then moved them into the theater and up to the frontline units for them to have been used. This process would have required several days for any tactically significant use of chemical warfare. However, US forces moved so fast and overran Iraqi defensive lines so quickly that the special Iraqi units tasked with filling, moving, and ensuring the firing of the WMD munitions could not have done so in time.76

The 2003 Gulf war and Saddam’s failure to use chemical weapons The Iraqi regime had strong political-military incentive to employ WMD against US and British forces during the 2003 war. Evidence collected by American intelligence and UN weapons inspectors from the 1991 war strongly suggested that Iraq was contemplating use of biological and chemical weapons had American forces staged an offensive on Baghdad after liberating Kuwait. In contrast to the 1991 Gulf war, the 2003 war against Iraq was not for limited objectives, but to remove the regime. Saddam had ample strategic reason to unleash clandestine biological and chemical weapons if only to slow and derail the operational tempo of American ground forces, as well as to inflict American casualties which would undermine tenuous American domestic and international political support for the bid to oust Saddam’s regime. Saddam’s prohibited WMD activities and capabilities, however, were revealed in the post-war light to be significantly less than American and British intelligence had suspected on the eve of the war. American intelligence judged that Saddam, notwithstanding a decade of international sanctions, was still harboring WMD programs and weapons in violation of the ceasefire arrangements that ended combat in 1991. The American intelligence community asserted in October 2002 that “Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX; its capability probably is more limited now than it was at the time of the Gulf war, although VX production and agent storage life probably have improved.”77 The intelligence community further judged that “all key aspects – R&D [research and development], production, and weaponization – of Iraq’s offensive BW program are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war.”78 51

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Iraq’s non-possession of significant chemical and biological weapons stocks during the spring 2003 undermined the administration’s rationale for waging war against Iraq. The American and British intelligence pre-war assessments were based on a wide array of sources collected over a period of years, but these sources proved to be poor. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his February 2003 attendance at the United Nations Security Council, gave a masterful presentation of the American intelligence picture of Iraq’s WMD programs. The presentation marshaled a circumstantial case of Iraqi efforts to evade UN Security Council resolutions. Powell catalogued a variety of Iraqi activities in and around sites associated with Iraq’s WMD programs and weapons using human intelligence reports, satellite imagery, and intercepted communications, a fair amount of which suggested that the Iraqis were cleaning up and hiding evidence in late 2002 and early 2003 in preparation for another round of United Nations inspections.79 But like shadows on the cave wall in Plato’s Republic, the intelligence showed reflections of weapons and programs rather than the prohibited items themselves. The Bush administration’s periodic release of intelligence reports, apparently collected in the heat of battle, to some extent undermined the more comprehensive, if more general, strategic intelligence picture of Iraq’s WMD programs and activities. The administration apparently sought to shore-up the intelligence case against Iraq with the periodic public release of intelligence in the heat of combat that was thought to give more concrete details of Iraqi WMD-related activities. But these reports – such as the deployment of Iraqi ballistic missiles and the readying of chemical weapons for use against coalition forces – which, with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, appear to have originated from intelligence sources that were unreliable, not knowledgeable, or not corroborated by other sources. There can be no gainsaying that the American intelligence community suffered from numerous shortcomings regarding Iraq’s WMD programs. The National Intelligence Estimate explicitly acknowledged glaring gaps in intelligence. “We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq’s WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad’s vigorous denial and deception efforts. . . . We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs.”80 Nevertheless, the American and British intelligence communities shared a broad consensus that Iraq was harboring banned WMD programs and weapons stocks in violation of the ceasefire agreements that ended the 1991 war. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) led by David Kay discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations in late 2002.81 More specifically, the Iraqis had a clandestine network of laboratories suitable for chemical and biological warfare research; reference strains of biological organisms; a covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited 52

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Scud missiles; plans and advanced design work for prohibited ballistic missiles with ranges of 1,000 km; and, clandestine attempts between 1999 and 2002 to obtain North Korean technology related to 1,300 km ballistic missiles.82 The ISG determined that Saddam remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons, but that the Iraqis were waiting for the lifting of international sanctions before resurrecting a nuclear weapons infrastructure. But in the end, the Iraq Survey Group had found no Iraqi stocks of chemical or biological weapons.83 Kay, moreover, reported that his team had not found evidence to confirm pre-war reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use chemical weapons against invading US and British forces.84 There are numerous potential explanations for Iraq’s non-possession of WMD stocks. Saddam appears to have been in an utter state of denial and to have mistakenly judged that the Americans and British were bluffing and were not prepared to wage war against Baghdad. Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz has told US officials that French and Russian intermediaries repeatedly assured Hussein during late 2002 and early this year [2003] that they would block a US-led war through delays and vetoes at the UN Security Council. Later, according to Aziz, Hussein concluded after private talks with French and Russian contacts that the United States would probably wage a long air war first, as it had done in previous conflicts. By hunkering down and putting up a stiff defense, he might buy enough time to win a cease-fire brokered by Paris and Moscow.85 Aziz further said that Saddam “refused to order an immediate military response when he heard reports that American ground forces were pouring into Iraq, concluding that the crossing was some sort of feint.”86 The regime did not even “prepare land mines and other basic military defenses to block or slow the US advance.”87 Saddam’s psychology of denial strangely resembles that of Joseph Stalin who during World War II refused to believe that Hitler had betrayed him and that German forces were marching on Moscow. Saddam might have judged that the priority for the reconstitution of his WMD programs was ballistic missile production. Indeed, the ISG has found the most prohibited activity in the ballistic missile arena. According to reports from ISG officials, “When Hussein asked scientists how long it would take to restart sarin and mustard gas production, he learned the timelines ‘were all so sufficiently short’ that he could afford to hold off until the missile program was further along.”88 In retrospect, the impact of internal insecurity coupled with longstanding economic sanctions and UN weapons inspections might have been greater than anticipated by many Iraq observers and caused Saddam to change its strategy for preserving Iraqi WMD capabilities. Pollack speculates that 53

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“Saddam switched from trying to hang on to the maximum production and research assets of his WMD programs to trying to keep only the minimum necessary to reconstitute the programs at some point after the sanctions had been lifted.”89 Similarly, Kay believes that “Saddam in the mid-1990s decided to get rid of his weapons on the theory that they were too easy to find. Instead, he maintained the program at a level below the production of actual weapons. Ultimately at some point, he planned to resume production, of course.”90 If Pollack and Kay are correct, American intelligence utterly failed to detect this shift in Saddam’s tactics. The regime appears to have been suffering from dry rot and was too corrupt and disorganized to resurrect Iraqi WMD programs from the 1991 war. As Barton Gellman has found in an extensive report based on coalition investigations and interviews with Iraqi scientists associated with Iraq’s once substantial WMD programs, in 2003 The remnants of Iraq’s biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.91 Saddam too might have perpetuated the perception of harboring WMD to maintain his leverage in the region. Several high-ranking detainees have said they believe that Hussein was afraid to lose face with his Arab neighbors. Hussein concluded, these prisoners explained, that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries paid him deference because they feared he had weapons of mass destruction. Hussein was unwilling to reveal that his cupboard was essentially bare, these detainees said, according to accounts from officials.92 Saddam appears to have also bluffed his own military officers into thinking that chemical weapons were at the ready. According to a US official involved in debriefing Iraqi officers, “The only consistent pattern we’ve gotten – 100 percent consistent – is that each commander says, ‘My unit didn’t have WMD, but the one to my right or left did.’ ”93 Saddam might have leveraged the perception of chemical weapons stocks among his general officers to nurture loyalty to his regime as well as to stiffen their resistance against invading US and British forces.

54

GULF LESSONS

Regional lessons learned from Iraq’s WMD Nation-states in the Middle East and South Asia, given the burdensome demands and costs of modernizing conventional military forces, will look for any possible “short cuts” to military capabilities and advantage to include chemical weapons. They will draw from the history of chemical weapons use in the Iraq–Iran war the lesson that chemical weapons are potentially powerful contributions to combat effectiveness on the battlefield, especially in counterinsurgency campaigns, and look to the Iraqi example as a model for their own programs. The Iraq–Iran war shows that chemical weapons can serve as force multipliers against forces that are unprepared and under-equipped to fight in a chemical environment. Nation-states in the greater Middle East may also come to judge chemical weapons as potentially useful tools for wreaking havoc in an adversary’s civilian population. Such an assessment would be reminiscent of that of Western airpower enthusiasts who argued that strategic air bombardment of civilian populations during World War II was necessary to undermine civilian morale and support for the regimes in Germany and Japan. Strategists in the Middle East and South Asia might in the future draw the same mistaken conclusion to the tragic detriment of vast populations of innocent civilian noncombatants. The increasing ballistic missile payloads and ranges in the greater Middle East region may add incentive to nation-states to hold at risk the civilian populations of adversaries; such a strategic rationale would bolster the bureaucratic power and influence of the ballistic missile programs in many states. Whatever the causes of Saddam’s failure to have chemical weapons in the 2003 war, had he used chemical and biological weapons against American forces in the recent war, they would have slowed, but not stopped US advances. The United States had anticipated Iraqi use of chemical and biological weapons in combat and had made appropriate defensive preparations. While they did not have perfect defenses against chemical weapons, American forces had far more robust and sophisticated capabilities than Iranian forces had during the 1980–1988 war in which Iraq demonstrated its prowess for chemical warfare. The risks and dangers of chemical warfare for American forces will be mitigated as the professional military and civilian strategists study and plan for future contingencies in the region in which use of chemical weapons is possible. The preparation for waging war in the chemical weapons littered battlefield would bolster the confidence of American forces to operate in and with greater effectiveness in a chemical weapons environment. Such preparation and capabilities, moreover, would dampen the confidence of potential adversaries to effectively use chemical weapons against US forces on the battlefield. The examination of the Iraq case studies suggest that American national policy can successfully cope with the threat posed by chemical and biological weapons on the battlefield.

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The United States needs to underscore to political leaders and military officers in the greater Middle East that chemical and biological weapons are not an “easy fix” for the shortcomings of conventional forces. That the United States was able to successfully counter the chemical and biological weapons threat posed by Iraq in the 1991 war should be parlayed as a powerful demonstration that conventional warfare trumps chemical and biological warfare. A regional recognition of this lesson would substantially lessen the political incentive to embark on chemical and biological programs at the expense of conventional military capabilities. Such a reverse trend, moreover, might lessen the acuteness of regional security dilemmas that could spark armed conflict with chemical and biological weapons to the detriment of the lives and welfares of thousands, and potentially millions of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of strategic folly. Nation-states in the greater Middle East region, on the other hand, may draw dangerous conclusions from observing US campaigns against Iraq in 1991 or 2003. They might assess that chemical, as well as biological weapons, are insufficient deterrents and conclude that nuclear weapons are the only pillar of WMD that offer the prospect of deterring American intervention in greater Middle Eastern affairs. They might judge that had Iraq had nuclear weapons in either 1991 or 2003, the American would have been profoundly more reluctant, or even unable, to put their forces and interests at risk in war. Saddam’s strategic failure was that he moved too slowly to acquire a nuclear weapons deterrent, and got caught midstream in the 1991 war and was not able to rebound fast enough before the 2003 war. Iran, in particular, is likely to look to Pakistan, where its nuclear weapons acquisition was delivered as a fait accompli and to the standoff on the Korea Peninsula, where North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons arsenal apparently is holding forceful American options at bay, as cases of successful bids to acquire nuclear deterrents. Some observers reason that the United States must hold out the threat of retaliation with nuclear weapons – in lieu of chemical and biological tit-fortat retaliation – in order to deter and lessen the chances of adversaries employing chemical and biological weapons against US forces and citizens.94 The United States has destroyed its biological weapons and is in the process of destroying its chemical weapons stocks, both acquired during the cold war. That view overlooks the fact that the United States’s formidable conventional forces could serve as an even more effective deterrent. In the event that an adversary uses chemical and biological weapons, US forces could ably respond with conventional retaliation and not need to resort to American nuclear weapons. The United States could sufficiently retaliate with massive conventional military power for ambitious political ends to punish or destroy an adversary as well as to reestablish the American deterrent posture. Conversely, American nuclear weapons employment, even if used in retaliation for chemical and biological weapons strikes, would substantially 56

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undercut the nascent international norm or taboo against nuclear weapons use. The central goal for American nonproliferation policy needs to be raising the threshold for the use of chemical, biological, and especially nuclear weapons by demonstrating that political and military costs far exceed the advantages of resorting to WMD.

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4 SWORDS AND SHIELDS Ballistic missiles and defenses

The American war effort in Afghanistan against the Taliban and the Osama bin Laden network and the war against Saddam’s Iraq naturally eclipsed what had been a rigorous debate over the strategic wisdom of ballistic missile defenses, a major national security emphasis of the Bush administration. The debate over the pros and cons of ballistic missile defenses has been reduced from a boiling to simmering pot for now. What remains has partisan tones with Republicans and the Bush administration arguing that the threat to American territory by nation-states armed with ballistic missiles – perhaps tipped with chemical, biological, and nuclear warheads – is a contemporary reality. The Republicans argue that the United States is defenseless against these weapons and must embark on ambitious research, development, procurement, and deployment programs to field ballistic missile defenses to guard American citizens, homeland, and armed forces abroad. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats argue that the threat posed by ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction payloads is well over the horizon. They argue that substantial investments in ballistic missile defenses will siphon money from more immediate and higher priority defense programs. They argue, moreover, that aggressive ballistic missile defense programs needlessly ended the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which, in their view, was the cornerstone of stability in the cold war American–Soviet strategic relationship and offered to do the same for American–Russian relations in the post-cold war period. From the Democratic perspective, breaking out of the ABM Treaty for the sake of ballistic missile defense programs threatens to set off a chain reaction of ballistic missile arms races. Of great concern would be Russia and China building up their ballistic missile forces to compensate for American ballistic missile defenses to ensure the viability of their intercontinental strategic nuclear force deterrents. As is the case with many controversies over national security and defense priorities, the bureaucratic players in Washington are consumed by inside the Beltway views. Little time is devoted to hearing views from abroad. Those foreign views that have managed to slip into the margins of the American ballistic missile defense debate have been largely those of NATO allies and 58

S WO R D S A N D S H I E L D S

Russia. The Bush administration early on faced blistering European opposition to its plans for ballistic missile defenses. The leaderships of NATO countries, dominated by liberal notions of using multinational institutions to promote international stability, clung to the legacy of the ABM Treaty for maintaining stability with Russia. President Bush and his lieutenants had made some headway with NATO partners, who appear to have concluded that the Americans are committed to ballistic missile defenses and it would be better to move along with the Americans – albeit begrudgingly – than to have the issue be another source of transatlantic rift. Allied disputes – especially coming from Paris and Berlin – with Washington over ballistic missile defenses, moreover, have been overshadowed by heated opposition to the American–British war and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The Bush team also has managed a dialogue with Russia over ballistic missile defenses, although that too has received less care and attention than discussion and cooperation on countering terrorism. To ease Russian concerns, President Bush announced dramatic cuts in the US nuclear weapons arsenal that cast doubt on the relevance of the ABM Treaty to the post-cold war world. American dialogue with China on ballistic missile defenses was stalled early on by the Chinese downing of the American reconnaissance aircraft in 2001. The Chinese reliance on ballistic missiles as a tool of intimidation and war against Taiwan as well as the potential provision of American ballistic missile defenses to Taipei, however, will make American diplomacy with Beijing an uphill battle on ballistic missile defenses.1 Although an assessment of the threat posed to the continental United States by ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction is controversial, neither Republicans nor Democrats doubt that ballistic missiles are formidable threats to American military forces posted abroad, particularly in the Middle East. The Middle East is the only region of the world that has witnessed the combat use of ballistic missiles since Nazi Germany fired Blitz bombs against England in World War II.2 The Nazis fired V-1 cruise missiles, which are essentially air breathing, pilot-less aircraft, and V-2 ballistic missiles that are rocket powered only during launch and follow a curved, or ballistic trajectory as the warheads carried by missiles fall to earth. The Germans fired more than 17,000 V-1s and 3,500 V-2s, penetrated British airspace with impunity, and killed nearly 12,000 British civilians.3 Major powers in the Middle East as well as in South Asia – friend and foe alike – are placing greater emphasis on short- and medium-range ballistic missiles in their military postures and modernization plans. The emphasis that regional states place on ballistic missiles has increased since the 1990– 1991 Gulf war. Middle Eastern and South Asian militaries clearly anticipate that ballistic missiles – including ones armed with weapons of mass destruction – are essential pillars of deterrence against adversaries and, should deterrence fail, are likely ingredients for military supremacy on the battlefield.4 What are the trends in ballistic missile capabilities in the Middle East and 59


South Asia? How do regional states view ballistic missile defenses? What are the implications of these trends for American national security policy? To answer these interrelated questions, this chapter traces the history of ballistic missile proliferation in the region. It pays particular attention to the use of ballistic missiles during the Iran–Iraq war and the Gulf war. It reviews military modernization efforts that have taken place in the region since the Gulf war and the views of regional partners on the pros and cons of ballistic missile defenses as well as the anticipated impact of American ballistic missile defenses on their relationships with the United States. The chapter concludes by offering some broad policy contours for American decision-makers as they move toward a more robust reliance on ballistic missile defenses to support regional partners and American forces operating in the greater Middle East region.

Swords in battle Ballistic missiles are attractive instruments of power for nation-states in the Middle East and South Asia for several reasons. They deliver their payloads faster than combat aircraft and are largely assured of penetrating enemy airspace due to that lack of highly effective defenses. By way of example, combat aircraft, which can fly at more than 1,000 km per hour, would therefore take nearly an hour to fly 900 km. The same flight would take a ballistic missile about six minutes.5 Ballistic missiles also are less hampered by poor weather and darkness than pilots and aircraft and, in many respects, are less technologically demanding to maintain and support than modern combat aircraft. For these reasons, ballistic missiles have a history with militaries in the Middle East and South Asia. Egypt received inventories of Scud missiles from the Soviet Union prior to the 1973 Middle East war. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat – aware that his air force would be unable to gain air superiority over the Israeli Air Force – viewed Scuds as military means to ensure that Cairo could strike at Israeli civilian targets to deter Israeli aircraft strikes against Egyptian population centers.6 Sadat also viewed ballistic missiles as tools to support tactical battlefield objectives. In the 1973 war, he ordered the firing of three Scud B missiles at Israeli bridges across the Suez Canal, although all of them failed to hit their targets.7 Faced with regional adversaries armed with Soviet-supplied ballistic missiles, the Israelis sought ballistic missiles for a nuclear deterrent force. Israel may have readied its nuclear deterrent missile force in the initial losing stages of the 1973 Middle East war.8 Soviet-supplied Scuds to Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran have been used in numerous conflicts. In April 1986, Libya-sponsored a terrorist bombing against American soldiers in Germany, which resulted in the Reagan administration’s retaliatory bombing raids against Libya. In a weak 60


response, Tripoli fired two Scud missiles at a US Coast Guard station on the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea. The Libyan Scuds failed to hit their targets.9 Although the Yemeni civil war in 1994 was of little note in western media, it witnessed the use of ballistic missiles. Southern Yemeni forces fired about twenty Scud missiles against North Yemen’s capital of Sanaa.10 Southern Yemeni forces had hoped to undermine public support for the north’s war effort, but the north eventually prevailed in the conflict. South Asia experienced the combat use of ballistic missiles in Afghanistan. The regime in Kabul, between 1988 and 1992, fired about 2,000 Soviet-supplied Scud missiles at Afghan rebels.11 The most significant use of ballistic missiles occurred in the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war. The Iranians and Iraqis traded ballistic missiles in the so-called “War of the Cities.” Iraq launched about 160 Al Husayn extended-range Scud missiles at Tehran and scores of missiles at Isfahan and Qom between February and April 1988.12 The Iranians returned fire with about 88 Scud missiles against Iraq during that time-frame.13 Iraqi ballistic missiles levied a psychological blow to Iranian citizens even though the military damage that they inflicted was limited. Iraqi ballistic missile attacks coupled with the Iranian political capitulation at the war’s end bolstered arguments by airpower enthusiasts that strategic bombing of civilians can break the political will of adversaries. In assessing the role of ballistic missiles in the “War of the Cities,” analysts need to take stock of a broader strategic context before leaping to conclusions about the effectiveness of strategic bombing with ballistic missiles, as Thomas McNaugher wisely points out. Loss of confidence in the regime, economic deterioration, and battlefield losses also reduced Iranian will to resist the Iraqis. Iraq’s missiles did not so much destroy Iranian morale as hasten a deterioration in morale that was the work of other factors and that was already well underway when the 1988 missile campaign began. If there is a general case to be made, it is that missiles are an effective “coup de grace” weapon, decisive only when target states are already near collapse.14 Iraqi ballistic missile capabilities were sharpened after the war with Iran. During the 1990–1991 Gulf war, Baghdad fired eighty-eight extended-range Scud missiles at Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.15 The Iraqis had managed to extend the ranges of Soviet-supplied missiles by reducing warhead weights and increasing the fuel in them. They also managed to manufacture mobile launchers for the missiles. The US-led effort to hunt Iraq’s mobile Scud launchers proved to be nearly impossible. After the war, there was no conclusive evidence that the coalition managed to destroy any Scud mobile launchers.16 As was the case in the Iran–Iraq war, the political and military effects of 61


Iraqi ballistic missile attacks in the Gulf war were mixed. Militarily, Iraq’s conventional Scud warheads produced limited destruction on the ground, although one Scud attack against Dhahran, Saudi Arabia tragically inflicted the greatest number of American casualties in one instance during the war; twenty-eight were killed and ninety-seven wounded. Iraqi ballistic missile strikes were significant in their political effect, however, and created an emotional and psychological unease in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most significantly, the strikes pressured Israeli leaders to retaliate militarily against Iraq, a move that could have threatened the political cohesion needed to hold Arab forces in the coalition. To forestall Israeli military retaliation, the United States was compelled to divert substantial military resources from striking Iraqi strategic infrastructure and preparing the battlefield for the ground campaign against Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait to hunt for Iraqi mobile Scud launchers. The Iraqi use of ballistic missile in the 2003 war against American and British forces was lackluster. The Iraqis fired al-Samoud-2 and Ababil-100 ballistic missiles with ranges of about 150 km at coalition forces, but these missiles were slower than the Scud missiles that Iraq used in the 1991 Gulf war. US Patriot batteries destroyed nine of Iraq’s missiles and at least five missiles were non-threatening and were allowed to land harmlessly in the desert. The al-Samoud and Ababil-100 missiles, however, were reportedly more accurate than the Scud; one Ababil-100 was intercepted only two miles from the coalition’s major command post at Camp Doha, Kuwait.17

Sharpening swords for the next war War in the Persian Gulf has underscored for regional nation-states the utility of ballistic missiles in combat. One lesson likely learned is that conventionally armed ballistic missiles can be used for political advantage. A second such lesson is that given the negligible military effects of ballistic missiles armed with conventional warheads, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on WMD warheads – particularly nuclear warheads – for deterrence and military preparedness for future conflict. As Steve Fetter observes, the inaccuracies of ballistic missiles make them inefficient vehicles for conventional weapons delivery, a fact that has long been recognized by the nuclear powers, which rely on ballistic missiles almost exclusively for the delivery of nuclear warheads. The inefficiency of conventionally armed missiles seems to be well understood by the new missile states as well, since most of them are also actively seeking nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.18 Any attempt to accurately gauge contemporary ballistic missile modernization programs in the Middle East and South Asia is less than an exact 62


science. Although a great deal of information is available in the public domain – in many instances this information is leaked from government intelligence agencies – it forms less than a complete picture. Nation-states place high priority on ballistic missile programs and work assiduously to keep their research, development, and procurement efforts far from the view of potential adversaries and those states that participate in the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a voluntary cooperative effort by western states to stem the flow of ballistic missile-related technology to nation-states trying to build their ballistic missile capabilities.19 This “cat and mouse” game in international politics prevents the perfect assessment of ballistic missile capabilities. As Aaron Karp has cautioned, “The number of ballistic missiles in the Middle East alone may number not in the hundreds, as is widely assumed, but thousands.”20 This important caveat aside, what do we know about ballistic missile programs today in the Middle East and South Asia? Israel probably has the most sophisticated and robust ballistic missile infrastructure and capabilities in the region. Janne Nolan’s assessment is that “Israel’s command, control, intelligence and logistical capabilities far surpass those of any Arab state.”21 The Israelis exercise tight security over their deterrent forces, but many suspect that they have an inventory of 50 to 100 nuclear-capable Jericho I missiles. The Israelis began development of the Jericho II in 1985 and test launches of the missile into the Mediterranean were made between 1987 and 1992 at ranges of about 1,300 km. Israel might also be building a follow-on known as the Jericho III.22 Tel Aviv relies on its ballistic missile capabilities to deter Syria, which may possess dozens of warheads filled with the nerve agent sarin for its Soviet-supplied Scuds.23 Iraq and Libya are no longer contributing to the regional ballistic missile arms race. A new government in Iraq, as long as it relies heavily on American and British military support to suppress Iraq’s Sunni and Shia insurgencies, is unlikely to be willing or able to resurrect Saddam’s ballistic missile plans harbored since the end of the 1991 war. Unlike Iraq, Libya wisely chose to abandon its ballistic missile programs to avoid a war and to end its years of international isolation. Tripoli’s dramatic change in its strategic calculus probably is due in part to fear of American power after it was wielded to oust Saddam’s regime in Iraq coupled with the need for the lifting of international sanctions imposed on Libya for past support of terrorism in order to aid an ailing economy. In marked contrast, Iran is ambitiously modernizing its ballistic missile capabilities to increase its political-military influence in the Persian Gulf and to hedge against American military capabilities there. Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure is more sophisticated than that of North Korea and has benefited from significant assistance from Russia and China.24 The foundation of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities consists of 200 to 300 Scud B and C missiles with ranges of 300 km and 500 km, respectively. The missiles, which 63


might have chemical warheads as well as conventional payloads, are mounted on ten to fifteen mobile launchers. Iran signed a contract in 1989 for about 200 Chinese CSS-8 missiles, which are modified SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. Iran, moreover, has assembled Scud C missile kits from North Korea and is building two liquid-fueled missiles – the Shehab-3 and -4 – with significant Russian help.25 The Iranians have nuclear weapons ambitions and, like the Iraqis under Saddam, undoubtedly want nuclear warheads for their ballistic missiles.26 Other Arab states also are modernizing their ballistic missile forces with foreign assistance, although these efforts have received significantly less public attention than those of Iran. The UAE in 1989, for example, purchased 25 Scud B missiles from China.27 Saudi Arabia too may soon seek to modernize its ballistic missile forces purchased in the 1980s from China. More significant and substantial are Egypt’s ballistic missile modernization efforts. In the late 1980s, Egypt had been working with Iraq and Argentina in the Condor II program to develop a solid-fuel missile capable of carrying a 2,000 kg warhead about 1,000 km. After Egypt withdrew from the program in 1988 – under heavy US pressure – and Argentina withdrew in 1989, Iraq continued alone under the auspices of the Badr 2000 program. The missile was never tested and the Gulf war interrupted the program, but Egypt most likely retains the expertise needed to resurrect the program.28 Egypt in the 1980s probably provided some of its Soviet-supplied Scud B missiles to North Korea – which Pyongyang reverse-engineered to form the foundation of its ballistic missile program – and may have helped the Iraqis to modify Scud B missiles to create Al Hussein and Al Abbas missiles.29 Egypt today is developing a ballistic missile infrastructure with North Korean assistance and is modifying Scud B and C missiles.30 The race for ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction is all too evident in South Asia. A key driving force behind ballistic missile programs in South Asia is India’s rivalry for regional power with China. Beijing’s growing influence in Asia consumes more of New Delhi’s long-term attention than the eroding conventional military power of Pakistan. On the other hand, Islamabad views India military modernization efforts – even if directed against China – as potential threats to Pakistan, especially because Pakistan’s largest cities and military installations tend to be located near the Indian border giving the Pakistani military little territorial depth for defense. Pakistani military planning is consequently focused on trying to keep pace with India.31 India’s ballistic missile program spun off its civilian space satellite program in 1983 and included the Prithvi and Agni missiles. Two versions of the liquid-fuelled Prithvi – the SS-150 for the army and the SS-250 for the air force – have been flight-tested. The solid-fuelled Agni II was flight-tested in January 2001 at range of 2,100 km. India is also developing the Agni III missile with a 3,500 km range to hold Chinese assets at greater risk.32 Indian 64


leaders have declared that they have developed nuclear weapons for delivery on Prithvi and Agni missiles.33 To keep pace with India, Pakistan is developing and deploying a variety of ballistic missiles. Pakistan’s ballistic missile program – like Iran’s – is now more advanced that of North Korea. Pakistan has nuclear-capable M-11 missiles from China. In 1998, Pakistan tested and deployed the 1,300 km liquid-fuelled Ghauri, based on North Korean technology, for which it has production facilities.34 A second Pakistani missile program, the 600 km range, solid-fuelled Shaheen I, is based on Chinese assistance, was first tested in April 1999, and is now operational.35

Picking up shields? While regional states are convinced of the political and military utility of ballistic missiles for deterrence and war fighting, their views on ballistic missile defenses are in nascent stages. The nation-states of the region do not share the cold war history of the United States, NATO allies, Russia, and to a lesser extent China, which was permeated by the doctrine of mutual assured destruction and the strategic logic behind the ABM Treaty. The ABM Treaty codified the vulnerability of American and Soviet societies to intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile barrages that, in theory, bolstered the deterrent of opposing strategic forces. Middle East and South Asian thinking about ballistic missile defenses is also preliminary because for all intents and purposes, ballistic missiles today remain invulnerable to defenses. Defensive systems – with few exceptions such as the American Patriot and the Russian SA-300 air defense system touted by Moscow to have anti-ballistic missile capabilities – are not readily available. The Patriot missile system was hailed for its effectiveness in countering Iraqi ballistic missiles in the midst of the Gulf war, but post-war analysis has called into question the Patriot’s battlefield performance; assessments of the Patriot’s success rate range from 40 percent to 80 percent.36 While regional states are well aware of theater ballistic missile defenses such as the Patriot and SA-300, they are less familiar with systems designed to provide national or homeland defense. Ballistic missile defenses are generally characterized as “theater” or “national,” designed to intercept short to medium-range and long-range missiles, respectively. The Patriot is considered a Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system while American systems for National Missile Defense (NMD) are under development.37 The intended point of interception is another way of distinguishing ballistic missile defenses. There are generally three intercept points; in initial boost-phase, in midcourse, and the terminal or end of the missile’s trajectory. The Bush administration is deploying a NMD system to destroy enemy warheads in the midcourse phase, after an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile 65


(ICBM) has burned its fuel and released the warheads but before the warheads reenter the atmosphere. Intercepting ballistic missiles in the earlier and powered phase of trajectory has several advantages over the midcourse intercept, however. Interception in the boost-phase would destroy the entire missile payload including submunitions, decoys, and warheads and be easier to detect because the burning missile is brighter, larger, slower-moving, and more fragile than the warhead. A boost-phase defense, furthermore, would be able to cover a much larger area than a midcourse defense.38 The United States is on the cutting edge of research, development, and deployment of ballistic missile defense technologies that are likely to increasingly blur the distinction between TMD and NMD. Some ballistic missile defense systems, for instance, might be highly mobile and could be forward deployed to the Middle East and South Asia in a time of crisis to provide defenses against ballistic missile threats against US forces operating in the region as well as to be in position to intercept missiles targeted against American territory in their boost phases.39 Tactical ballistic missile defenses which provide coverage for American forces deployed abroad, moreover, may provide wide enough area coverage to be considered “national” defense for security partners, especially for the small Arab Gulf states such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. As is the case with ballistic missiles, Israel is by far the most forwarding thinking nation-state in the Middle East and South Asia on ballistic missile defenses. The Israelis have cooperated with the United States since the late 1980s on the Arrow interceptor missile, which was declared operational in March 2000. Israel is building three Arrow batteries to provide coverage for its heavily populated areas. If each battery operates fifty interceptors, the initial deployment could be 300 to 450 missiles.40 The Israelis are also working on a boost-phase intercept system based on Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) armed with Rafael Python 4 air-to-air missiles, a program which has been accelerated because of increasing Israeli concern about Iranian ballistic missile capabilities.41 The Israelis may eventually broaden international collaboration on the Arrow to help defray costs. Israeli cooperation with Turkey, for example, would require more than the three Arrow batteries that Israel now plans, but would be a logical area in which the two countries could strengthen their deepening security ties.42 Elsewhere in the region, public and authoritative dialogue on security issues such as ballistic missile defenses is a hard commodity to come by. As Karp observes, “Throughout the Arab world, security remains a highly sensitive subject, rarely discussed except in private.”43 Middle Eastern states such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria in the past had lent their political backing to efforts in the United Nations General Assembly to bolster the ABM Treaty, while a few regional states such as Bahrain, Morocco, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates had preferred to abstain or to be absent during these 66


UN votes.44 Those countries that had the largest stakes in ballistic missile inventories – Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria – by no accident appeared to have been the most committed to the ABM Treaty to stop potential deployments of countermeasures to offset their considerable investments in ballistic missiles. South Asian nation-states, as with many security-related issues, are of opposing minds on the potential impact of ballistic missile defenses. Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf – while standing by the visiting Chinese Prime Minister – publicly expressed concern that ballistic missile defenses could jeopardize “strategic stability, trigger a new arms race and undermine international efforts aimed at arms control and disarmament.” On the other hand, India has applauded American proposals for ballistic missile defenses.45 New Delhi’s support probably stems, in part, from a confidence that it has more resources to devote to ballistic missile defenses than does Islamabad. Outsiders only have a skeletal sketch of greater Middle Eastern thinking on ballistic missile defenses. In the author’s own discussions with numerous military officers and defense planners from the greater Middle East, many believe that American homeland ballistic missile defense would spark an arms race with China, which, in turn, would fuel a South Asian arms race. They worry that a build-up of Chinese strategic missile stocks needed to counter US defenses would compel India to build up its ballistic missile forces to balance China’s increased inventory. New Delhi’s ballistic missile build-up, in turn, would induce Islamabad to bolster ballistic missile forces as a counter-weight to India’s growing inventory. Other officials worry about the potential unintended consequences of ballistic missile defenses used in the region during combat. Given the tight geographic confines of some areas in the Middle East, for example, ballistic missiles intercepted by theater ballistic missile defenses could fall on third parties trying to stay out of a conflict. Regional officials argue that American ballistic missile defenses would not diminish the threat of WMD. While they might limit the options of “rogue” states, “rogue” states would shift strategies to adapt to ballistic missile defenses. The implicit concern is that adversaries would use covert means of delivering WMD instead of ballistic missiles. They further argue that American homeland ballistic missile defenses would cause American interests in regional security to contract. Regional officials voice the concern that “without shared vulnerability,” the United States is less likely to come to the aid of regional partners in times of crisis. The United States’ pursuit of ballistic missile defenses will divert defense funds from traditional forces. The implicit worry on this score is that the United States will neglect investment in traditional military forces that have been used in the past for regional intervention. An increasing US reliance on less traditional forms of military power causes officers and diplomats to 67


anticipate that the United States would be less likely to come to their aid in a crisis. As some officers and diplomats worry, ballistic missile defenses would “turn the United States inward, and away from the world.” Regional partners express concern that even if they support American ballistic missile defense programs, they might not be able financially to afford the purchase of theater defensive systems. Along these lines, many officers and diplomats from the region are interested in American offers of regional or country protection under a ballistic missile defense umbrella. At the same time, they worry that the costs of developing, procuring, and deploying theater ballistic missile defenses would be unsustainable. They are concerned that high expenditures on ballistic missile defenses would squeeze out investment in their hard-pressed traditional forces. The potential regional deployment of American theater ballistic missile defenses raises a host of operational considerations for our partners. In the event that the United States deploys theater ballistic missile defenses to a country in the midst of crisis – similar to American Patriot deployments to the Middle East during crises in the Persian Gulf – some regional representatives have asked, what would be the command and control arrangements for the deployments? Who would have operational control of country or regional ballistic missile defenses? How would regional countries coordinate with American military combatant commanders? Would the presence of American theater ballistic missile defenses erode the sovereignty of regional partners? An underlying concern is that regional partners will become more dependent on the United States for ballistic missile defenses and, in turn, increase American influence in the region. Other officials are anticipating that some form of American ballistic missile defenses might have to be deployed in the region. The United States, for example, might one day be interested in deploying boost-phase interceptors – on a variety of ground-, air-, and sea-based platforms – near Iran. Potential cites for deployments could include Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kazakstan, and Uzbekistan to the north, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman to the south of Iran.46

Paving the way for American ballistic missile defenses These are eclectic views that are sometimes at odds with one another, but American policymakers and military commanders responsible for the Middle East and South Asia will have to wade through them as they move to equip American forces with theater ballistic missile defenses and deploy a NMD to defend the continental United States. The history of ballistic missile use in combat probably makes Middle Eastern and South Asian partners potentially more receptive to ballistic missile defenses than American counterparts in Europe. Regional players have seen first-hand the strategic consequences of having spotty – at best – defenses against ballistic missiles. 68


Regional concern about vulnerability to ballistic missiles will only increase with regional efforts to procure chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Middle East and South Asian partners, moreover, were not direct participants in the ABM Treaty, and probably are not as intellectually accustomed to the concept of mutual assured destruction embedded in the treaty. These factors may give American policymakers and military commanders more latitude in dealing with security partners in the Middle East and South Asia than is the case with NATO allies and Russia who carry on strategic traditions nurtured in the crucible of the cold war. Effective ballistic missile defenses would give a future President some measure of confidence that American forces and territory – as well as those of our regional partners – would be reasonably well protected in the event of armed conflict. American ballistic defenses, moreover, would work to increase the level of uncertainty in the minds of adversaries as to how effective – politically and militarily – their ballistic missiles would be against US forces. That uncertainty induced by ballistic missile defenses would work to bolster deterrence and reduce the chances of armed conflict. The pursuit of boost-phase interceptors would be a particularly welcomed approach by some regional players. Such ballistic missile defenses would offer regional partners homeland defense, protect American forward deployed military assets, and offer the potential for early interceptions of potential ICBMs aimed at the territorial United States. Boost-phase systems, moreover, are likely to be seen as less threatening to Russia and China. Both of these states encompass massive geographical areas that would be difficult to cover entirely with American boost-phased interceptor systems.47 Negotiating memoranda of understanding in advance of contingencies governing the deployment, hosting, and command-and-control issues revolving around boost-phase interceptors – whether land-, air-, or sea-based platforms – would need to be made in peacetime to dramatically increase the response time in the heat of future regional contingencies. American missile defense systems contemplated for the region should be sufficiently capable and flexible to counter the inevitable proliferation of cruise missiles, the next looming evolution of arms competition in Middle East and South Asia. Cruise missiles are smaller than ballistic missiles making them easier to fire from concealed positions such as trucks and naval vessels and may be more accurate at long ranges. Their small size, maneuverability, and low flying altitudes gives cruise missiles the ability to evade air defenses.48 If the United States successfully develops and deploys highly effective ballistic missile defenses, regional rivals are sure to shift resources toward investment in cruise missiles. Beyond coordinating an international and regional strategy for working with allies and partners abroad, there can be no gainsaying the increasing profiles that ballistic missiles and WMD have in the greater Middle East region. These capabilities will increasingly pose a threat to American forces 69


in the region and over time will grow as threats to the continental United States. Some observers argue that the deployment of US ballistic missile defenses to the region will set off an arms race. The concern, however, ignores the fact that regional arms races in the greater Middle East already are well underway, with or without robust American ballistic missile defenses deployed there. To be sure, a regional adversary such as Iran might redouble efforts to build ballistic missile inventories in hopes of overcoming American ballistic missile defenses. If those efforts were to be undertaken though, it would come at the cost of other military modernization programs. In the longer run, regional adversaries might become muscle bound in ballistic missiles and weaker in ground and air capabilities that might work to US advantage in combat. Although the Bush administration prefers not to distinguish between national and theater ballistic missile defenses, many regional officials are inclined to distinguish between the two. That inclination will be important to keep in mind as American policymakers and military commanders implement ballistic missile defense programs whether for defending forces abroad or Americans at home. US policymakers should understand that blurring the lines between theater and homeland ballistic missile defenses causes confusion among foreign partners. They well understand the need for theater systems, but continental American ballistic missile defenses raise alarm over the coming of a “fortress America” with no incentive or interest in direct regional security involvement. In working with regional partners, policymakers and military commanders will need to reassure Middle Eastern and South Asian counterparts that American homeland and theater defenses will strengthen, not diminish, the ability of the United States to honor pledges of security assistance and to intervene if necessary in regional crises. The lack of adequate ballistic missile defenses assuredly would give pause to American decision-makers pondering whether to send forces to a regional trouble spot. If, for example, Iraq had had ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads in 1990 or 2003, Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush or George W. Bush might have made profoundly different calculations in weighing the risks and potential advantages of military intervention against Iraq.

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5 IRAN IN IRAQ’S SHADOW Tehran’s nuclear weapons bid

As the old military adage has it, no good deed ever goes unpunished. And so it would seem with American security interests in the Persian Gulf. Soon after having removed a major threat to American and regional interests with the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Washington has to come to terms with the looming challenge in Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. The good news is that unlike in the case in Iraq, diplomacy still has some running room for negotiating a stall or derailment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The bad news is that the prospects are dim for achieving this end without resorting to force over the coming years. The Iraq war is the backdrop for the evolving policy debate on Iran. The Iraq situation pits competing views of American national security strategy after 11 September 2001 against one another. On one side, critics of the Iraq war are posturing that if WMD failed to be a sufficient justification for waging war against Iraq, then concerns about WMD have even less merit for forcibly challenging the Iranian regime over its nuclear weapons aspirations. On the other side, the threat posed by WMD – and the associated risk that terrorists might get their hands on WMD – is emerging as a worldview to replace the grand unifying scheme of containment which governed American and western policy during the cold war. Those in this camp view the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq as models for other policy challenges that involve WMD and potential support for terrorist groups coming from the likes of Iran and North Korea. There are pitfalls, though, of viewing the Iran policy debate entirely through the Iraq policy prism. Just as a prism bends rays of light, Iraq and Iran, while they share many features, are distinct problems that require the modulation of policy tools. This chapter illuminates the commonalities and variations between past Iraq and today’s Iran as well as the strengths and weaknesses of American policy options for dealing with the growing security challenge posed by Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

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I R A N I N I R AQ ’ S S H A D OW

Iran’s decrepit armed forces Iran shares with Iraq geopolitical aspirations in the Persian Gulf in which WMD play a critical role. Iraq’s past drive for WMD was fueled by Saddam’s lust for power and will to dominate the Gulf politically and militarily. It was manifested in his invasions of Iran and Kuwait in 1980 and 1990, respectively. Although Iraq’s behavior over the past decade captured the most international attention, Iran too has hegemonic ambitions in the Gulf. The Shah, with strong American backing, sought to transform Iran into the dominant Gulf power until his bid was cut short by the 1979 Iranian revolution. Khomeini’s revolutionary goal was to remake the region in Iran’s own selfimage, governed by clerics and Islamic law. Iraq’s 1990–1991 war pushed into the far background the premier security concern of the United States and the Arab Gulf states in the 1980s, that Iran would emerge as the winner of the war with Iraq to become the dominant power capable of directly threatening the autonomies of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iran’s geographic girth lends itself to a country with large standing armed forces. Tehran’s regular armed forces consist of about 325,000 in the army, 18,000 in the navy, and 52,000 in the air force. It has a parallel force structure in the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with about 125,000 soldiers comprising about 100,000 ground troops, 20,000 naval, and 5,000 marines, and an unknown number in an air force. Tehran also has a paramilitary force, the Popular Mobilization Army or Basij, with about 40,000 active troops.1 The traditional armed services, which were built up by the Shah and backed by the United States, were neglected and politically neutered in the aftermath of the revolution because the clerics viewed them as a threat to their hold on power. The clerics stripped resources from the army and air force and diverted them to the Revolutionary Guard and Basij that were more politically reliable to serve as a counterbalance to the traditional armed forces. Iran’s military position today is weaker than it had been in the wake of the revolutionarily euphoria of 1979. Militarily, the Iranians lived off the Shah’s US-provided arms and equipment to survive the Iran–Iraq war, but the war nearly exhausted the inventories and put enormous wear and tear on equipment holdings. The Iranians have managed to make do, in part, by cannibalizing American equipment to keep fewer armaments running, but these stopgap efforts to prolong the longevity of the military inventory are increasingly difficult to muster. The Iranians are using illicit means to bypass US restrictions on the export of military equipment to Iran. In July 2003, the US issued search warrants and grand jury subpoenas to eighteen US companies in 100 states in a massive raid against illegal exports of American-built military components to a London front company for Iran. The front company was procuring components for the Hawk air defense system, F-14, F-4, F-5 combat aircraft, C-130 transport aircraft, and radar as well as other equipment.2 In July 2003

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California police arrested two men trying to export military technology – to include components for the F-4, F-5, and F-14 aircraft, and Hawk surfaceto-air missiles – to China.3 These items, however, are not in the Chinese military inventory, but are in the Iranian military’s inventory, strongly suggesting that China is acting as a middle man for Iran’s clandestine spare parts pipeline. Iran has been hard pressed to find direct external weapons suppliers to replace the United States. Michael Eisenstadt observed that in recent years Russia had been Iran’s main source of conventional arms, but Moscow had agreed not to conclude any new arms deals and to halt all conventional weapons transfers after September 1999.4 Russian restraint is probably due, in no small measure, to American intelligence capabilities to monitor Iran’s acquisitions of conventional arms. Moscow and Beijing, moreover, in many instances cannot compete with the quality of armaments offered by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, all of which have refrained from supplying Iran with major weapons systems but are actively marketing and supplying to the Arab Gulf states over which Iran aspires to dominate. The Iranians have made efforts to fill the void with indigenously produced weapons, but Tehran lacks the capabilities to produce high performance conventional weapons platforms. The Iranians must have shuddered when witnessing the American military slashing through Iraqi forces and territory in the spring 2003 war. Iran had already had a sense of its conventional military inferiority against American forces. Years ago Tehran received a direct taste of the inferiority of its conventional forces during the American re-flagging operations in the Gulf during the Iran–Iraq war in which the US Navy readily destroyed much of Iranian conventional naval capabilities, leaving Iran to harass shipping with irregular hit-and-run gunboat attacks. In the 2003 war, American and British forces accomplished in about a month what Iranian forces failed to do in eight years of war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988. Tehran cannot fail to appreciate that Iranian conventional forces would have little chance of resisting a military assault from American forces.

Iran’s hostility toward the United States and squeezed geopolitical space In Iran’s geopolitical landscape and strategic calculus, the United States looms large and its “demonization” remains a central feature in the regime’s worldview. As Judith Yaphe explains, Since the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, analysts inside and outside of Iran have talked about the shift in regime policies under a new, more liberal and enlightened leadership. The debate applies to Khatami’s social and domestic policies, but its 73


relevance for foreign and defense policies is much less clear. Iran’s more conservative leaders – such as Supreme Leader Khamenei, Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani, and IRGC Commander Major General Yayha Rahim Safavi – define Iran’s role in world affairs as the standard bearer of the Islamic revolution and the defender of oppressed Muslims globally.5 Iran’s desire to counter the United States remains a potent motivation in Iranian national security decision-making. As Anoushiravan Ehteshami observes, “Iran holds an almost paranoid and conspiratorial view of the United States’ role and actions in the Middle East and sees almost every US initiative as a direct or indirect assault on Iran’s regional interests.”6 Just as George Kennan in his cold war analysis of the Soviet Union judged that the regime in Moscow needed to politically manufacture an enemy in the United States to justify its ruthless reign at home, so too do the clerics in Tehran need a political opponent in the United States on which to heap the blame and deflect public attention from the state that fails to deliver political freedom, basic living standards, and economic livelihoods to its populace. The challenge facing the regime for providing employment for Iranian youth is especially daunting; 59.3 percent of Iran’s population is under twenty-four years of age.7 The regime as part and parcel of its efforts to deflect domestic criticism toward outside targets portrayed numerous student demonstrations in Iran – during which Tehran felt compelled to arrest about 4,000 demonstrators – in June and July 2003 as a result of American instigation in Iranian affairs. American policymakers for their part could only wish that US public diplomacy and covert action could produce such results. The history of these instruments of statecraft, even after 11 September 2001, has been lackluster. The United States lacked the resources to use covert action to overthrow Saddam’s regime and it likely lacks the resources to orchestrate such a move against Iran in the near future. The Iranian People’s Mujahadeen, an opposition group whose operational hub in Iraq was nurtured by Saddam, lacks broad and deep support for its cause inside Iran and it is questionable whether American support for the group would be commensurate with American interests. American military endeavors in the greater Middle East region necessitated by 11 September 2001 events have fueled Iran’s insecurity and geopolitical sense of encirclement. As Ray Takeyh notes, “The paradox of the post-September 11 Middle East is that although Iran’s security has improved through the removal of Saddam and the Taliban in Afghanistan, its feelings of insecurity have intensified.”8 The United States used its robust military presence in the Persian Gulf to support military operations both in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if host country partners – including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates – 74


were reticent in publicly discussing their assistance, in a role which cut against the grain of Arab public opinion. In the future the United States will probably look to the smaller Arab Gulf states to host any necessary operational support in light of the withdrawal of American troops in Saudi Arabia. This will lessen the Royal family’s vulnerability to al-Qaeda charges that it is a stooge for American interests in the region. The United States in its campaign against al-Qaeda, much to Iran’s chagrin, has had hubs of military activity and/or transit rights in countries in Central Asia as well, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and Tajikistan.9

Glimpses of Iran’s nuclear weapons bid Iran sees WMD as a means to fill the void in military and deterrent capabilities. The Iranians developed a chemical warfare program in the 1980s to match Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities demonstrated during the Iran– Iraq war and are suspected of harboring a biological warfare program.10 Iranian CW and BW capabilities are underway despite Iran’s signature on the Chemical and Biological Weapons conventions that prohibit such programs. Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan all have been in the forefront of supporting Iran’s WMD and ballistic missile programs with equipment, technology, and expertise that Western states restrict to Iran. Tehran suffered under barrages of Iraqi ballistic missiles during the Iran– Iraq war and wants to have the option of using ballistic missiles that are faster and more reliable than Iran’s air force for penetrating enemy airspaces to deliver both conventional and WMD warheads. Iran in July 2003 successfully tested the Shahab-3 which achieved a range of about 1,000 km. Iran is suspected of having an unspecified number of operational Shahab missiles, which are based on North Korea’s No Dong-1 missile that is reportedly capable of carrying an 800 kg warhead. Iran also is working on a 2,000 km Shahab-4 based on Russian technology, as well as a 5,000 km Shahab-5 missile.11 The missiles probably are too inaccurate to be of much military utility if armed with conventional warheads, but they would be sufficiently accurate to deliver WMD, particularly nuclear warheads.12 According to a foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer, the North Koreas are working on the Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.13 The destructive power of chemical and biological weapons pale in comparison to that of nuclear weapons, which, unfortunately, often are considered the “coin of the realm” for major power status in international relations. Iranian interest in nuclear weapons, in fact, harks back to the days of the Shah, who set up the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and had planned to build twenty-three nuclear power plants. American intelligence had evidence at the time that the Shah had set up a nuclear-weapons design team and covert efforts to acquire the materials and know-how for a nuclear 75


weapons program, according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.14 The effort was interrupted by the 1979 revolution, but after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989 the Iranians again picked up the nuclear weapons baton and sought Russian and Chinese assistance to start up Iran’s nuclear power and weapons infrastructure.15 Iranian clerics would at a minimum want nuclear weapons to deter adversaries and enhance the security of their regime. “The powerful Revolutionary Guards and military strategists are convinced that only a nuclear Iran can assume its place as a major regional power and adequately deter a possible attack from the United States or Israel,” said the policy adviser to a senior conservative cleric, who spoke on condition of anonymity.16 Tehran would want nuclear weapons to compensate for conventional military shortcomings, which, in the eyes of adversaries, might invite military endeavors against Iran. Tehran most keenly worries about such a scenario as it watches the rebuilding of Iraq’s military. The Iranians have learned that the road to nuclear weapons is best paved with ambiguity. The Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, and apparently the North Koreans successfully acquired nuclear weapons by cloaking their research, development, procurement, and deployment efforts with cover stories that their efforts were all geared to civilian nuclear energy programs, not to be harnessed for military applications. Tehran could not have failed to notice that once these states acquired nuclear weapons mated with aircraft and missile delivery systems, they escaped – so far, at least – military preemptive and preventive action by rival states. In marked contrast, the Iraqis suffered at the hands of the Israeli and American preventive military actions, in part, because Baghdad was not fast enough in acquiring nuclear weapons. The Israeli military strike on an Iraqi nuclear research plant in 1981 and the American military campaigns against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 might have been deterred had Iraq managed to acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranians therefore consistently and loudly proclaim that their pursuit of nuclear power is strictly for peaceful civilian purposes. President Muhammad Khatami, for example, said in February 2003, “I assure all peace-loving individuals in the world that Iran’s efforts in the field of nuclear technology are focused on civilian application and nothing else.”17 The Iranians argue that they need electric power from nuclear plants to meet domestic energy needs and to free up oil for export and foreign currency. The Iranian claims, however, have a hollow ring; far fewer economic resources could be used to modernize Iranian’s oil industry to make it more costefficient and productive to better deliver energy to Iranian population at lower costs while increasing production for the international market. The Iranians are working closely with the Russians to develop a series of 76


nuclear power plants. The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, during a July 2003 visit to Moscow announced that Tehran wants Russian help to build several more nuclear power plants in addition to Iran’s controversial first reactor, now nearing completion at Bushehr. The Russians have a $800 million contract with the Iranians to build the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor at Bushehr.18 Although spent nuclear fuel at Bushehr could be diverted to use in nuclear weapons, Moscow has traditionally put economic, near-term interests before longer-term, strategic interests when dealing with Iran. The Russians have adapted a Keynesian approach to Iran: damn the long-term strategic threat of a Iran armed with ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads hostile to Russian political interests because in the long run we’ll all be dead anyway. Instead, the Russians want to “take the money and run” and have worked hard to win Iranian nuclear power plant contracts. The Iranians are also interested in building a heavy-water reactor, which is considered by the international community as more of a nuclear proliferation risk than a light-water reactor such as the one nearing completion at Bushehr. Tehran has announced plans to build a 40-megawatt heavy-water research reactor and it already has a heavy-water plant at Arak that could provide heavy water to the planned research reactor. Heavy-water allows a heavy water reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel and to produce plutonium.19 Spent fuel from the planned heavy-water reactor would be ideal for extracting bomb-grade plutonium. North Korea, for example, claims to have made its weapons from the plutonium-rich spent fuel of its 5-megawatt reactor.20 Gary Milhollin puts the planned Iranian reactor in perspective by noting that it is too small for electricity and larger than needed for research, and is the type providing fuel for nuclear weapons programs in India, Israel, and Pakistan.21 The Iranians are developing domestic uranium production capabilities ostensibly to fuel their “civilian” nuclear power plants. In February 2003, Khatami publicly announced that Iran had begun mining uranium near Yazd.22 The Russians, however, claim that the Bushehr contract includes “provisions for Russia to supply fresh fuel for the life of the reactor and to take spent fuel back to Russia, thus denying Iran any potential access to the plutonium contained in the spent fuel.”23 The Iranians claim that the plant is needed for self-sufficiency to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants, but again, as with most Iranian claims regarding their ostensible “civilian” uses for nuclear power, it would be cheaper for the Iranians to purchase uranium for civilian power needs from the international market than to indigenously develop uranium production capabilities. Perhaps most alarming are the recent international exposures of Iran’s emerging uranium enrichment capabilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in February 2002 discovered that Iran is building a sophisticated uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, about 200 miles south of 77


Tehran. The IAEA found that 160 centrifuges were installed at a pilot plant at Natanz and 5,000 more centrifuges are to be completed at a neighboring production facility by 2005. After completion of the plant, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs per year.24 Iranian uranium enrichment capabilities appear to have benefited from Pakistani assistance. The centrifuges inspected at Natanz by IAEA officials in February 2002 were reportedly based on a Pakistani design. A Pakistani official widely regarded as “the father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, A. Q. Khan, moreover, reportedly traveled frequently to Tehran to share his expertise with centrifuges and nuclear weapons design. An former Iranian diplomat turned defector claims that the Iranians gave Khan a villa near the Caspian Sea as a token of thanks for his support of Iranian endeavors.25 Iran’s looming capabilities to produce massive quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) would allow Tehran to use the simplest nuclear weapon design for a nuclear weapons arsenal. Such a design uses a small artillery piece to fire a “bullet” of HEU into a stationary mass of HEU to form a nuclear explosion. Only about 100 pounds of HEU would be required for a gun-type weapon design that would not require nuclear testing.26 The IAEA in a June 2003 visit to Iran, moreover, discovered traces of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium on centrifuges at the Natanz plant and at the Kalaye Electric Company, raising the international concern that Iran’s centrifuges are intended to support a nuclear weapons program.27 Some scholars and observers of Iranian politics dismiss the forgoing as evidence that Iran has embarked on a full-fledged nuclear weapons program. Farideh Farhi, for example, argues that the limited Iranian public debate related to nuclear issues revolves around whether Iran should have a nuclear option, a debate “based on the assumption, strongly held by most players in the Iranian public realm, that at least for now the decision has been made not to pursue the nuclear option, irrespective of whether there was such a pursuit earlier on.”28 Like-minded observers of the Iranian scene judge that Iran has not yet made the political decision to cross the nuclear weapons threshold and alternatively argue that Iran is merely pursuing these nuclear research, development, and production avenues to “keep its options open” in the event that Tehran wants to have the option of crossing the nuclear weapons threshold at some date in the distant future. It is curious that Iranian scholars should have confidence in making such an assessment given the secretive regime in Tehran is not likely to publicly broadcast a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Such a decision would be tightly held in a small circle of regime insiders. Yaphe asserts that the key Iranian national security decision-makers include, “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the conservative faction [who] traditionally have set security and defense policy. The Defense, Intelligence, and Security Ministries, 78


as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Crops (IRCG) and paramilitary factions, report to Khamenei.”29 Shahram Chubin speculates that The most likely “father of the bomb” in Iran is Rafsanjani, who, despite several changes of job (Speaker of Parliament, President and now President of the Expediency Council), has been in sensitive positions since the beginning of the revolution. Though Rafsanjani holds no formal role in the security area today, he has over the years been the official with the most to say about those programmes related to WMD (and strategy in general), easily displacing Khatami, Khamene’i and others in the number and depth of his statements on these issues.30 Many observers were surprised by the breadth, depth and sophistication of the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities toured by IAEA inspectors because the regime’s decision to pursue these activities was not publicly announced. The Iranians would be foolhardy to undermine their civilian nuclear power cover story and announce their quest for nuclear weapons, only to increase their vulnerability to American and Israeli preventive military action.

Diplomatic options for stalling Iranian nuclear weapons One potential avenue for hampering Iran’s nuclear weapons program is to diplomatically press Tehran to accept assertive IAEA inspections. Tehran signed the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970 under the Shah’s rule and has not yet officially broken out of the treaty. American diplomacy could be brought to bear to encourage energetic and assertive IAEA inspections of Iran under existing NPT conditions. The specter of the US use of force against another pillar of the “axis of evil” coupled with Europe’s belated doubts about the efficacy of engagement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program offers a window of opportunity diplomatically to coax Iran to accept no-notice IAEA inspections. The Europeans – the French and Germans, in particular – who had long resisted US efforts to isolate Iran and favored diplomatic and economic engagement of Iran, were apparently taken aback by the scope of Iran’s work on uranium enrichment and violation of the NPT. The European Union foreign minister declared publicly in June 2003 that if diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s WMD should fail, coercive measures could be envisioned.31 The French, Germans, and British are rightly trying to exchange trade discussions for Iran agreeing to no-notice inspections and ending its pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle, which would give Iran the capability to pursue a robust nuclear weapons program in short order.32 While such bravado is in marked contrast to European opposition to the American use of force against Saddam’s regime, should push come to shove 79


in dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Europeans may well revert to their aversion to the exercise of American military power. It is easy for the Europeans to argue theoretically that force may have to be used when that contingency appears well over the horizon, but it would be politically more unpalatable for European capitals when the concrete decision time for the resort to force beckons. Tehran for its part probably calculates in light of changing European attitudes that the acceptance of the no-notice inspections will buy it more time to work on the clandestine nuclear weapons program by politically diffusing international support for an assertive American stance while at the same time betting that they could work on nuclear weapons undetected by IAEA inspectors. Iran has had plenty of opportunity to learn lessons on beating the IAEA inspection regime from watching Iraq and North Korea, which both cheated successfully against IAEA inspectors. Both Iraq and North Korea worked feverishly on nuclear weapons programs while officially considered in “good standing” in the eyes of IAEA inspectors and their governing NPT. Only US intelligence was able to catch North Korea covertly working on a uranium enrichment program, which led to a chain of events that resulted in Pyongyang formally withdrawing from the NPT. The massive scope of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was only revealed after Iraq’s 1991 battlefield defeat and intrusive UN weapons inspections. UN inspectors found the Iraqis to be expert in denial and deception efforts that allowed them vigorously to pursue a nuclear weapons program despite years of IAEA inspections. If IAEA inspectors were to be on their way to a sensitive Iranian site, Tehran’s security services could manufacture all kinds of obstacles to slow the IAEA team down or misdirect them just as the Iraqis had done with UN weapons inspections from about 1991 to 1998, when revelations about Iraq’s weapons programs became progressively more difficult to come by. To hedge against these potential Iranian calculations, IAEA inspections would have to demand an unparalleled level of sustained and rapid access to Iranian facilities and personnel with full Iranian cooperation. No-notice and intrusive IAEA inspections would have to be regularly and routinely mounted without international apology. IAEA inspectors should have routine, widespread, and unencumbered debriefing access to any and all Iranian scientists and technicians, who would be debriefed without Iranian minders and even outside of Iran. These measures were only faint-heartedly implemented by the United Nations under Hans Blix in the run-up to the spring 2003 war against Iraq. Washington could further use international sanctions to cut Iran’s trading access to the global market, particularly for oil exports, to increase pressure on Tehran to accept assertive IAEA inspections and a stoppage in Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle efforts. Sanctions on Iran’s export of oil, however, would increase the already record-breaking highs in global oil prices to the 80


detriment of Western economies. Sanctions, moreover, would have to be sustained for a prolonged period of time before they began to hurt Iran’s economy, after which time, they, much like the sanctions implemented against Saddam’s regime, would hurt the livelihood of the general populace harder than regime elites. The United States might undercut its objective of looking to the Iranian population to usher in a change in regime in Tehran if under the stress of new international sanctions the population rallied around the regime in Tehran rather than take up political protests against it. In short, economic sanctions might work to rally public support around the regime rather than undermine it, much as sanctions had done in Iraq under Saddam’s rule. A better alternative might be for Washington to offer to sweeten the diplomatic tea with a variety of options to encourage Iran to accept an unprecedented level of intrusive IAEA inspections. Washington, for example, could offer the resumption of diplomatic ties with Tehran severed after the 1979 revolution, the release of frozen Iranian assets in the United States, and the easing of trade sanctions that would facilitate Iranian access to the international market place and technology and business to modernize Iran’s oil industry. As Ray Takeyh observes, “The economic dimension is particularly important as, in the past decade, Tehran has grudgingly come to realize that Iran’s tense relations with the United States preclude its effective integration into the global economy and access to needed technology.”33 These positive incentives, though, may still not be sufficient for Iran’s reversal of a hostile policy toward the United States given the competing factions for power in Tehran. As Geoffrey Kemp explains, opponents can be counted upon to do all they can to prevent such a thing from happening, including strategic leaks designed to undermine any diplomacy in prospect. This can be prevented if the Supreme Leader and the President, together, decide to change policy, and do so in such a way that neither can easily renege on the effort.34 The uncertainty over the Iranian internal power structure would make it difficult for American policymakers to establish “rules of the road” with the Iranian regime in any diplomatic dialogue that could be fashioned to gain a degree of confidence that the regime would be capable of exercising responsible and stringent controls over future nuclear weapon stocks. Notwithstanding Iranian public support manifested in votes for the Iranian president, the wind in Khatami’s reform-minded sails is dying. While many in the West, particularly among the successful Iranian expatriate community, hope that the counter-revolutionary winds will grow stronger with public demonstrations and cast aside the conservative clerics, such a fortuitous course of events may take a long time. In the short- to medium-terms, there 81


may be greater prospects for hard-line clerics ousting the more pragmatic clerics in the regime power struggle.

Military options for disrupting Iran’s nuclear weapons program American diplomatic support for robust IAEA inspections are beneficial for reducing widespread European and Middle Eastern criticism that the United States acts “unilaterally” or “hegemonically” in the international arena. Such criticism reached shrill heights during the lead up to the war against Saddam’s Iraq. The United States needs to work to heal these wounds to garner political support from Europe and the greater Middle East region to complement diplomacy with military force in a concerted policy to derail Iran’s train ride toward nuclear weapons. Military options as part of a coercive diplomatic approach could be employed to physically disrupt, delay, and destroy key components of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. According to Alexander George, coercive diplomacy emphasizes the use of threats to punish the adversary if he does not comply with what is demanded of him. If force is used in coercive diplomacy, it consists of an exemplary use of quite limited force to persuade the opponent to back down. By “exemplary” I mean the use of just enough force of an appropriate kind to demonstrate resolution to protect one’s interests and to establish the credibility of one’s determination to use more force if necessary.35 Military options could be geared toward causing the Tehran regime pain and inflicting costs for Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. They could be aimed a changing Tehran’s strategic calculus from viewing nuclear weapons as enhancing the security of the regime to liabilities that increase prospects for conflict with the United States to threaten the regime’s hold on power. Military options would work in tandem with political measures to form a coercive diplomatic approach to Iran. As Robert Art wisely observes regarding the prospects for effective coercive diplomacy, All things being equal, the target should be more likely to comply with the coercer’s demands if it is offered positive inducements in addition to coercion. It the target must bend to the coercer’s will, carrots should help, especially if they enable the target to save face or provide it with resources that help it abandon its goal.36 To those who would ask should the United States use diplomacy or force to deal with Tehran’s nuclear weapons bid, coercive diplomacy advocates would answer “yes” to both. 82


Military options would entail less risk if exercised before Iran acquires nuclear weapons and deploys a robust nuclear weapons and delivery infrastructure. American policymakers would have to be concerned that if military options are employed after Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the Iranians could retaliate against US conventional military strikes by targeting American forces in the region with nuclear weapons or against American civilians by clandestine means, perhaps via Iranian intelligence services or collaborating transnational actors, especially Hezbollah. While such risks may not ultimately preclude the decision to use force, Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would make the decision a heavy burden. American military superiority over Iran’s military capabilities gives Washington a wide spectrum of military options for coercing Tehran. These options range from limited strikes against Iran’s political-, military-, internal security-, and WMD-related infrastructure. The United States, for example, could target Iran’s nuclear power infrastructure – to include the Bushehr nuclear power plant as well as any future nuclear power plants, heavy-waterrelated facilities, future plutonium reprocessing plants, and uranium production and enrichment plants – with cruise missile and combat aircraft strikes. An American air campaign mounted from regional support hubs in the small Gulf Arab states could make short work of Iran’s air force and air defense forces to gain air superiority for attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Such strikes could serve practical purposes of disrupting the means for developing nuclear weapons as well as a symbolic, political demonstration of American resolve to use whatever means available to block Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations. The United States would be operating on a less than perfect intelligence picture of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, however. The Iranians cannot have escaped learning the importance of diversifying and making redundancies in nuclear weapons program components in light of Israel’s preventive strike on Iraq’s nuclear power facility. They managed to hide Iranian uranium enrichment developments from the outside world for some time and have undoubtedly tightened security to stem further exposures of the nuclear weapons program. In the aftermath of any American air strikes against the nuclear infrastructure, Iran undoubtedly would also redouble efforts to hide, conceal, and make redundancies in its nuclear weapons infrastructure to make follow-on American attacks more difficult. American aircraft and cruise missiles could target Iran’s key political, security, and military infrastructure to harm the power of the regime in Tehran. Strikes could target government buildings and homes of clerics; facilities and compounds used by internal security and police forces; assets of the IRGC and Basij; major army units and garrisons; and WMD delivery vehicles such as aircraft and ballistic missiles as well as their production facilities. The targeting of internal security organs would be particularly useful because they might allow the disgruntled populace more freedom to 83


demonstrate against the regime and substantially increase the pressure on clerics to forgo their nuclear weapons aspirations. The specter of a US invasion of Iran should not be taken off the table. The threat of invasion could be used to bolster the strength of coercive diplomacy to compel the Iranians to abandon its nuclear weapons program and to accept robust and intrusive international inspections to help ensure their compliance with the NPT. The most imprudent step a statesman can take is to let his adversary know what he is not prepared to do. Such a move profoundly undermines his political leverage to achieve interests without the resort to force. President Clinton made this critical mistake in the 1999 Kosovo war in which he declared that US ground forces would not be used against Serbia. While US ground force presence in the greater Middle East brackets Iran, these forces would be insufficient to project the massive ground campaign that would be required to occupy Iran’s major cities. Iraq is a comparatively easy occupational task in comparison to Iran; it is smaller and has fewer citizens. Iraq is twice the size of Idaho and populated with about 25 million people while Iran is slightly larger than Alaska with approximately 67 million people.37 The American and British divisions in neighboring Iraq are likely to be fully preoccupied with Iraq’s internal security for the coming years, and without significant augmentation, would be unavailable for a cross-border invasion of Iran. US forces in Afghanistan are much smaller and more suited for special operations that would augment, rather than spearhead, the massive ground force campaign that would be necessary due to Iran’s sheer geographic size. American decision-makers have to weigh political ends against military means as a basis for formulating strategy. The United States now has a significant portion of its total ground forces committed to Iraq and would be hard pressed to mount a comparable or larger operation simultaneously against Iran. The United States also needs to keep forces ready to meet contingencies elsewhere in the world, particularly in Asia where potential clashes could emerge on the Korean Peninsula or over Taiwan. The weighing of these concerns, however, would best be done in the minds of policymakers and not shared aloud in the public domain for the ears of Iran’s clerics. The domestic Iranian political fallout from American military operations could cut two ways. On the one hand, they may undermine the regime politically as many Iranians would see them as more evidence that the nature of the regime works to prolong Iran’s isolation from the world community and its economic stagnation and political retardation. On the other hand, the clerics would seize on any attacks as evidence of a hegemonic American campaign to conquer the Middle East and its oil. They would use that perception as justification for repressive domestic security measures to hold on to power. In the final analysis, the United States might have to just wait and see which of these competing forces proves to be stronger as it vigilantly 84


monitors Iran’s efforts to reconstitute its infrastructure and to make followon strikes over a period of years to perpetually “kick the can down the road” and delay Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The United States would, much like in the war against Iraq, have to ride out international political fallout from any military actions against Iran. At first glance, Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan probably would politically protest “American unilateralism” out of concern over economic losses as a result of attacks on Iranian facilities that these countries are supporting. But, then again from a more cynical view, these states might work to economically exploit the situation and seek additional contracts to rebuild all that the Americans had destroyed. Military operations, too, would come with a tide of regional outcries against the United States. Many would accuse the United States of the all-too-familiar refrain that Washington holds a “double-standard” in the region by ignoring Israeli nuclear weapons while taking taking up military arms against Muslim states such as Iraq and Iran who are seeking to arm themselves to counterbalance Israeli and American nuclear power. As hard as it is for American observers to appreciate, many in the region – officers, diplomats, officials, as well as the general public – genuinely believe that a nuclear weapons-armed Iran could be useful to counterbalance Israeli as well as American nuclear power.

Running risks with Iranian nuclear weapons What could Iran do with nuclear weapons? Would Iranian nuclear weapons pose a profound security challenge for the United States? Or would an Iranian nuclear weapons inventory be manageable for Washington? Could the United States accept Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities much as Washington has accepted those possessed by Israel, Pakistan, India, and perhaps North Korea? A grave concern is that Iran could transfer nuclear weapons to non-state actors because Tehran for the past twenty years has consistently used nonstate actors as instruments of statecraft to advance Iranian political interests and objectives. Indeed, the prospects for the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-state actors is greater in the case of Iran than it was for Saddam’s regime because Tehran has been much more active than Baghdad had been in the sponsorship of terrorist operations, particularly those orchestrated by Hezbollah, against the United States.38 And recently, Iran has shown an interest in maintaining links to al-Qaeda by harboring its operatives, some of whom had fled neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of the October 2001 American military campaign in Afghanistan.39 Hezbollah with its central base of operations in Lebanon is a creature of Tehran. The IRGC keeps Hezbollah trained and well supplied via Syria. Damascus views Hezbollah as a useful thorn in Israel’s side, in part, to put 85


pressure on Tel Aviv to return the Golan Heights. Investigative reporter Jeffrey Goldberg writes that “Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world.”40 Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in October 1983 that killed 241 Marines. And the US failed to hold Iran accountable for its complicity in the attack. Hezbollah also was responsible for the April 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed sixty-three people including six CIA officers and killed the CIA Beirut station chief in 1985. In 1985, Hezbollah also brutally murdered a young US Navy diver aboard their hijacked TWA Flight 847 that landed in Beirut.41 Some observers argue that the revolutionary steam has run out of Iran’s regime and that Iranian sponsorship of terrorist operations against US interests has diminished. Iran’s complicity and support for the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an American military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American servicemen, belies arguments that Iran’s government has tempered its revolutionary zeal, however. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has publicly and directly linked Iran to the Khobar Towers attack: Over the course of our investigation the evidence became clear that while the attack was staged by Saudi Hezbollah members, the entire operation was planned, funded and coordinated by Iran’s security services, the IRGC and MOIS [Ministry of Intelligence and Security], acting on orders from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran.42 Some observers are inclined to give the Iranian regime the benefit of doubt regarding allegations of complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing by arguing that “rogue elements” or conservative hardliners in the regime, not President Khatami and like-minded supporters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and parliament, supported the operations. Conclusive evidence to bolster this argument is elusive, however. Even if it were found to be the case, such a fact would be of little solace to American policymakers and the public coming to terms with the potential dangers posed by Iranian possession of nuclear weapons. Policymakers would have to be concerned that hardliners in the future could control or direct transfers of nuclear weapons even if it were not the consensus policy of the regime. If an American city were to suffer from the detonation of a Hezbollah-planted Iranian nuclear weapon, it would be largely irrelevant whether or not it came about via “rogue” or mainstream elements of the Tehran government. Tehran might calculate that a nuclear deterrent would give it more leeway for supporting militants in the Middle East to include Hezbollah, Islamic 86


Jihad, and Hamas. The Iranians even without nuclear weapons are moving in this policy direction. As Daniel Byman observes “Since the outbreak of the al Aqsa intifada in October 2000, Hezbollah has provided guerrilla training, bomb-building expertise, propaganda, and tactical tips to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other anti-Israeli groups.”43 Tehran might judge that even if its hand were revealed in supporting terrorist operations via these groups against American interests and partners among the Gulf Arab states, Iranian nuclear weapons would deter military reprisals against Iran. American and Israeli contemplation of retaliatory strikes against Iran would be substantially riskier if Iran had the means to retaliate with nuclear weapons. The Iranian clerics are not well schooled in the ins and outs of the elaborate Western strategic literature formulated during the cold war. The clerics probably would be more influenced by their Islamic ideological worldviews than by rationale calculation of national interests. As George Perkovich argues, political leaders like Khamene’i and Rafsanjani see nuclear weapons as an almost magical source of national power and autonomy. These men are political clerics, not international strategists or technologists. They intuit that the bomb will keep all outside powers, including Israel and the US, from thinking they can dictate to Iran or invade it.44 In short, Tehran might fear the prospects of American and Israeli nuclear retaliation less than Western strategists would hope. The Iranians could opt to rely more heavily on integrating nuclear weapons into war fighting strategies. The Iranians undoubtedly are ingrained in their political and military thinking to never again be caught in a prolonged war of attrition as had been the case in the Iran–Iraq war that Tehran ultimately lost. The Iranians might come to view nuclear weapons as useful, or even essential, battlefield instruments for destroying the armed forces of an adversary, particularly those of Iraq. As Gary Sick points out, Iran’s past use of unconventional hit-and-run speedboat attacks in the Persian Gulf during its war with Iran demonstrate Tehran’s willingness to “use unconventional, even terrorist, methods to pursue a political and military strategy, even if that meant confronting the United States.”45 Along these lines, Tehran might be tempted to harness the threat of nuclear weapons for leverage in the political-military struggle against the United States for power and influence in the Persian Gulf. Iranian nuclear weapons would give Tehran greater political and military prestige that could translate into leverage over the Arab Gulf states. As Kenneth Pollack warns, “Tehran appears to want nuclear weapons principally to deter an American attack. Once it gets them, however, its strategic calculus might change and it might be emboldened to pursue a more aggressive 87


foreign policy.”46 The Arab Gulf states would be more vulnerable to Iranian political pressure to reduce security cooperation with the United States, particularly in the event of a regional contingency. An Iranian nuclear bomb also would increase the already high incentives for Arab states to procure nuclear weapons.

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6 FALLOUT FROM IRAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS

The current American and international attention on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons aspirations is high, but Tehran’s belated admissions and continued maneuverings with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) may in the medium to long run allow Iran to press ahead with a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Tehran probably looks to the North Korean model in which Pyongyang ostensibly conformed to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to diffuse politically any international or American resolve for preventive or preemptive military action to stem North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. After establishing a minimal nuclear deterrent, North Korea was able publicly to withdraw from the NPT and announce its nuclear weapons capabilities to up the ante for any consideration of Americaninstigated military action against the hermit kingdom. Tehran also can look closer to home, to Iraq’s unsuccessful bid for nuclear weapons in the run up to the 1990–1991 Gulf war. Saddam managed to remain in good standing with the NPT while harboring an enormous nuclear weapons infrastructure that would have produced a nuclear weapons arsenal had Saddam not provoked international military intervention with his invasion of Kuwait. The lessons from North Korea and Iraq underscore for Iran how it is possible to continue working on nuclear weapons, even with the presence of IAEA inspectors on the ground, while parlaying “compliance” with the NPT safeguards against international military action on suspected nuclear weapons-related sites and infrastructure. Iran’s confidence that it can pursue a clandestine nuclear weapons program under the watchful eye of the IAEA may be bolstered by American preoccupation with Iraq. The American military is stretched thin with operations against insurgents in Iraq and would be poorly prepared to undertake yet another ambitious military campaign against neighboring Iran. American political legitimacy is also strained over the course of events in Iraq. Domestic and international confidence, moreover, in the quality of American intelligence is in doubt after a less than stellar performance against Saddam’s Iraq. For all of these reasons, Iran might calculate that the Americans are ill-prepared to move militarily against its nuclear weapons program. 89

FA L L O U T F RO M I R A N ’ S N U C L E A R W E A P O N S

Public and policy debate on Iran has focused on Tehran’s bid for nuclear weapons, but significantly less attention is paid to the regional consequences if Iran is eventually successful in evading IAEA safeguards and acquiring nuclear weapons. To the extent that regional reaction to Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons or its eventual possession of nuclear weapons is addressed, it is largely devoted to the dilemmas for American and Israeli policy. While Iran straddles the Middle East and South Asia, the major powers in South Asia, Pakistan and India, already have nuclear weapons and their security perception is likely to be less startled by Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons than those in the Arab world. Parenthetically, Islamabad appears to have cast aside any long-term strategic concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons in favor of short-term financial windfalls for aiding Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Arab states would face new security challenges and burdens if faced with Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. Authoritative Arab debate and discussion of the impact of Iranian nuclear weapons has not yet surfaced and probably should not be expected. The United Nations conveys the sad state of affairs in Arab media, “There are less than 53 newspapers per 1000 Arab citizens, compared to 285 papers per 1000 people in developed countries. In most Arab countries, the media operate in an environment that sharply restricts freedom of the press and freedom of expression and opinion.”1 Arab states for all intents and purposes, moreover, still consider the public debate and discourse of national security policies to be taboo. Notwithstanding the arrival of satellite television and cable news programs, Arab public discussion of national security is muted and what little does get aired publicly is intellectually superficial and resembles platitudes rather than hardheaded strategic analysis. In light of the paucity of public sources, a great deal of analytic speculation as well as analysis based on off-the-record conversations with officers and diplomats from the region are required to answer the question, how will Arab states react and respond to Iranian nuclear weapons? This chapter sets the analytic scene by examining writ large Arab threat perceptions of Iran. The chapter assumes that most regional states over the next five to ten years will come to recognize that Iran has nuclear weapons even if Tehran does not make a formal policy declaration or detonate a nuclear device to overtly demonstrate its nuclear power status. The chapter examines Arab perception of Israeli security, which is intimately intertwined with Arab contemplation of Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. It then examines likely courses of action by Arab states nearest Iran in the Persian Gulf as well as Arab states geographically located farther afield in the Levant and northern Africa. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the options and limitations for US policy in stemming political-military pressures on Arab states to redouble their WMD and delivery system programs in the aftermath of a suspected or demonstrated Iranian nuclear weapons stockpile. 90


Arab threat perception of Iran Arab states have traditionally worked to balance Iranian power in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Most of the Arab states, with the notable exceptions of Syria, Sudan, and Yemen, politically, economically, and militarily backed Iraq in its war with Iran out of concern that Iranian forces threatened at various stages in the 1980–1988 war to overwhelm Iraqi forces to gain a strategic foothold in southern Iraq from which Tehran could exercise a stranglehold on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Such a course of events would have positioned Tehran better to export its then revolutionary zeal to undermine moderate Arab states throughout the region and to dominate the regional distribution of power. The Iran–Iraq war depleted Iranian political, military, and economic power and reduced the acuteness of Arab threat perception of Iran during the 1990s. The substantial American military presence in the region as a legacy of the 1990–1991 war to monitor and deter any renewed Iraqi military ambitions in the Gulf, reassured Arab Gulf states that neither Iraq nor Iran would be able to mount an ambitious military campaign to upset the regional balance of power. Iran’s election in 1997 of President Khatami, who was widely perceived in the region as a moderating political influence in Tehran that dampened Iran’s zeal for exporting the Islamic revolution, led to a further easing of the Arab threat perception of Iran. The American ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq may have further diminished Arab concern about Iran’s ability to leverage its geopolitical mass to dominate the Gulf. Arab states are in awe, if only privately, of American military capabilities which they witnessed slashing through massive Iraqi forces widely regarded as the most formidable Arab military forces in 1990. Arab military forces must also be impressed with the relative ease with which American and British forces drove their way through Iraq to occupy Baghdad. Arab states must calculate that as long as American forces occupy Iraq, Tehran would not dare undertake any conventional military operations to challenge the Gulf distribution of power. Indeed, many Arab officers and diplomats today are more concerned about American political and military intentions in the Gulf than they are about Iran in its weakened political, military, and economic condition. The public disclosures in 2002 and 2003 about the scope and sophistication of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is just beginning to seep into the strategic calculations of Arab diplomats, officials, and military officers. The Arab states have been slow to perceive the strategic threat posed by Iranian nuclear weapons. As Judith Yaphe observes, the Gulf Cooperation Council states “have shrugged off dire predictions of the dangers of a nuclear armed Iran.”2 The author’s discussions with a wide array of senior military officers and diplomats from the Middle East reveal a fairly commonly held view that

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Iranian nuclear weapons would have a stabilizing effect on the region. These officials and officers reason that Israel and the United States both have robust nuclear weapons capabilities while Arab states do not, and only one Muslim state, Pakistan does. They reason that Iranian nuclear weapons would have salutary effects on regional security because Tehran’s nuclear arsenal would “balance” Israeli and American nuclear weapons. The implicit assumption of this line of reasoning is that Israel and the United States have political, military, and economic ambitions in the region that could only be checked by Muslim nuclear weapons, even if in the hands of the Farsispeaking Islamic regime in Tehran. The superficial reasoning behind this Arab strategic thought may reflect the equivalent of an intellectual “knee jerk” reaction. As time passes and the reality of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons comes into sharper focus, Arab diplomats and officers are more likely to come to grips with the dilemmas posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. They will have to worry that American security backing of Arab states may lessen in the face of Iranian nuclear weapons. Arab security policy officials would have to concede that the United States might be less willing to come to the aid of Arab states in the event of a future regional crisis in which Iran wielded nuclear weapons. Had Iraq had nuclear weapons in 1990, for example, the risks and potential costs of an American military campaign to liberate Kuwait would have been greater and might have led the United States to accept Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait as a fait accompli. In a future regional contingency, the Iranians could make limited land grabs in the Persian Gulf – whether against Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates – and hope to hold American conventional forces at bay with the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. Iranian nuclear weapons would also afford Tehran the titular leadership role in the Gulf and give it substantial political sway with the Arab Gulf states. Arab states will also have to worry that Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons will embolden Tehran to revert to a more aggressive foreign policy. The regime might calculate, for example, that it could give more material assistance and lessen restrictions on Hezbollah to engage in operations against Israel and American interests. The Iranians have supported Hezbollah operations against American forces as an appendage of Iranian foreign policy to push the Americans out of the Gulf, most notably in assisting Saudi Hezbollah attacks against Khobar Towers. Tehran might calculate that it could support an even more ambitious unconventional terrorist campaign against American forces in the Gulf and the smaller Arab Gulf states that host American forces if it has a nuclear weapons arsenal. The Iranians would try keep their support of Hezbollah hidden from public disclosure, but even if exposure occurs, they might assess that the risks of American military retaliation would be minimal given Iranian nuclear weapons. If push came to shove, Tehran could use nuclear weapons against American military assets or hosting countries in the region with ballistic missiles or the weapons could be 92


clandestinely inserted into the United States to target American cities and citizens directly.

Arabs weighing American and Israeli reactions Scratching the analytic surface of the dilemmas posed by Iranian nuclear weapons will lead Arab defense planners to contemplate American and Israeli security policies. For Arab states, the United States and Israel are the “bulls in the china shop” whose actions will have to be gauged in mapping out Arab reactions to Iranian nuclear weapons. How the United States and Israel behave toward an Iran armed with nuclear weapons will affect their security policies and strategies. Arab officials are already alarmed at what they see as an American precedent for waging preemptive or preventive war. American security studies scholars are careful to distinguish between a preemptive war, in which a country moves militarily first in a crisis against an adversary, and a preventive war, in which a country moves to stop an adversary from growing too powerful, particularly with nuclear weapons. Arab officials, however, appear to use these terms in conversations in English interchangeably. Arabs worry that the United States will move militarily against Iran either before or after Iran acquires nuclear weapons by using its military position in Iraq to bring forces to bear against Iran. The Arab states worry that they will be caught in a crossfire in an American military campaign against Iran. The Saudis, for example, may hope that the ending of the American military footprint in Saudi Arabia will lessen the potential for Saudi Arabia to become embroiled in a future conflict with Iran. The Saudis, after all, resisted the investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing which killed numerous American servicemen out of fear that it would uncover Iranian ties to the operation and put the Kingdom in the middle of an American–Iranian conflict. The Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, also worry that American military operations against Iran would give the Americans potentially too great an influence over the global oil market. The Arab states will be concerned about Israeli preemptive or preventive military action. The Arab regimes will especially worry that Israeli military operations against Iran – whether by air or sea – would spark street demonstrations that could spark public resentment against Arab regimes. Despite their worst fears in the run up to the 2003 war against Iraq, “the Arab street” was muted. But Arab regimes will worry that Israeli military action against Iran would prove to be more politically volatile than American military action had been against Iraq. Arab military officers and diplomats have a hard time, though, understanding Israel’s perception of geographic vulnerability and the severe security demands that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would have on Israeli defense policy. 93


The Arab world has a begrudging respect for Israeli air power in particular due to its prowess demonstrated in the Arab–Israeli wars, air battles with Syrian aircraft in struggles over Lebanon, the air strike against Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis, and the preventive air strike against Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The reality of Israeli air power, however, is probably less of a threat for Iran, which is located far from Israeli airspace.3 Israeli aircraft would have to violate Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi, or Saudi airspaces depending on the flight route taken to strike Iranian targets. While some speculate that Israel could gain Ankara’s support, for Israeli aircraft to be launched from Turkish bases, Ankara’s unease with working with the Americans vis-à-vis Iraq shows how squeamish the Turks are over relations with their southern neighbors. The Israeli air force’s ability to generate sorties for a sustained air bombardment of Iranian nuclear weapons-related facilities, moreover, pales in comparison to that of the United States, which enjoys wide access in the Persian Gulf, both in host countries and based on aircraft carriers. Tel Aviv for its part will try to work closely with Washington on the shared threat from Iran’s nuclear weapons. The head of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad told the Israeli Knesset in November 2003 that Iran’s nuclear weapons program represented “the biggest threat to Israel’s existence since its creation” in 1948.4 The Israelis would be relieved to have the Americans carry the lion’s share of the burden for working diplomatically and, if necessary, militarily to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons drive.

The Gulf neighborhood The policy plate of US security officials is already overflowing with its current load of security responsibilities. And the contemplation or implementation of yet another formidable security task represented by moving militarily – even in a limited air campaign – against Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure may simply be one bridge too far for American policymakers. Should the United States be unable or unwilling to use military actions against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Tehran will probably acquire nuclear weapons sooner rather than later. How, then, are Arab states likely to react in the next five to ten years to a suspected or demonstrated Iranian nuclear weapons stockpile with robust ballistic missile inventories as delivery means? Arab Gulf states will feel the Iranian threat most acutely. Iraq, for example, will continue to see Iran as the largest and most formidable national security threat in the region regardless what shape, form, or nature the post-Saddam government in Baghdad eventually takes. A relatively transparent, moderately disposed government in Baghdad would probably want American military reassurance to shore up its security vis-à-vis Iran. The Iraqis might be amenable to residual American and international ground and air forces hosted in Iraq. The Iraqis might want a profile small 94


enough to minimize charges by political opposition that the Iraqis are subservient to the Americans, but large enough to serve as a “trip wire” to deter Iranian military ambitions against Iraq, particularly as Iraq’s new armed forces are just taking root. The American presence in Iraq also would reassure Iraqis that the Iranians could not parlay their nuclear weapons to political coercion against Iraq. The Iraqis will probably also want force projection capabilities to deter Iranian military activities as well as to strike Iran in the event that deterrence fails. The residual American and international presence in Iraq might work to dampen Iraqi interests and ability to restart ballistic missile programs to match Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. The Iraqis, however, would probably press the United States and the West for advanced air force capabilities to project power and as compensation for not resuming ballistic missile endeavors. Parenthetically, while much public discussion has centered on the size and nature of Iraq’s post-Saddam army, little debate has touched upon the legitimate air power needs of the future Iraq. Over the longer run the withdrawal of American and international forces from Iraq probably would heighten Iraqi fears vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Even if Iraqi conventional forces evolve into relatively modern, professional, and capable forces – albeit in fewer numbers than the forces during Saddam’s reign – the Iraqis will be under strong pressure to contemplate resurrecting Iraq’s nuclear program to counterbalance Iran’s nuclear weapons inventory. From Baghdad’s perspective, Iran could parlay its nuclear weapons advantage to politically coerce Iraq. The Iranians, for example, could embark on an aggressive campaign to support Iraqi Shia opposition in the south or challenge the Shatt al Arab, calculating that Baghdad would be deterred by Iranian nuclear forces from undertaking conventional military reprisals across the border. The Iraqis would have to worry that should they seek to strike conventionally against Iran, Tehran could resort to tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iraqi forces on the battlefield. A Turkish decision to move toward a nuclear weapons program in response to Iran’s nuclear arsenal would further increase Iraq’s incentive to resurrect its nuclear weapons programs. A continued deterioration in Turkish– American relations coupled with failed efforts to gain entry into the European Union over time could lead Ankara to be substantially less confident in NATO’s resolve to come to Turkey’s defense in the event of a military contingency with Iran. The Turks might then calculate that they need to have their own and independent nuclear deterrent as a hedge against Iran’s nuclear forces as well as against future nuclear weapons aspirants to their southern borders. Saudi Arabia has worked to restore diplomatic ties with Tehran that were ruptured by the Iranian revolution and the Iran–Iraq war, but Tehran’s possession of nuclear weapons is likely to cause discomfort in the kingdom. 95


While the restoration of normal diplomatic relations appears on the surface to ease tensions, neither the Saudis nor the Iranians have abandoned their traditional aspirations to be the most influential nation-state in the Gulf. The Saudis are likely to view Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons as a substantial Iranian effort toward dominating the Gulf. The Saudis probably would suffer a sense of political humiliation that the Iranians have the political prestige or reputation for power that accompanies nuclear weapons. Iranian nuclear weapons would add already substantial political-military incentives in Saudi Arabia to pursue its own nuclear weapons capabilities. The Saudis have limited conventional military capabilities to defend its large geographic space from outside threats, the most serious of which, Iran and Iraq, could be armed with nuclear weapons. The Saudis worried in the Iran– Iraq war that Iranian forces would defeat Iraqi forces in southern Iraq to threaten Kuwait and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis would have to worry that a nuclear-armed Iran could again militarily threaten the Gulf. The Saudis would also have to worry about the foreign policy orientation of the future government in Iraq and hedge against the specter of Iraq in the long run tapping its technical expertise to resurrect a nuclear weapons program. The Saudis still harbor deep mistrust of Israel and resent Israeli military prowess and nuclear weapons capabilities. The Saudis also have a wary eye on the military power of the United States. They were shaken by post-11 September events and shocked both by signs of formidable domestic political opposition against the Saudi regime and internationally by the anger in the United States over the stark, if belated, recognition that Saudi Arabia was a hotbed for al-Qaeda. The political backlash in the United States must have heightened Saudi concern that the United States could one day pose a threat to the kingdom. Although this concern is never uttered, Saudi officials remember that the kingdom was vulnerably dependent on the United States for its survival in the 1990 war. It would not take too much Saudi imagination to appreciate that the United States with its 500,000 troops then stationed in Saudi Arabia could have forcibly taken over the kingdom in a couple of days. The Saudis today probably worry that that United States could in the future “overact” to an al-Qaeda attack against American interests with retaliatory strikes or military occupation in Saudi Arabia, much as the Americans have done in Afghanistan and Iraq. A Saudi nuclear weapons capability would strategically work to shore up Saudi insecurities vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, but also from potential hostile actions in the longer run from Israel, Iraq, and the United States. The Saudis have already taken several steps in this direction. In the 1980s, they – unbeknown to the United States – secretly negotiated for and purchased intermediate range CSS-2 ballistic missiles from China. The Saudis purchased 50–60 CSS-2 missiles, 10–15 mobile launchers, and technical support from China, according to Anthony Cordesman.5 96


The missiles would be ideal for delivering nuclear weapons, but poorly suited for the delivery of conventional munitions because they are very inaccurate. The Saudi missile arsenal is too small to be used in the massive conventional missile barrages that would be needed to compensate for inaccuracies. The missiles, moreover, were bought from Chinese operational nuclear force inventories. Although Beijing and Riyadh claim that the missiles in Saudi Arabia are armed with conventional weapons, no American or international observers have been allowed by the Saudis to inspect and independently verify Chinese and Saudi claims.6 The international revelations in 2003 about the scope and depth of Iran’s nuclear weapons-related activities have brought to the public domain reports of Saudi contemplation of nuclear weapons with the assistance of Pakistan. The British Guardian newspaper reported that Saudi officials have admitted that in light of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the post-11 September security environment that the Kingdom is considering a variety of national security policy options, one of which is the pursuit of nuclear weapons.7 Other press reports allege that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz traveled to Pakistan in October 2003 and secured a secret agreement with President Pervez Musharraf under which Pakistan will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil.8 Naturally, Pakistani and Saudi officials deny these reports, but both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have national interests consistent with such a course of actions. Pakistan needs money to support its military competition with India while Saudi Arabia needs a deterrent to compete with Iran, Israel, and as a hedge against a distancing of security ties with the United States. While a body of circumstantial evidence suggests that Saudi Arabia has the interests, means, and intentions to lean toward a nuclear weapons option, there is little to suggest that the smaller Gulf Arab states are as far along in their strategic thinking as Saudi Arabia. To greater and lesser degrees, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman gauge a threat from Iran in general. Yemen, on the other hand, takes great reassurance from its geographic separation from Iran and sees little to no direct military threat coming from Tehran. Yemen’s security preoccupation despite Iranian nuclear weapons in the Gulf region will continue to be its neighbor to the north, Saudi Arabia. The richer small Arab Gulf states have the financial wherewithal to purchase nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but they will face obstacles in moving along such a strategic path. China and Pakistan, for example, are probably more willing to risk an international and American backlash for public discovery of clandestine WMD-related dealings in exchange for the strategic prize of security ties with Saudi Arabia, the richest and one of the three major states in the Gulf balance of power, but they might be less willing to take these risks for the sake of security ties with the smaller Gulf states. The Chinese and Pakistanis might be more concerned with operational 97


security of any clandestine WMD cooperation with the smaller Arab Gulf states recognizing that they need strong ties with the Americans that would increase the risk of public exposure. The Saudis, in contrast, have proven themselves adept at keeping secrets from the Americans. While Saudi Arabia may calculate that it could survive the international and American opprobrium that would accompany revelations of a Saudi nuclear weapons program, the smaller Gulf Arab states would have to worry that revelations of nuclear weapons aspirations would alienate their security backers – namely the United States and Saudi Arabia – which are the cornerstones for ensuing their autonomies from the larger states of Iraq and Iran. Small Gulf Arab state efforts to develop their own nuclear fuel cycles and nuclear power plants under the guise of civilian electric power generation would be a long and expensive undertaking. Such a course of action, moreover, would likely set off international alarm bells in light of Iran’s exploitation of this route for acquiring nuclear weapons. The small Arab Gulf states might be less able than Iran to ride out international criticisms of ostensible civilian nuclear power infrastructure; they are far more critically dependent on trade and security from the West than Iran and therefore more vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and ruptures in bilateral security arrangements, particularly with the US, Britain, and to a lesser extent, France. The small Gulf Arab states would, also, have to worry that their nascent nuclear power infrastructure would be vulnerable to preventive and preemptive attacks from larger regional powers. The notable exception to this line of reasoning might be the United Arab Emirates, which perceives the Iranians as a threat more acutely than their Gulf Arab counterparts. The UAE still harbors resentment toward the Iranians for their occupation of the contested territories of Greater and Lesser Tunbs and Abu Musa Islands.9 The UAE might calculate that Iran’s nuclear weapons will reduce, if not eliminate, what little incentive Tehran has to negotiate a settlement to the island disputes as well as embolden Tehran to take even more assertive actions against the UAE. The UAE has demonstrated a willingness to spend top dollar for defenses as evident in the procurement of the F-16 aircraft from the United States as well as Scud missiles from North Korea. The UAE blindsided the United States when Dubai purchased Scud-B missiles from North Korea in 1989, according to Simon Henderson.10 Dubai is suspected of having six Scud-B launchers.11 The UAE might see the F-16s as well suited for a nuclear weapons delivery system and could turn to Pakistan for technical assistance. UAE’s F-16s could readily navigate the Persian Gulf to hold at risk Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure at Bushehr and major naval facilities at Bandar Abbas. The UAE, moreover, has demonstrated a willingness to purchase controversial weapons systems such as Scud missiles and suffer economic sanctions as a consequence. The Chinese and the Pakistanis might be willing to undertake the risk of exposure in exchange for substantial 98


economic rewards to assist the UAE in developing nuclear, chemical, or biological payloads for its Scud missiles.

The Levant neighborhood Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will have security repercussions for Arab states beyond the immediate Persian Gulf area. Syria and Egypt are geopolitically central to Middle Eastern security and will see their interests most directly affected by Iran’s nuclear weapons power. Concerns about the prospects of Syrian or Egyptian nuclear weapons programs, however, have been muted in part due to the economic weaknesses of both states. Common wisdom holds that a nuclear weapons program is often a prohibitively expensive undertaking that puts the nuclear weapons option beyond the grasp of many nation-states with poor, if not dysfunctional, economies such as Syria and Egypt. A cursory look at reality shatters that common assumption. Two of the world’s poorest and most ineffective economies in Pakistan and North Korea illuminate the stubborn fact that countries with an expert technical elite and the determination to siphon off scarce financial resources from their economies can defy reasonable assumptions and establish nuclear weapons programs. Pakistan and North Korea are estimated to have 2002 per capita GDP of $462 and $903, respectively.12 Egypt and Syria have estimated 2002 per capita GDPs of $1,190 and $1,100, respectively,13 which puts Cairo and Damascus on a richer footing than both Islamabad and Pyongyang. And like Pakistan and North Korea, Syria and Egypt have black market means for making funding streams for clandestine nuclear weapons programs. With the Pakistani and North Korean nuclear weapons histories in mind, one should not be too confident of dismissing futures in which the poorly performing economic states of Syria and Egypt embark on nuclear weapons programs. Syria, at least initially, might take some solace from Iran’s nuclear weapons stocks. Damascus is increasingly isolated and in a weakened regional security position. It is encircled by states that enjoy strong security relationships with the United States; Israel to the southwest, Jordan to the south, Iraq to the east, and Turkey to the north. Syria, while once the reigning influence in Lebanon, has only Iran to cooperate with in regional politics against the other regional powers influenced by the United States. In the short term, Damascus might welcome Iran’s nuclear weapons as a means to bolster by association its marginal regional power. Over the longer run, Syria will come to see the negative strategic consequences of Iranian nuclear weapons. If in response to Iranian nuclear weapons, Turkey and Iraq pursue nuclear weapons options, Syria will see its power position in the region deteriorate even further.14 Turkish or Iraqi nuclear weapons will add to the already strong Syrian strategic incentive to 99


pursue nuclear weapons because Damascus views Israel as its most formidable security threat. The Syrians have a rudimentary nuclear infrastructure upon which to build.15 But aside from the formidable technical obstacles for acquiring the fuel cycle infrastructure to support a nuclear weapons program, Damascus would have a major obstacle keeping its nuclear program secret to avoid provoking Israeli preemptive or preventive military action either against Syria’s clandestine nuclear weapons infrastructure or against the regime itself. Tel Aviv probably could not tolerate Syrian possession of nuclear weapons, and unlike the case of Iran, Israel has more than sufficient military capabilities needed to wage a sustained air campaign to significantly damage Syrian political, military, and economic nodes. The Syrians could more readily respond to accelerated regional nuclear weapons proliferation by strengthening its “poor man’s nuclear weapon option.” The Syrian conventional military is dying on the vine since it lost its principal military backer with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, Syria’s conventional military is less capable on the battlefield than the Iraqi military of the 1991 war. The Syrian military is a thoroughly political institution unable to compete with Israel’s military on the battlefield. Damascus compensates for conventional military inferiority by relying on chemical, and perhaps biological weapons, and ballistic missiles to deter Israeli military action. The US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, testified to a House hearing in September 2003 that Syria has “a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin that can be delivered by aircraft or ballistic missiles, and has engaged in the research and development of more toxic and persistent nerve agents such as VX.” Bolton also stated that Syria “is continuing to develop an offensive biological weapons capability” and expressed concern about Syria’s nuclear activities, noting that Russia and Syria “have approved a draft program on cooperation on civil nuclear power.”16 Damascus would probably redouble efforts in the chemical and biological weapons arenas to shore up its weak deterrent capabilities against Israeli, Turkish, Iraqi, and Iranian conventional and nuclear forces in the distant future. The Syrians would have to depend on its substantial ballistic missile forces to deliver chemical or biological weapons against regional threats because of the uncertainty over its air force capabilities. Only Syria’s ballistic missiles would stand a chance of penetrating Israeli airspace, probably even with the deployment of the Israeli Arrow ballistic missile defense system which cannot be entirely foolproof. Syria’s air force would be an unreliable means to deliver WMD payloads given the exceptionally poor performance of Syrian aircraft and pilots against Israeli forces in the air battles of the 1980s in which Israel downed some eighty Syrian aircraft without the loss of one Israeli. The Syrians have eighteen Scud-B launchers with 200 missiles, eight Scud-C launchers with eighty missiles, and an unknown number of Scud-D missiles.17 100


The Syrians appear to be working on modernizing their ballistic missile forces in fits and starts. “Syria tested a 700-kilometer range Scud-D on September 23, 2000, following a successful test of Israel’s Arrow missile defense system.”18 Syria also has flirted with acquiring more modern, mobile, reliable, and accurate ballistic missiles such as the M-9 – whether from China directly or indirectly from Pakistan. Syrian President Bashar al-Asad has yet to demonstrate much prudence in regional politics and might be persuaded by Syria’s old guard military that new missiles will bring Syria greater security and influence vis-à-vis Israel. Tel Aviv might in turn shatter that Syrian assessment and judge that such a change of the status quo is unacceptable and militarily move against Damascus, particularly since Damascus is in a profoundly weaker position in the Middle East than it had been during the cold war. Egypt is geographically farther from Iran and does not feel the direct Iranian military threat as acutely as those states located closer. Nevertheless, Cairo is likely to view Iran’s nuclear weapons as another blow to the Egyptian worldview as the leader in the Arab and Islamic worlds. As journalist Nicholas Kralev observes, “Egyptian politicians, intellectuals and journalists are worried that their country is losing its status as a major regional player in the Middle East.”19 The blow to Egyptian prestige because of Iran’s nuclear weapons status may not be sufficient of itself to alter Egypt’s restraint from a nuclear weapons program, but it adds to an already large pile of incentives to pursue nuclear weapons. Egypt had the incentive to contemplate nuclear weapons well before Iran’s nuclear weapons come to the foreground in regional politics. The Egyptians, notwithstanding the peace treaty with Israel, have resented Israel’s nuclear weapons program which they see as a substantial source of Israeli political leverage over Egypt and the other Arab states. Cairo has long pressed diplomatically for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East as a means to negotiate away Israel’s unilateral nuclear weapons advantage in the region. Cairo consistently has warned that it could reconsider its nuclear weapons restraint if the Israelis indefinitely refuse to negotiate for a nuclear free zone. Egypt does have a nuclear power infrastructure upon which to begin a program with military applications. In the 1970s Egypt may have debated pursuing nuclear weapons, but the peace treaty with Israel, aid from the United States and limited financial means, derailed a policy in this direction.20 Nevertheless, the Egyptians have a nuclear research center with a Soviet-supplied 2 megawatt research reactor that started in 1961 and an Argentine-supplied 22 megawatt light-water reactor that started in 1997.21 The Wisconsin Project estimates that the Argentine reactor gives Cairo access to bomb quantities of fissile material, possibly enough plutonium to make one nuclear weapon per year.22 If the Egyptians were to embark on a nuclear weapons program based on its nuclear power infrastructure, they would have to move gingerly much as the Syrians to reduce the risk of Israeli 101


military action. Cairo, however, might judge that it would face less of a risk of Israeli military action than Syria because of Egypt’s security relationship with the United States. Cairo could also calculate that Tel Aviv would be loath to undertake military action that would threaten the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty and risk the return of hot wars between Arab states and Israel. The Egyptians, much like the Syrians, could also redouble their “poor man’s nuclear weapon” option. The Egyptian military in the 1980s modernized its chemical warfare agent production facilities to manufacture nerve agents and even cooperated with Iraq on chemical weapons; in 1981 Iraq gave Egypt $12 million to expand Egypt’s chemical agent production facilities and, in return, Cairo assisted Baghdad in the production and storage of CW agents.23 And the Egyptians could undertake similar modernization efforts of their suspected biological warfare capabilities. “In 1996, US officials reported that by 1972 Egypt had developed biological warfare agents and that there was ‘no evidence to indicate that Egypt has eliminated this capability and it remains likely that the Egyptian capability to conduct biological warfare continues to exist.’ ”24 Egyptian and Syrian pursuit of the “poor man’s nuclear option” might prove in the end to be only stopgap measures. The Egyptians and Syrians drawing lessons from the 2003 war against Iraq might conclude that nuclear weapons are inherently greater sources of deterrence than chemical and biological weapons. The American campaign against Saddam has probably shaken Egyptian and Syrian confidence in the deterrence value of chemical and biological weapons because the US perception of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons stores was insufficient to deter the United States from waging a war against Baghdad. Israeli, American, and Iranian possession of nuclear weapons might put pressure on Syria and Egypt to pursue nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of their securities. The Egyptians appear to be continuing efforts to modernize their ballistic missile forces, which could be used as a foundation for a nuclear weapons deterrent posture. The Egyptians probably already have on hand at least 24 Scud-B/C launchers with about 100 missiles.25 The Wisconsin Project assesses that the long-standing relationship with North Korea has given Egypt the capability to produce Scud-B missiles indigenously and Cairo is developing Scud-C missile production capabilities.26 In August 2002, Slovak authorities revealed that two North Korean agents based in Slovakia were procuring millions of dollars’-worth of ballistic missile components for Egypt. Although the North Korea agents fled the country before Slovak authorities could arrest them, documents they left behind show that between 1999 and mid-2001, they ordered more than $10 million worth of equipment and supplies for Egypt. The items ordered suggest that Egypt is trying to acquire a ballistic missile with a range of about 1,500 km.27 The Egyptian ballistic missile program, which has escaped much international scrutiny, has benefited from substantial North Korean assistance. The Egyptians could eventually turn to 102


their North Korean partners for help on a nuclear weapons program with items such as warhead designs to carry on top of Egypt’s ballistic missiles. Egypt’s interest in ballistic missiles with greater ranges than the Scud is long-standing. In the 1980s, Egypt cooperated with Iraq and Argentina on the Condor missile program. The United States in 1988 revealed that the Egyptians turned to Argentina for production help and Iraq for funding in a $3.2 billion Condor-2 project intended to provide Egypt and Iraq each with 200 solid-fuel ballistic missiles comparable to the American Pershing II nuclear delivery system.28 Intense US diplomatic pressure as well as the 1990 Gulf war forced the collapse of the program. Cairo might rekindle its efforts to procure longer range missiles if it calculates that US attention is diverted elsewhere. A series of scenarios could be envisioned in which Egypt could embark on a nuclear weapons program in earnest. If American grant assistance were cut significantly, the lifeblood for Egypt’s conventional military modernization would evaporate and put more pressure on Cairo to compensate with comparatively cheaper investments in unconventional weapons. A continuing political deteriorating over the Israel–Palestinian conflict, Arab street backlash over American military occupation of Iraq, or popular Egyptian uprisings against the Mubarak regime or Mubarak’s death could all work to reduce Cairo’s responsiveness to US diplomatic pressure than was the case when Egypt abandoned the Condor missile program. Cairo could look to nuclear weapons acquisition as a means for the political prestige needed to shore up Egypt’s domestic security situation and sagging political stature in the Arab world. Egypt might look to Pakistan as a model in this regard; a poor state, but one in which popular support for the nuclear program worked to President Musharraf’s political advantage at home and abroad. Arguably, Pakistan benefits from more international attention and American assistance than would have been the case had Pakistan not had nuclear weapons. Cairo also could calculate that only nuclear weapons could bring sufficient political pressure on Israel to engage in serious arms control talks, much as they had taken place between the Americans and Soviets during the cold war. To the west of Egypt, Arab states are less likely to view Iran as an imminent nuclear threat because of their geographic distance, but they might nevertheless resume work on nuclear weapons programs. Algeria has flirted with nuclear weapons options and may continue to do so regardless of the emergence of Iran as a nuclear weapons power. In 1991, Algeria was suspected of developing nuclear weapons with the use of a large, unsafeguarded research reactor, but Algeria’s acceptance in 1991 of IAEA inspections and signing in 1995 of the NPT dampened international concerns. Algeria continues, however, to develop its large nuclear research complex in the Atlas Mountains with China’s help and some of those facilities are not within the IAEA inspection responsibilities.29 Libya recently turned a new strategic leaf and revealed a nuclear weapons program that Tripoli had largely hidden 103


from the international community despite signing the NPT in 1975. Algerian cooperation with the IAEA should not be taken at face value. Iraq throughout the 1980s and Iran for the past twenty years demonstrated that IAEA inspections are relatively easy to skirt around by countries determined to procure nuclear weapons under the cover of ostensible compliance with the NPT.

American policy avenues The United States will have strong leverage and influence over Iraqi responses to Iranian nuclear weapons inventory as long as American and international forces play critical roles inside Iraq. But, over the longer run, that influence will subside and the incentives for Iraq to resume ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs will grow stronger to balance growing Iranian ballistic missile and nuclear forces. The Gulf Arab states, moreover, might be supportive of Iraqi efforts in this direction because they would see Iraq as a geopolitical counterbalance to growing Iranian power much as they had during the 1980–1988 Gulf war. To stem this course of events, the United States will have to bolster Iraq’s force projection capabilities by providing assistance in the building of a modern, capable air force to compensate for Iraqi restraint in resurrecting ballistic missile programs. The Iraqis will have legitimate security demands for force projection against Iran’s growing ballistic missile forces. The Iraqis also will need American and international security reassurance in continued linkages to Western militaries to ensure that Iraqi conventional forces, while smaller than Iranian forces, are more capable of deterring Iranian ambitions in conventional conflict. The Iraqis will also need international security reassurance to dampen powerful incentives to pursue nuclear weapons to counterbalance Iran’s nuclear weapons inventory. The United States should be leading diplomatic efforts to stem Egyptian and Saudi incentives to pursue nuclear weapons options. The United States is bound to have more leverage over Egypt, which benefits from substantial American military and economic assistance. As Jon Alterman observes, “the $1.3 billion in military aid that the United States provides annually is useful as the present regime distributes patronage in the armed forces. US economic aid, just under $800 million annually and slowly declining, also helps the regime consolidate its patronage networks.”30 Egypt demonstrated sensitivity to US diplomatic and political pressure that ended its Condor ballistic missile program in the late 1980s. The Egyptians, however, probably calculate that the United States has a short attention span and is easily distracted by other global events, especially today in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States needs to squeeze Egypt’s ballistic missile program and potential nuclear weapons aspirations in light of Iran’s nuclear weapons program back on to the policy agenda. The United 104


States needs to speak firmly and directly with the Egyptians and challenge the country on the activities of its ballistic missile forces, which would be the platform for nuclear weapons delivery in the future. American leverage against Saudi Arabia will be less than is the case with Egypt. The Saudis are by no means dependent on American economic support or largesse for the modernization of the Saudi military. The Saudis, however, continue to see the United States as a strategic backdrop that could potentially again bolster the Kingdom in a future contingency. The United States needs to leverage the security reassurance it gives to the Saudis to gain access to Saudi militant facilities and to receive updates on the status of CSS-2s. The United States should argue that the Saudi military benefits from access to American military facilities and that the Saudis should reciprocate by allowing US officials to inspect on a bilateral basis Saudi military facilities, missiles, and warheads and to speak with Saudi personnel. Such efforts would give the United States a better understanding of the Saudi infrastructure, as well as underscore the potential negative consequences of the Saudis undertaking a bid for nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles. The possession of nuclear weapons in Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be particularly troubling given the potential for political instability in these countries over the longer run. Both countries, especially Egypt, have a burgeoning demographic bulge of young and unemployed men who will be vulnerable for recruitment by domestic – especially militant Islamic – political opposition. Egypt in the past has had its armed forces penetrated by Islamic militants witnessed in the assassination of President Sadat during a military parade, and might again suffer from Islamic militants in military ranks who might have knowledge and access to nuclear weapons inventories. The same case could be made of Saudi Arabia. While these scenarios would not appear likely in the near term, they might not appear so hypothetical in fifteen or twenty years. These scenarios underscore the imperative of American statecraft to try to head off the Egyptian or Saudi acquisition of nuclear weapons in the near term to avoid being saddled in the future with unstable regimes politically struggling against militant Islam political opposition both inside and outside the gates of power, much as the United States faces today with respect to Pakistan. Syria would require more use of coercive diplomacy that entails the threat of force than in the cases of Egypt and Saudi Arabia if the United States is to discourage Syria from undertaking the nuclear weapons route. The Syrians have demonstrated a stubborn resistance to conciliatory measures from outside as well as a propensity to put their near term interests over longer term strategic interests. The Syrians, for example, appear to have rendered logistics assistance for the Iraqi regime exodus from Iraq after the 2003 war as well as facilitated the travel of Jihadists from the region into Iraq to fight American occupation forces. The United States needs to reaffirm directly to Syria that it is an isolated regime squeezed between powers – Israel, Jordan, Turkey, 105


and Iraq – which are more favorably disposed to American than Syrian strategic interests. Damascus needs to know directly and clearly that the initiation of a nuclear weapons program would not be tolerated and that American and/or Israeli military forces could wreak havoc on Syria’s limited infrastructure and obsolete conventional forces, the destruction of which would leave the ruling regime wobbly. Rather than procure their own nuclear weapons capabilities, the smaller Gulf Arab states might seek to use a set of overlapping security arrangements to acquire a rough, if minimal measure, of deterrence against the Iranian nuclear weapons threat. Iranian nuclear weapons could act as a further catalyst for Arab Gulf states to nurture their security relationships with the United States. Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar might increase the already substantial security links that have bloomed with the United States since the 1991 Gulf war. These states see security ties with the United States as critical to ensure their autonomies from the major regional states of Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. If they were to become wedged between nuclear powers in Iran – and subsequently in Iraq and Saudi Arabia – the small Arab Gulf states might try to get themselves more closely tied with American conventional deterrence as well as under a potential American nuclear umbrella. The small Arab Gulf states, moreover, would need to hedge their bets and simultaneously work to nurture ties with Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counterbalance Iranian aspirations for dominance in the Gulf. Even in the event of American or Israeli preemptive or preventive military action against Iran, Arab states, particularly the small Arab Gulf states, will be looking to secure a protective coverage of American nuclear deterrence. The Gulf states will look to using their hosting and support of American conventional forces in the region to bargain for American security guarantees that the American nuclear forces deterrent will be leveraged against Iranian nuclear capabilities. Gulf states might look to the United States for a contemporary rendition of the “Carter Doctrine” in which the United States made a veiled threat to respond with nuclear weapons in the event that the Soviet Union made a military bid for warm water Gulf ports. President Carter announced in January 1980 in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and closer proximity to the Persian Gulf that “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”31 The Gulf states might look to the United States on a bilateral basis to extract such similar American commitments to hedge against an Iranian threat. Although the United States might opt to couch a policy that applies to the whole region – as the Carter Doctrine had – the Arab Gulf states are unlikely to be able to coordinate among themselves a coordinated pitch to the United States. The United States, though, would be well advised to steer clear of a renewed Carter Doctrine that imprudently relies on nuclear 106


weapons. The Carter Doctrine made strong strategic sense, but because the United States at the time lacked the conventional force projection capabilities to make good the threat against Soviet forces, the doctrine amounted to a veiled American threat to resort to nuclear weapons. Today, the United States does not lack the conventional means to project power in the Gulf as demonstrated in the wars of 1991 and 2003 against Iraq. And the United States would be strategically wise to use its reputation for power to reassure partners in the region – in order to dampen incentives for exploring the nuclear weapons option – with ballistic missile defenses and conventional military means. The United States with its preponderance of conventional forces could threaten to remove the regime in Iran should nuclear weapons be used against American forces and regional partners. The reliance on conventional deterrence will underscore internationally that nuclear weapons are not necessary, a mindset that, in turn, would dampen regional interest and prestige linked to nuclear weapons acquisition. Conversely, the American threat of nuclear weapons response in kind will heighten the importance and prestige of nuclear weapons and contribute to incentive for nuclear weapons proliferation. In the event that nuclear deterrence fails, the United States would have to make good on its nuclear threat and retaliate with nuclear weapons to cause most likely the end of the regime in Tehran, but at the unacceptable moral cost of thousands to millions of innocent Iranian civilian lives. Massive and tightly targeted conventional force retaliation offers a profoundly more moral and strategically effective deterrent because the threat is more credible than nuclear weapons response in light of the American restraint in inflicting civilian casualties in numerous conflicts since the end of the cold war. The United States would be better off offering ballistic missile defense coverage than a new grand doctrine with veiled threats of American nuclear retaliation for military disruptions to the Gulf balance of power. The Gulf states with the experience of the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars have grown accustomed to benefiting from the provision of American ballistic missile defense coverage. And Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will undoubtedly increase the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states’ sense of vulnerability because one nuclear tipped Iranian missile could decimate the government, ruling families and societies of the smaller GCC states that in some respects have more in common with ancient city-states than modern nation-states. The United States might look to the GCC states for financial assistance to offset the research, development, procurement and deployment of ballistic missile defense systems in the region, whether land- or sea-based. While seaand land-based American ballistic missile defense systems are unable to provide strategic defense protection of the United States with its large landmass, they are capable of providing strategic protection to small states such as Qatar and Bahrain.

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7 DESERT REALISTS Saudi strategy and nuclear weapons

Iran’s thinly veiled bid for nuclear weapons attracts international and American attention, but one proliferation concern – driven by insecurity and the need to garner resources to ensure national survival – may be taking place right under our noses, not in a so-called “rogue state,” but in a key American regional partner in the Persian Gulf – Saudi Arabia. This chapter discusses the sources of Saudi insecurity and the regional proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that probably are pushing Riyadh toward procuring a nuclear weapons deterrent. Saudi Arabia’s Chinese ballistic missiles acquired in the 1980s would serve as ideal delivery systems for Saudi nuclear weapons. The Saudis most likely would look to China and Pakistan as sources for nuclear warheads for their CSS-2 ballistic missiles or more modern missiles that the Saudis might procure in the future. The Saudis would inevitably work clandestinely to develop a nuclear deterrent – much as they did to procure the CSS-2 missiles – to avoid raising the ire of the United States and to escape preemptive military measures from potential regional rivals.

Saudi insecurity and the regional power struggle Saudi Arabia harbors a deep sense of vulnerability to foreign invasion. This insecurity was heightened by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Iraqi forces in Kuwait were poised as a dagger at the heart of Saudi Arabia. Saudi military forces would have been unable to blunt an Iraqi assault from Kuwait to take the oil-rich eastern region of Saudi Arabia had Baghdad decided to launch such an assault and had the United States not intervened to protect the Kingdom. Saudi leaders too must have felt a deep sense of insecurity and angst during Desert Shield and Desert Storm with the realization that the some 500,000 American forces in their country could have readily taken over the country had such a political decision been made in Washington. Only the Saudi regime’s confidence and trust in President George H. W. Bush eased this worry to allow for Saudi acquiescence to such a large American military presence in the desert kingdom. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was only the most recent manifestation of the 108

D E S E RT R E A L I S T S

instability of the Persian Gulf balance of power that threatens Saudi security. During the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war, the Saudis backed Iraq’s war effort against Iran, least Iranian forces gain a foothold in the Shatt al Arab and threaten Saudi security. Riyadh worried that Iranian battlefield successes threatened to draw Iranian forces into an occupation of Kuwait, which in turn, would have put at risk Saudi territory. In the aftermath of the 1990– 1991 Gulf war, few American observers seem to recall that Iran had posed a grave threat to the balance of power in the Gulf region. The Saudis rely on the United States for security assistance, but from the Saudi perspective, that assistance has not always been reliable. The Saudis bitterly remember a time in which American military support for Saudi Arabia was under-whelming. After the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Carter administration dispatched F-15 fighter aircraft to bolster Saudi security, only to have President Carter publicly declare that the aircraft were unarmed.1 The Saudis have harbored lingering suspicions about the reliability of American military support to Saudi Arabia since the Carter episode. They worried that the Americans would repeat such a performance in the aftermath of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Recalling Carter, the distinguished Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan was suspicious of an American offer of military assistance to help defend the Saudi Kingdom. In an August 1990 discussion with National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Bandar said, “Frankly, we’re worried. Do you guys have the guts or don’t you? We don’t want you to put out a hand and then pull it back and leave us with this guy on our border twice as mad as he is now.”2 It took President Bush’s personal pledge of support to overcome Saudi reservations about the steadfastness of American military help in the face of Iraqi aggression. The Saudis were saved from their worst nightmare during the 1990–1991 Gulf war by the United States. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, King Fahd was faced with the very real prospect of leading his family along the footpaths made by the Kuwaiti Royal family into international exile. Fahd, in giving the final approval to allow US military forces into his Kingdom concluded, “We have to do this. The Kuwaitis waited, they waited too long and now there no longer is a Kuwait . . . all of the Kuwaitis are living in our hotel rooms.”3 Riyadh is trying to bolster its own military means to defend the kingdom, but these efforts are problematic. The Saudis have redoubled their military modernization efforts in the wake of the 1990–1991 Gulf war, but the Saudi military and National Guard only have about 200,000 soldiers, while Iran fields forces of about 513,000 troops.4 Although the Saudis are qualitatively better equipped than Iraq or Iran thanks to major infusions of American and European arms – to include M1A2 Abrams tanks, M-2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and Tornado and F-15 combat aircraft – it remains to be seen whether Saudi soldiers would have the grit needed to take on Iraqi or 109


Iranian soldiers in ground combat. The Saudis might prove unable to fully master the technological sophistication of their weapons while Iranian troops in some future conflict could be motivated by the spoils of war waiting for them in Saudi Arabia. While in the near term, Iraq under American and British occupation poses no direct military threat to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis must be concerned about the orientation and nature of the post-Saddam government after coalition forces depart.

Regional competitors armed with WMD and ballistic missiles Above and beyond the conventional military capabilities that threaten Saudi Arabia, unconventional military threats in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf are growing in leaps and bounds, which undoubtedly has not escaped Saudi attention. From the Saudi Royal family’s vantage point, Saudi Arabia’s neighborhood is increasingly inhabited by rivals armed with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. And notwithstanding Saddam’s ouster, the Saudis have to guard against the resurrection of Iraq’s WMD programs long after the American military occupation ends. The most pronounced threat developing on Saudi Arabia’s security horizon is Iran, which is sharpening its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile capabilities. The Iranians are strengthening their chemical weapons capabilities5 – that made their debut during the Iran–Iraq war – and are suspected of working on nuclear weapons. The Iranians have increased their ballistic missile delivery capabilities with the acquisition of twenty-five Chinese CSS-8s to add to their inventory of Scud-B/Cs, as well as working on several indigenous ballistic missile research and development programs.6 While the Iraqis and the Iranians have historically posed the greatest direct threats to Saudi Arabia, the Royal family keeps a wary eye on Israel, whose weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile capabilities are the most formidable in the Middle East. Tel Aviv publicly maintains that Israel would not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but, based on leaks from the Israeli nuclear weapons program, respected observers estimate that Israel has an inventory of about 100 nuclear warheads.7 The Israelis also are suspected of having chemical weapons.8 And Israel has robust ballistic missile capabilities with Jericho-1 missiles with ranges of 500 km and Jericho-2 missiles with ranges of 1,500 to 2,000 km.9 While some Arab states have interests that coincide with those of Riyadh, the Saudi Royal family, after being caught unawares by Iraq’s abrupt 1990 betrayal, is likely to keep close tabs on today’s allies who might one day emerge as tomorrow’s adversaries. The United Arab Emirates signed a $6.4 billion deal with Lockheed Martin Corporation to develop and buy eighty F-16s to UAE specifications, which will be more modern and sophisticated than those flown by US pilots.10 The deal is the UAE’s largest procurement program in its history. The UAE views Iran as a threat to its security 110


because of a 30-year territorial dispute with Iran over three islands in the Gulf; Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, which Iranian forces have occupied.11 The F-16 deal was delayed, in part, because the United States had to grant a special waiver of US sanctions legislation that required economic penalties against the UAE for violating the Missile Technology Control Regime with its 1989 purchase of twenty-five Scud-B missiles from North Korea.12 Saudi Arabia’s ally Egypt also is cooperating with North Korea on ballistic missiles. In 1981 Cairo sent to Pyongyang a few of its Sovietsupplied Scud-B missiles, which North Korea reverse-engineered to support its own ballistic missile production program. Egypt – with the benefit of North Korean assistance – reportedly is now able to produce a version of the Scud-B and may have Scud-C missiles with ranges of 500 km. Three Egyptian companies were sanctioned in March 1999 by the US State Department for transferring dual-use American technology and missile components to Pyongyang.13

The case for a Saudi nuclear deterrent Faced with regional rivals arming themselves with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles and their own conventional military shortcomings, Saudi Arabia’s position in the Gulf balance of power is precarious. The Saudis are working on bolstering their conventional military capabilities, but recognize that their geographic girth coupled with a smaller population than Iran will handicap any efforts to achieve conventional military parity with Iran. The Saudis, moreover, are anxious lest they become too dependent on American military power to ensure the Kingdom’s survival. Saudi leaders would be loath to rely on American benevolence or a confluence of interests in a future conflict. They calculate that Saudi Arabia is unlikely to always have as strong a statesman as George Bush the elder in the American oval office. The Saudis would be imprudent to assume as a cornerstone of their national security posture that – under any and all circumstances – the United States will come to the Kingdom’s military defense. The Saudis would be unwise to rely solely on the ebbs and tides of American politics to protect their nation-state. To protect Saudi security the Saudis worry that an over dependence on the United States’ forces will undermine the Royal family’s political legitimacy at home by giving Islamic fundamentalists an issue over which they can criticize the secular and Western orientation of the Kingdom. As J. E. Peterson anticipates, Neither the Saudi regime nor its people regard the state’s alliance with the West with equanimity. Even the Saudi leadership has become increasingly vocal about policy divergences. As time goes on, it is likely that most Saudis – whether the Islamic right, the educated 111


liberals, or the great silent and “apolitical” majority – will become more critical of the Western alliance and less supportive, albeit for different reasons. This trend became more pronounced in late 2001 and early 2002.14 The withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2003 lessens the Saudi tether to American security. From both Saudi and American perspectives the withdrawal of some 5,000 American troops from the Kingdom was a pragmatic decision. American forces were no longer needed there to support air operations policing the southern no-fly zone in Saddam’s Iraq, a lingering legacy of the 1991 Gulf war. The American withdrawal, moreover, lessened the Saudi regime’s vulnerability to political charges, especially from al-Qaeda, that the Saudi regime was a footstool for American domination of the Middle East. Notwithstanding the enormous Saudi financial commitment in the past decade, harder financial times have hit the Saudi military leading to deteriorating military capabilities. As Kenneth Pollack explains, The Kingdom has cut its military budget, and the crunch has hit operations, training, and maintenance hard. Even Saudi F-15 pilots have regressed from reasonable competence to mediocrity. Compounding these practical shortcomings is the lack of a warfighting doctrine. Without this foundation that spells out maneuver warfighting concepts, combined arms operations, or other sophisticated military skills, the Saudi armed forces will never realize the potential their high-tech weaponry promises.15 What could the Saudis do to ensure their sovereignty in light of their concerns about American security backing and the kingdom’s own sagging conventional military capabilities? The acquisition of nuclear weapons and secure delivery systems would appear to be rational and logical measures, and perhaps even necessities from the Saudi point of view. The Saudis would want to have a spectrum of military capabilities to draw on in the first instance to deter aggression and in the second instance to fight, should deterrence fail. In the event of Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, or even American military posturing against the Kingdom, the Saudis could receive some security reassurance from their Western-supplied air and ground forces. But nuclear weapons would give the Saudis an even greater sense of security against nuclear-armed rivals. The Saudis would want to have a nuclear deterrent based on ballistic missile forces to ensure that the nuclear weapons could strike an adversary. The Saudis – concerned that an adversary might be able to defend its airspace against the Saudi aircraft-delivery of nuclear weapons – would want to hedge their bets with ballistic missile delivery systems that would stand near 112


invulnerable chances of penetrating enemy airspace. Ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads would serve as security bulkheads behind conventional military forces.

Riyadh’s nuclear deterrent foundation is poured Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that the Saudis are at least leaning toward – if not already working on – a nuclear weapons deterrent option. While there is no conclusive or “smoking gun” evidence that the Saudis are embarking on such a course, at least one scholar has noted that Saudi Arabia was considering the establishment of a weapons-related nuclear infrastructure, but that strong American diplomatic intervention convinced Riyadh to abandon the idea.16 Refraining from efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and delivery capabilities, however, would leave the Saudis lagging well behind the efforts of their regional rivals. Under such circumstances, the Saudis would fear that their weapons inferiorities would be perceived as vulnerabilities and invite foreign aggression or political pressure against Saudi Arabia. The Saudis already have in place a foundation for building a nuclear deterrent, although it manages to escape persistent American scrutiny. Washington assumes that a close regional ally such as Saudi Arabia would not dare to jeopardize that relationship by working at cross purposes with declared American policy against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Such an idealistic view, however, profoundly overestimates the Saudi confidence in the United States and fails to recognize political realism’s wisdom that security interests – not any sense of innate friendship – are the driving forces behind policy in international politics. Saudi Arabia’s CSS-2 ballistic missile force acquired from China in mid1980s is well-suited for serving as the foundation for a Saudi nuclear option. Prince Bandar made a secret visit to China and negotiated the arms deal in which Beijing had agreed “in principle,” perhaps as early as July 1985 to sell Riyadh ballistic missiles.17 General Khaled bin Sultan, who served as commander of Arab forces during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, negotiated the final agreement with the Chinese for the purchase of the CSS-2s. Khaled made four visits to China, the first of which was in 1987.18 In a remarkably public and candid account of the brokering of the deal, Prince Khaled recalls: My task was to negotiate the deal, devise an appropriate deception plan, choose a team of Saudi officers and men and arrange for their training in both Saudi Arabia and China, build and defend operation bases and storage facilities in different parts of the Kingdom, arrange for the shipment of the missiles from China and, at every stage, be ready to defend the project against sabotage or any other form of attack.19 113


And Khaled succeeded brilliantly because American intelligence – and presumably Israeli intelligence too – failed to detect the precedent-setting international transfer of intermediate range ballistic missiles as well as the Saudi personnel who began traveling to China in 1986 for training on the missiles.20 The Saudis purchased 50 to 60 CSS-2 missiles, 10 to 15 mobile launchers, and technical support from China at a cost of about $3 to 3.5 billion, according to Anthony Cordesman.21 The missiles delivered to Saudi Arabia came out of China’s operational inventory, which the Chinese began deploying in 1971. The CSS-2 is a singlestage, liquid-fuelled missile that can carry a warhead of about 2,500 kg. Those CSS-2s deployed with Chinese strategic forces were armed with a single nuclear warhead with a yield of 1 to 3 megatons. The range of the CSS-2 is 750 km to 4,000 km, depending on the variant of the missile and the weight of its payload.22 In Saudi Arabia, the CSS-2s are deployed in two battalions; one located at the As Sulayyil Oasis, about 475 km south to southwest of Riyadh and the other at Al Juaifer near the Al Khaj airbase south of Riyadh. A training facility, that may also have a launch capability, is at al Liddam, in southwestern Saudi Arabia.23 Riyadh and Beijing claim that the Saudi CSS-2s are mounted with conventional warheads to reassure the United States. Although there have been unconfirmed reports suggesting that chemical warheads have been developed for the Saudi missiles,24 the Saudis have refused US requests for on-site inspections of their CSS-2 missile facilities. After the United States belatedly discovered the missiles, thirty-one US senators called on the Reagan administration in April 1988 to suspend American arms sales to Saudi Arabia until the missiles were removed, but the Saudis were not intimidated. An American request to inspect the Chinese missiles to make sure that they were not armed with nuclear or chemical payloads was categorically rejected by the Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud. “They would never be allowed to do it,” he said. “Many people think that we’re dependent on the United States for arms, and even say we’re subservient to American policy. The acquisition of Chinese missiles proves the opposite.”25 The United States apparently has not since insisted on any inspections to verify Saudi and Chinese claims that the missiles are only armed with conventional warheads, even though they were armed with nuclear warheads when they were fielded with the Chinese military. Khaled’s account of the Saudi strategic rationale for purchasing the Chinese missiles is highly suggestive that the Kingdom has nuclear deterrent designs for the missiles. Khaled asserts that “the aim was to give us the capability to counterattack in the event of an attack on us by either Israel or Iran.”26 In regard to the perceived Israeli threat, Khaled argues that “our security and self-respect demand that we acquire some minimal deterrent capability.”27 Throughout his discussion of the negotiations with the Chinese and the missile program, Khaled repeatedly makes reference to “deterrent” capabil114


ity. He comes right up to the cusp of stating a strategic nuclear mission for the missiles for both the power and prestige of the Kingdom: we needed a weapon to improve the morale of our armed services and our people, a deterrent weapon not intended to be used, except as a last resort when it should be able to demoralize the enemy by delivering a painful and decisive blow; a weapon which, once launched, could not be jammed or intercepted; a weapon which would make an enemy think twice before attacking us.28 These are hardly words appropriate to describe conventional warheads even if sitting on top of ballistic missiles. Khaled received military education in both the United Kingdom and the United States and acquired sufficient knowledge of strategic studies literature in the West to make references in his book to Clausewitz and Liddel Hart. Those educated, as Khaled was, in the strategic studies field refer to nuclear weapons, not conventional weapons, as “deterrent weapons of last resort.” One could speculate that Khaled was more schooled in strategic studies than his security reviewers and was able to reveal more of Saudi Arabia’s strategic intent – perhaps a reflection of personal pride to give the world a glimpse of his professional accomplishments – than official Royal decision-makers would have liked. Khaled makes only one reference to the Saudi and Chinese claim that the missiles are armed with conventional warheads. The claim, though, sits oddly in the text, as if the security reviewers insisted that Khaled insert it in the text somewhere to support declared Saudi policy. The fact that CSS-2s are poorly suited for delivering conventional payloads also raises suspicions about their status and Saudi plans for them. The missiles are too inaccurate for delivering conventional payloads with any effectiveness. The missiles have a circular error of probability – a radius into which half of the warheads fired are likely to land – of about 1 km to 2 km.29 Combat aircraft – including the F-15 in the Saudi inventory, if flown by proficient pilots – could drop larger payloads with greater accuracy at less expense than Saudi CSS-2s.30 Iraq’s Scud missile firings against Saudi Arabia and Israel during the 1991 Gulf war showed how militarily ineffective ballistic missiles are when armed with conventional warheads. In marked contrast, the CSS-2s would be very effective for delivering nuclear warheads. The destructive power of a tactical nuclear warhead would offset the missile’s poor accuracy. In fact, the missiles originally were operational in the Chinese nuclear force structure and Khaled claims that he was the first foreigner to visit a Chinese missile base and view the CSS-2 missile armed with a nuclear warhead.31 The delivery of chemical and biological weapons, however, would be problematic. Chemical weapons probably would have to be delivered in bulk with substantial ballistic missile barrages in order to be militarily effective. Biological weapons would not have an immediate 115


impact in battle because they would require an incubation period after delivery against an adversary. For Saudi purposes of deterring regional rivals and blunting ground assaults should deterrence fail, nuclear warheads would be more advantageous than chemical or biological warheads.32 From where would the Saudis obtain nuclear warheads for their ballistic missiles? For starters, China might be tempted for several reasons to sell tactical nuclear warheads to go along with their CSS-2 missiles. The Chinese want to solidify security ties with Saudi Arabia to serve as a cornerstone for Chinese influence in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese – with their expanding economy and limited indigenous oil reserves – want to secure oil supplies in the Gulf. Beijing also wants currency from foreign military sales to devote to China’s military modernization programs, and the Saudis would probably be willing to buy nuclear warheads under extraordinarily lucrative terms. The Chinese may be particularly eager to sink profits from foreign military sales into their ballistic missile research, development, and procurement efforts, in part, to hedge against emerging American ballistic missile defenses that may one day be extended to Taiwan. The Saudis could look closer to home for nuclear warheads. The Saudis have had longstanding security cooperation with Pakistan based on mutual interests. The Saudis have money while the Pakistanis have military resources, while neither nation-state has territorial ambitions against the other. The Saudis have had enough confidence and reliance on the relationship to ask Pakistan for ground forces to defend Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity. In the 1980s, the Saudis turned to the Pakistanis for military support to shore up Saudi security. The Saudis at one point hosted a small number of Pakistani brigades in Saudi Arabia, for which they paid an estimated $1 billion per year.33 As Joseph Kechichian recalls, the Saudis previously hosted a Pakistani unit – estimated at 10,000 men – attached to the 12th Armored Brigade stationed at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.34 Riyadh and Islamabad may have reached a point of political-military confidence required for deeper security ties involving cooperation on nuclear weapons. Islamabad has nuclear warheads for its growing ballistic missile inventory as part of Pakistan’s regional competition with India. Pakistan has worked on indigenous short-range missiles, the Hatf-1 and Hatf-2, and has reportedly imported M-11 ballistic missiles from China.35 The Saudis might be willing to help fund Pakistani research, development, production, and deployment costs for their nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in exchange for the Pakistani provision of nuclear warheads to Saudi Arabia. As Samina Ahmed observers, “Pakistan lacks the economic and technological means for full-scale weaponization and deployment. Both would require additional expenditures – for example, for the establishment of an adequate command, control, and communications infrastructure – which the country’s strained economy could not possibly sustain.”36 Saudi officials say Pakistan has probably received more Saudi aid than any other non-Arab state.37 An infusion of 116


Saudi funds could help Islamabad to overcome these obstacles and establish a robust Pakistani nuclear weapons deterrent. The Pakistanis could share Chinese nuclear weapons designs that Beijing has shared with Islamabad. China is suspected of having provided the design of a Chinese warhead from China’s fourth nuclear test in 1967.38 US intelligence reported in 1983 that China had transferred a complete nuclear weapons design to Pakistan as well as enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to build two nuclear weapons.39 The Pakistanis, moreover, have demonstrated their willingness to share nuclear weapons-related technology with other nation-states. Pakistan in 2002 shared centrifuge technology for the enrichment of uranium to support North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in exchange North Korean ballistic missiles. The United States discovered the transfer and imposed a two-year ban on dealings with the Pakistani entity involved in the affair, the A. Q. Khan Research Institute, which is a central actor in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.40 Islamabad might have received about twelve to twentyfive complete No Dong missiles from North Korea as part of this arrangement.41 Pakistan also is strongly suspected of having provided uranium enrichment technology to Iran.42 Despite the official Pakistan government reprimand at US urging of A. Q. Khan for his nuclear weapons-related assistance to Libya, Iran, and other states, it is conceivable that rather than acting purely as a private entrepreneur, Khan was giving kick-backs to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program from his business deals with other states. A high-level Saudi official visit to Pakistan’s nuclear and ballistic missile facilities in recent years strongly suggests that such nuclear weapons-related cooperation is already underway. In May 1999, Defense Minister Prince Sultan visited the Pakistani uranium enrichment facility at Kahuta and the missile facility at Ghauri. His visit marked the first known instance in which a foreign official visited these closely guarded Pakistani sites. The Saudi defense minister also met with A. Q. Khan, the scientist most responsible for the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. To add insult to injury, the Saudis and the Pakistanis rebuffed US inquiries as to the purpose of the trip.43 A Saudi diplomat who defected to the West in 1994 claims that in the 1970s Saudi Arabia bankrolled Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and signed a pact that if Saudi Arabia were attacked with nuclear weapons, Pakistan would retaliate against the aggressor with its own nuclear weapons.44 That same defector also claims that the Saudis in the past even looked to Iraq for help in acquiring nuclear weapons by giving Saddam about five billion US dollars up until the 1990 Gulf war as part of an agreement in which Iraqi would have shared its nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia.45 The Saudi CSS-2 program could serve as a seedbed for developing more robust ballistic missile capabilities, perhaps purchased from Pakistan. It allows the Saudis to train and nurture a cadre of military personnel expert in 117


ballistic missile operations. The CSS-2 program provides an institutional and doctrinal base on which the Saudis could build with future purchases of more sophisticated and accurate ballistic missiles. Indeed, Crown Prince Abdullah in May 2002 sent one of his sons, Prince Mitah, to Pakistan to view the test launch of a 900-mile range Ghauri ballistic missile, a version of the North Korean No Dong missile, according to Simon Henderson.46

The Saudi need for “opacity” The Saudis view the United States as an important ally, but they are realists who understand that security alignments are always in flux in international politics. Riyadh will have to develop alternative security arrangements to hedge against a further weakening or even a severing of Saudi–American security ties. A break in American and Saudi security ties could occur, for example, over how aggressively to crack down on al-Qaeda operatives inside the Kingdom. Alternatively, the Saudis might worry that in some distant future the Americans might become distracted by other global trouble spots and lessen their attentiveness and involvement in the Persian Gulf. To protect the Kingdom’s security against contingencies such as these over the long haul, the Saudis have compelling reasons for working in the near-term on acquiring a nuclear weapons deterrent option. The Saudis want to hedge their bets for the future, but they would not want to have the American security rug pulled out from beneath their feet in the process. The Saudis would work tenaciously to preserve security ties to Washington while clandestinely working on their ballistic missile and nuclear warhead programs. The Saudis would want to avoid the public disclosure of their nuclear weapons option that would cause a political uproar in Washington. American political pressure would build to force American policymakers to distance Washington from Riyadh to punish the Saudis for procuring nuclear weapons and undermining the US policy of stemming the tide of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. By hiding their nuclear weapons ambitions, the Saudis would also reduce the prospects for other states – especially the United States and Israel – to take covert or overt military measures to disrupt or destroy Saudi missile-related facilities. Riyadh could look to the Israeli experience as a model for the Saudi development of a nuclear deterrent. Tel Aviv adroitly nurtured security ties with Washington while working clandestinely to develop Israeli nuclear weapons capabilities. The Israelis officially denied rumors that they had nuclear weapons, lessening political pressure on Washington to formally condemn the Israelis. At the same time, the suspicions of a nuclear weapons program bolstered Israeli security by letting would-be aggressors know that Israel was prepared to wage war along the full spectrum of conflict. Avner Cohen characterizes this situation as “nuclear opacity” in which “a state’s nuclear capability has not been acknowledged, but is recognized in a way that 118


influences other nations’ perceptions and actions.”47 The Saudis, in a policy of nuclear opacity, might privately hold the view that as long as their nuclear warheads are not mounted on their ballistic missiles, they are “honoring” their 1988 signature to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Riyadh probably bets that – despite the risks – a policy of nuclear opacity offers the best chances for ensuring the Saudi Kingdom’s near- and long-term survival in the Gulf balance of power. The Iranians, too, appear to be making the same strategic calculations in trying to cloak their nuclear weapons ambitions. The easing of a Saudi nuclear weapons program’s opacity could occur gradually over time – after it is firmly established and well-protected from potential preventive or preemptive strikes – behind the scenes in diplomatic exchanges and in subtle public references. The Saudis would want to plant in the minds of potential rivals the suggestion that Riyadh is not to be diplomatically and militarily intimidated or coerced. Recent leaks to the media of unconfirmed reports of Saudi–Pakistani nuclear cooperation, in fact, work toward this end. A Saudi nuclear deterrent could more blatantly be revealed in the midst of a future Gulf military crisis, perhaps one involving military posturing by Iran against the Gulf states. Either way, public awareness of a Saudi nuclear deterrent will put the West, and particularly the United States, in an awkward position. The United States would lose some prestige in light of a security partner choosing a policy course in direct opposition to the American policy to contain and stem the international proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Washington in the aftermath of revelations of a Saudi nuclear deterrent would be under strong domestic and international pressure to take measures to show its displeasure with Riyadh. The United States, however, must avoid steps that would completely rupture American–Saudi security ties: both Washington and Riyadh share the grand strategic interest of seeing that no one power ever grows to dominant the Gulf. The United States needs to recognize that Saudi Arabia will continue to be a major player in the regional competition for power in the greater Middle East region. More broadly, the recognition of a Saudi nuclear deterrent would be a major blow against international proliferation regimes. The global community would be forced to see that despite the best of intentions and efforts, the “nuclear genie” will not be put back into its bottle. The West and the United States will have to face the fact that weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles will be an ever-present reality of the post-11 September world. Despite the arguments from some quarters that the proliferation of nuclear weapons will enhance international security by bolstering deterrence and lessening the chances for inter-state war, prudent statecraft would assume that deterrence in practice is unlikely to be as effective as envisioned in theory.

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8 CHINA’S STRATEGIC PRONGS Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan

Struggles for power in the greater Middle East are influenced by major nation-states that lie outside the region. The United States, Russia, and China each have important strategic interests in the greater Middle East while nation-states inside the region look to outside powers to bolster their positions in regional competitions for power. Throughout the cold war the United States was especially concerned with political-military moves by the Soviet Union in the greater Middle East. American policy toward the region was always viewed as an appendage of Washington’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union. The power and influence of Russia in the greater Middle East today is substantially less than it was for the Soviet Union during the cold war. The Soviets lost a foothold in the region with Egypt’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel. The Russians subsequently lost a major client in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which severed a lucrative arms purchaser in Baghdad with the imposition of international sanctions. The Russians no longer can given large weapons stocks to clients and the Russia’s lone bastion of political-military support, Syria, cannot afford to purchase massive amounts of Russian military hardware. India too is moving away from what had been cold war dependency for Russian-built arms. Russia’s major political-military activity focuses on Iran, which favors the use of its limited budgets for WMD procurement over conventional weapons modernization. Moscow is willing and able to pursue economic and short-run strategic interests in adding and abetting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. While Russian power in the greater Middle East has crested, China’s power and influence in the region is rising. Chinese security ties in the Middle East and South Asia are growing and over time are likely to pose an increasing security problem to American interests in the region. The Chinese are nurturing security relationships with countries that benefit from American security assistance such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as well as with states with which the United States has no security ties, most notably Iran. Chinese military and security assistance is a means for American security partners to seek weapons and training that are not offered by American security 120

C H I N A ’ S S T R A T E G I C P RO N G S

assistance programs as well as a source of military hardware that could be used in combat against US forces in the event of war. In sum, the Chinese are increasingly viewed as a counterbalance or alternative source of military assistance by many nation-states in the Middle East and South Asia. This chapter focuses on China’s security ties with geopolitically significant nation-states in the greater Middle East in which WMD and related delivery system cooperation are key features. The intersection of these two critical areas poses great challenges and dangers to American national security. To be sure, China has other arms relations in the region that are worthy of study. It has had dealings, for example, with Syria on the purchase of M-11 ballistic missiles; the status of the arrangement is in question. China also has nurtured a security arrangement with Israel. As Richard Bitzinger observes, “Although Israel and China did not establish formal diplomatic relations until early 1992, secret military ties between the two countries date back to 1980, and various reports estimate that Israel has exported between $1 and $3 billion worth of arms and technology to the PRC.”1 While the Syrian and Israeli security relationships with China are of concern, China’s security ties with WMD-related activities with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan are of considerably graver consequence to US national security interests. These countries are pivotal states for the struggle for power in the greater Middle East region whose security alignments could have profound implications for American security policy. Chinese security relationships with these countries, particularly in areas related to weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, will have a major impact on the regional balance of power as well as on American security policy toward these states and the region. Despite the potential threat to American security interests, China’s security ties in the greater Middle East often escape the attention of scholars and American policymakers. Attention to the subject generally falls between the intellectual and bureaucratic stools in the worlds of academe and policy practitioners. Scholars tend to stick to their regional areas of interest – whether the Middle East, South Asia, or Asia – and refrain from the analysis of cross-regional security issues. The bureaucratic structure of the American national security apparatus similarly inhibits such analysis. The American policymaking machinery separates the Middle East, South Asia, and Asia. The US Department of State, for example, has one bureau for each region. The American military command structure also compartmentalizes the greater Middle East: US European Command is responsible for northern Africa and Israel; US Central Command is responsible for the area between Egypt and Pakistan; and US Pacific Command is responsible for India and Asia. The Chinese, while publicly claiming support for international arrangements to stem the flow of weapons proliferation, actively support WMD programs in the greater Middle East to advance their strategic interests. As 121


Robert Einhorn, former Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation, has characterized China’s role in these spheres, “China’s progress in complying with and enforcing nonproliferation standards has been so uneven over the years. The pattern has often been two steps forward, one step back.”2 As Daniel Byman and Roger Cliff assess China’s mixed bag on adherence to international agreements, “China’s leaders evidently want to be viewed as abiding by these regimes. Thus, any accusations of violations produce vigorous denials and legalistic defenses. Nonetheless, as Beijing’s ambivalence toward restrictions on arms transfers would suggest, China’s adherence to these regimes is imperfect.”3 The Chinese appear to look for gaps in international agreements and exploit them to the full to pursue strategic and economic interests. Byman and Cliff rightly observe that “China has violated the spirit of the regimes by engaging in transfers which, if not necessarily explicitly banned, contradict the intent. Although China has often violated the spirit of its nonproliferation commitments, there are relatively few instances of China violating the exact letter of these agreements.”4 The Chinese appear to look for “plausible denial” explanations for WMD-related transfers to escape being slapped by international and US economic sanctions. If caught, the Chinese under US pressure make pledges or commitments not to undertake these actions in the future while looking for other avenues through which to advance their political, military and economic interests. Perhaps China’s strategy regarding WMD proliferation is best characterized as “cheat, retreat, and cheat again” as evident in Beijing’s security relationships with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan.

Beijing’s political, economic, and military interests Before examining the major Chinese security relationships with states in the greater Middle East region, a general discussion of Chinese motivations driving the relationships is in order. What are the political, economic, and military interests that propel Chinese policy in the region? The Chinese see the natural resources of the greater Middle East as critical to their economic development. The Chinese economy is growing at a stunning pace and its demands for oil are moving in lockstep. Chinese economic power is the engine that will drive China’s growing political and military power. As John Calabrese observers, Chinese officials recognize the critical importance of oil and gas to the global balance of power and because of the Persian Gulf’s vast energy reserves they regard the region to be of major geo-economic and geopolitical significance.5 China’s demands for oil from the greater Middle East are high and likely to grow. China’s domestic infrastructure is growing, increasing demand for oil. China’s rapid growth in road transport has driven up the demand for oil while domestic oil production has failed to keep pace, making China poised 122


by 2010 to be one of the world’s major oil importers.6 Consequently, China will become more dependent on the Persian Gulf, which has most of the world’s proven oil reserves, no matter how much Beijing tries to diversify its oil supply sources.7 China needs to ensure that the United States will never be in a position to sever China’s energy flow from the region. Erica Strecker Downs judges that “China’s ‘oil diplomacy’ in the Middle East is an effort to ensure continued access to oil from a US-dominated region that provides China with the bulk of its oil imports.”8 And Beijing has nurtured numerous strategic relationships in the greater Middle East to lessen the chances of a cutoff of oil from the region. For example, Chinese and Saudi officials in 1999 announced a “strategic oil partnership” with volumes of oil exports rising from 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 1996 to 350,000 bpd in 2000 on a 10-year contract. Likewise, agreements were reached for Iran’s exports to increase from 20,000 bpd in 1995 to 200,000 bpd in 2000.9 The Chinese are playing to their strong suit in diplomacy to nurture strategic relationships in the region because it lacks the military means to deny the United States the ability to impose a sea-based blockade of oil tanker traffic out of the Persian Gulf. The RAND Corporation assesses that “China currently does not possess the naval capabilities necessary to defend its sea shipments of oil and, consequently, regards their passage through waters dominated by the US Navy – especially the Persian Gulf – as a key strategic vulnerability.”10 Beyond oil interests, Chinese policymakers guard against potential spillover effects from conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia. They are mindful of the greater Middle East because political and ethnic conflicts there may threaten to spill over into the Chinese internal political realm. Calabrese notes that Of special concern to China’s leaders is the potentially destabilizing effect of these conflicts and transnational forces on China itself, and especially on the Xinjiang province, where a comparatively large number of Muslim minorities reside and where political disturbances have occurred with increasing frequency in recent years.11 The Chinese pursue security ties in the Middle East and South Asia to hedge against resurgent Islamic fundamentalism stemming from the former states of the Soviet Union which pose a potential internal security threat to China’s western provinces. The greater Middle East region also is important to Chinese security policy because Beijing recognizes that the region is of critical importance to the United States, a key regional and global rival. As Robert Sutter asserts, “Beijing probably calculated that discreetly keeping the United States off balance in the Middle East and other global hotspots diverted US energies 123


from containing China’s expanding influence internationally.”12 To the extent US policy attention is mired in the politics and military dynamics of the greater Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has less of an attention span for more critical Chinese security interests closer to the mainland, especially Taiwan. The Chinese have adroitly coordinated diplomacy in the region with European states, especially France, Germany, and Russia, to orchestrate a counterbalance to American statecraft in the region. As Sutter notes, Mirroring what Chinese officials saw as the “two-handed” US policy of engagement and containment toward China, the Chinese government came up with a two-pronged policy of its own with regard to US interests in the Middle East. Thus, China continued to employ strategic partnerships, such as those forged with France and Russia, and historical affinity with the region’s developing countries to weaken US dominancy; at the same time, it continued to promote cooperation and avoided direction confrontation in the ongoing dialogue with the United States on key regional issues.13 The conduct of Chinese diplomacy in this regard has been most evident in China’s collusion with France and Russia to lessen international sanctions against Saddam’s regime in Iraq throughout the 1990s. That diplomacy of resistance came to a head in 2003 with French, German, Russian and Chinese opposition to the US-led military campaign to oust Saddam’s regime. Chinese diplomacy in and around the corridors of the United Nations allows the Chinese, in a manner, to politically hit above their weight in the international arena. Sutter points out that “Another calculation driving China’s newly assertive policy toward the Middle East was the need – as the UN Perm-Five’s only developing country – for China to demonstrate increased responsibility and activism in addressing global problems on behalf of its developing counterparts.”14 Beijing also conducts diplomatic maneuvering in the UN and in the greater Middle East to impede Taiwan’s increasing political efforts to garner international diplomatic recognition as a political entity separate from mainland China. Sutter notes that “Chinese officials, though victorious over Taiwan in establishing relations with the conservative Saudi Arabian government, devoted strong efforts to curbing any Taiwan inroads in the Middle East, as well as elsewhere.”15 The Chinese have sought military and security links in the region, often to fill voids in demand for equipment and expertise which the United States could not or would not fill for political reasons. The security ties also help stem the political recognition of Taiwan by states in the region at the cost of recognition of Beijing. As Sutter points out, The Chinese also sought to develop trade in military items and 124


technologies with countries that were on poor terms with the United States (for example, Iran), in part to use those ties as leverage in dealing with suspected US plots to contain or pressure China.16 The Chinese leverage security relationships it holds in the greater Middle East against American efforts to bolster Taiwanese security. The Chinese see security relationships involving WMD and delivery systems as particularly heavy tools to leverage against American security policy. As Michael Swaine comments, Chinese efforts to sell both arms, including ballistic missiles and nuclear technologies are “linked to Beijing’s efforts to augment both military and central government revenues, increase its diplomatic and strategic leverage against the United States and other potential antagonists, and assist important allies such as Pakistan.”17 Toshi Yoshihara and Richard Sokolsky elaborate that Beijing has relied on the threat of proliferation as a counterweight to US policies that threaten China’s interests. Most recently, American plans to sell a robust arms package to Taiwan and the potential delivery of theater missile defense systems to the island in the future have compelled China to invoke its right to transfer weapons technologies to unidentified third parties.18 The Chinese military earns foreign exchange from arms sales abroad that, in turn, are invested into Chinese military modernization efforts. As Bates Gill observes, There can be little doubt that the profit motive was an important factor driving the PRC to supply the combatants in the Iran–Iraq war. With the receipt of foreign exchange being the key element to China’s modernization efforts – and ultimately, to China’s security strategy – profitable arms exports to Iran and Iraq were promoted.19 The sale of Chinese weapons, particularly those related to WMD, often puts the Chinese military at odds with the diplomatic objectives of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). The MFA in some instances may object to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s incentive to push arms sales abroad to earn foreign currency for reinvestment into China’s military modernization programs out of concern for the negative diplomatic fallout should such sales become public knowledge. To resolve disputes between the PLA and the MFA, the Chinese have put into place a policymaking body. This policymaking mechanism may have improved the MFA’s say in arms sales, but the PLA still prevails in many debates over arms and security relationships. As Gill observes, in the late 1980s as Chinese arms sales became more controversial, 125


the MFA became a more important and institutionalized participant in arms export decision-making, along with trade-related and military-related organizations. In the case of highly advanced exports and exports to “sensitive regions,” the MFA takes part in a high-level interagency body – possibly the so-called Military Exports Leading Small Group that was established in 1989.20 Swaine notes that the MFA probably serves as the major proponent in high party and military circles for the need for restraining controversial arms sales to maintain good relations with the West. He notes, however, that the Chinese military and senior party leadership probably play a dominant, if not exclusive, role in determining and implementing controversial arms sales.21 The bureaucratic battles between the Chinese military and diplomats often make it difficult for outside observers to interpret the thrust and intent of Chinese security policy. As Denny Roy observers, Washington has sometimes received assurances from the MFA that China will restrict sensitive sales involving sophisticated weaponry, particularly nuclear technology and missiles, to politically unstable areas such as the Middle East, only to find the sales go ahead anyway. Often the MFA makes these promises in good faith. The problem is that the MFA cannot control Chinese arms sales; most of these come under the purview of the PLA, which is more willing than the MFA to tolerate a deterioration of relations with the United States to maintain a good source of revenue.22 A myriad of political, military, and economic interests shape Chinese policy in the greater Middle East. But what are the reciprocal interests of regional states that are cooperating with China in the security sphere? The Chinese have a variety of relationships throughout the region. They have provided conventional arms to Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and are nurturing military cooperation with Israel.23 Notwithstanding this range of military assistance relationships, China’s most strategically significant partnerships in the greater Middle East region lie with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. The power of each of these states looms large in the greater Middle East region, and Chinese security assistance specifically in WMD and delivery systems increases the power of these states and potentially increases the chances that the interests and power of these states will come to clash with the interests of American national security policy.

The Saudi Arabia connection The Chinese and the Saudis launched an ambitious strategic relationship during the 1980s. The Saudis purchased Chinese CSS-2 intermediate range 126


missiles from China. The deal paved the way for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the countries and laid the foundation for security cooperation that continues today. As Gill recounts, The Sino-Saudi CSS-2 missile deal was first publicly revealed as a fait accompli in March 1988. The first orders for the missiles were made in 1985, and a number of deliveries were made in 1987 and 1988 before news of the sale became public. The missiles delivered to Saudi Arabia came from an array of over 100 nuclear-capable IRBMs that were first tested by the PRC in 1969 and later deployed in 1971.24 Both the Saudis and the Chinese made great efforts to hide the relationship from American intelligence detection to preclude American diplomatic intervention to stop the deal. Saudi and Chinese denial and deception efforts paid real dividends and American intelligence was only able to detect the strategic cooperation long after the missiles had been deployed in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis gave greater weight to the strategic importance of the missiles than to the relationship with the United States, which they rightly calculated would weather the political storm unleashed by the revelation of the Chinese missile transfer. The characteristics of the CSS-2s raised concern that the Saudis were moving to develop a nuclear weapons delivery capability. The missiles were originally operational in the Chinese nuclear force structure. Saudi General Khaled bin Sultan made four visits to China, the first of which was in 1987.25 He visited a Chinese missile base and, by his account, was the first foreigner to view the CSS-2 missile armed with a nuclear warhead.26 The CSS-2 missile, moreover, is highly inaccurate and is much more suitable for the delivery of nuclear than of conventional warheads. While the Chinese and the Saudis claim that the missiles in Saudi Arabia are conventionally armed, no international inspection has ever taken place to verify those claims. The Reagan administration issued a diplomatic protest to the Kingdom and demanded inspection of the missiles, but the Saudis adamantly refused. The Chinese rationale for selling the missiles appears to have been heavily influenced by financial and political interests. As Jon Wolfstahl observes, as one of the few global suppliers of ballistic missiles China can demand high prices which in some instances will help recoup the design and production costs. This is naturally a powerful disincentive for the Chinese to put any limit on ballistic missile sales.27 By Khaled’s account, during negotiations for the missiles the Chinese were eager for the Saudis to pay in cash.28 The Chinese also managed to parlay the missile deal into a political strategic relationship with a central Middle Eastern state simultaneously denying that relationship to Taiwan. 127


The scope of contemporary Chinese–Saudi security cooperation is difficult to gauge by outside observers. The relationship was born in great secrecy and both parties have labored to keep it that way. Robert Mullins reports from a Defense Intelligence Agency study that in the mid-1990s there were at least 1,000 Chinese military advisers in Saudi Arabia at missile installations where American and Western technicians were denied access, and that China and Saudi Arabia have two secure telecommunications links for private leadership contacts.29 A Chinese defense firm, Polytechnologies Incorporated, under the control of the PLA General Staff is well known as China’s most aggressive arms dealer. It can handle sensitive training assignments and installation services such as those required by the China–Saudi CSS-2 arrangement, according to Eric Hyer.30

The Iran connection Iran nurtured military ties with China throughout its war with Iraq in the 1990s. The lion’s share of the relationship consisted of Iranian purchases of Chinese conventional military hardware. Gill notes that “Chinese militarytechnical exports to Iran began in 1981, shortly after the beginning of the Iran–Iraq war. This trade has included thousands of tanks, armored personnel vehicles, and artillery pieces; several hundred surface-to-air, air-to-air missiles; thousands of antitank missiles; more than a hundred fighter aircraft; and dozens of small warships.”31 During the Iran–Iraq war, China’s sale of cruise missiles to Tehran generated international controversy. China in the late 1980s delivered HY-2 Silkworm missiles to Iran which caused the Reagan administration to freeze the liberalization of technology sales to China. In March 1988 China gave private assurances to the United States that it would stop exporting the Silkworm to Iran. In January 1996 Iran tested an advanced Chinese C-802 anti-ship cruise missile; the United States pressured Beijing to stop these shipments. And the Clinton administration in September 1997 received a Chinese pledge that China would halt future sales of the C-802 cruise missiles.32 Iran has increasingly relied on Chinese expertise for weapons of mass destruction programs and delivery systems in the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq war. As Gill recounts, “China has assisted Iran in the development of its ballistic and cruise missile production capability and has provided Iran with military-related scientific expertise, production technologies, blueprints, and possibly assistance in the development of clandestine chemical and nuclear weapons programs.”33 The Iranians recognize their conventional military shortcomings and are blocked by international isolation from major purchases of conventional military equipment needed to modernize their armed forces. Iran’s international isolation has contributed to its reliance on China for help with WMD-related projects. As Barry Rubin judges, “In short, it is Iran’s pariah 128


status that makes it an attractive market – or even a market at all – for China, as a supplier of last resort for certain conventional items and weapons of mass destruction.”34 To make up for these shortcomings, the Iranians appear to be sinking their military modernization investments into WMD and delivery systems. The Iranians and Chinese continue to have high-level contacts to nurture their strategic relationship. Iranian president Mohammad Khatami in July 2000 visited China to ostensibly enhance economic cooperation, but Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani was also part of the official delegation and met with his Chinese counterpart to discuss military issues. The content of the talks remains a tightly held secret, but it is suspected that arms sales played a role in those discussions.35 Chinese activities in these areas have attracted international attention that has compelled the Chinese to sell WMD-related equipment in piecemeal fashion to reduce the chances of attracting American and international attention while at the same time preserving strategic ties to Tehran. As Gill traces Chinese dealings Over the two years prior to the US–China summit of October 1997, under significant pressure from the United States, China took a number of steps to curtail particularly sensitive transfers to Iran. Although it appears that Chinese arms exports to Iran have diminished, concerns persist that China continues to provide Iran with critical subsystems, technologies, and expertise, contributing to further development of its cruise and ballistic missile capability and to its alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon-related programs.36 Despite the US–China summit of October 1997, China has provided Iran with a range of nuclear- and missile-related assistance, including alleged technical assistance for uranium mining, enrichment, and conversion and for the development of nuclear research reactors, as well as other technical training and support. China ‘went along’ with the United States, but in subsequent interpretations of their nonproliferation agreements fell short of US expectations.37 The Chinese aid and abet Iran’s chemical weapons program. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Bruce Reidel, testified to a House Committee in 1995 that Iran’s chemical weapons program was receiving Chinese assistance: “Chinese firms have provided some assistance, both in terms of the infrastructure for building chemical plants and some of the precursors for developing agents.”38 Gill observes that 129


Negotiations with the Chinese over the past several years, and leading up to the US–China summit of October 1997, have not had the same kind of success in relation to chemical proliferation as they have apparently had with nuclear-related exports. China has an enormous chemical industry but lacks adequate means to monitor and enforce export controls on the industry. Moreover, the dual-use nature of many chemical-related exports makes the task of policing chemical weapons-related transfer difficult.39 The Chinese also are contributing to Iranian capabilities to produce nuclear weapons under the guise of civilian nuclear power-related activities. China and Iran have argued since 1992 that Chinese nuclear assistance is fully consistent with the Article 4 provisions of the NPT which allows for peaceful nuclear cooperation and that Iranian nuclear facilities are under IAEA safeguards. The IAEA has found that Iran is in compliance with NPT obligations.40 Nevertheless, that certification should provide the world with little comfort because Iran is as capable as Iraq was in the 1980s of pulling the wool over IAEA eyes, maintaining the façade of safeguards while maintaining a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program. Along these lines, Gill observes that as early as June 1994 reports indicated that Chinese nuclear experts were assisting with the construction of uranium enrichment plants in Iran even though Tehran could purchase enriched uranium for its civilian reactors on the international market for a fraction of the cost of developing an indigenous uranium enrichment capability, raising American concerns that Tehran intended to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapons program. More recently, CIA head George Tenet testified that “Chinese firms may be backing away from the 1997 commitment by China not to assist Iran’s nuclear program.”41 The Chinese also continue to dabble in Iran’s ballistic missile programs. China and Iran may have discussed the transfer of 600 km-range M-9 and 300 km-range M-11 missiles and that those transfers were imminent in late 1991 and again in late 1992. In spite of Iranian pledges in 1992 to abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), China continued to assist in the indigenous development of Iran’s ballistic missile program with technology transfers, scientific advice, and assistance in the construction of a missile production facility.42

The Pakistan connection The Pakistanis today rely heavy on Chinese conventional arms for their defense posture, much as the Iranians had during the 1980s. Gill observes that Pakistan is one of the few countries to have received weapons from all four major weapons categories of Chinese production – aircraft, armor and artillery, 130


missiles, and naval vessels – and in most cases receives the best weapons exports China has to offer. In short, the Pakistani arms trade relationship has been and remains China’s most stable and most important.43 Gill notes that a significant characteristic of the relationship is that “China’s military transfers to Pakistan have always been offered as outright free-ofcharge grants or, to a lesser extent, under low-cost repayment terms.”44 Clearly, China’s interest in security ties with Pakistan is for strategic reasons in China’s competition for power with India and not for financial gain. As Harry Harding traces the historical Sino-Pakistani relationship, it emerged in the early 1960s when Beijing wanted a counterweight to India after the Sino-Indian border wars of 1959 and 1962 while Pakistan wanted a balance against India when Islamabad could not count on its alliance with the United States as a reliable deterrent against New Delhi.45 China’s unease over the more recent rise of Indian power in South Asia probably strengthens Beijing’s strategic interests in Pakistan. Michael Pillsbury observers that “Following India’s nuclear tests in May 1998, in particular, numerous Chinese authors have accused India of pursuing a policy of military expansion since attaining independence, in order to become a military power, contain China, and dominate and control South Asia and the Indian Ocean.”46 In Pillsbury’s assessment, China’s analysts write that India, as a smaller scale version of Japan, also has a militaristic, religion-based strategic culture, seeks to dominate its neighbors, has had covert nuclear ambitions for two decades prior to its nuclear tests in 1998, attempts to foment conflict between China and other nations, and has some areas of military superiority over China, such as its current navy.47 Chinese security assistance has been instrumental in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a strategic imperative for Islamabad in its competition with New Delhi. According to Gill, after India detonated its “peaceful” nuclear explosion in 1974, Pakistani strongman Bhutto managed to gain China’s acquiescence in helping Pakistan develop a nuclear weapon, including the provision of uranium for a Pakistan enrichment facility.48 Zachary Davis recounts that in the 1980s the United States had evidence that China was helping Pakistan operate its Kahuta uranium-enrichment plant and that Beijing provided Islamabad with a design for a 25-kiloton implosion device along with enough weapons-grade uranium to build two nuclear weapons. Chinese scientists have regularly visited the Kahuta complex in which gas centrifuges are used to produce weapons-grade uranium.49 131


The Monterey Institute of International Studies also notes that China reportedly transferred enough tritium gas to Pakistan for ten nuclear weapons.50 Tritium is used to achieve fusion in hydrogen bombs and to boost the yield of nuclear weapons. And in 1995, the Chinese were caught exporting about 5,000 specially designed ring magnets – which could be used in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium – to a Pakistani nuclear laboratory suspected of conducting nuclear weapons-related work. China and Pakistan both initially denied that the sale had taken place, but in later talks with US officials the Chinese privately admitted the transfer.51 China has also provided critical assistance to lay the foundation of Pakistan’s ballistic missile forces. As Mullins recalls, “The origins of Sino-Pakistani cooperation in missile development can be traced to the late 1980s when China assisted in the development of Pakistan’s Haft missiles, two of which are very similar in design and function to the Chinese M-9 and M-11 tactical ballistic missiles.”52 China further nurtured Pakistan’s ballistic missile capabilities in the 1990s with the shipments of M-11 missile systems. Chinese officials publicly referred to these missiles as “short-range” weapons that did not violate the MTCR, but the United States imposed MTCRrelated sanctions on exports of high-speed computers and satellites to China.53 The American sanctions were lifted in March 1992 after Washington received a written pledge from China that it would adhere to the missile nonproliferation regime – by not transferring ballistic missiles or technology suitable for missiles to deliver a 500-kilogram payload a range of 300 kilometers – but in 1993 the United States again acquired evidence that China had transferred M-11 technology to Pakistan in violation of the MTCR.54 The Chinese may have violated the MTCR regime with the M-11s in order to retaliate or for diplomatic leverage against the United States for its perceived violation of an American-Chinese understanding on American military equipment provisions to Taiwan. The George H. W. Bush administration announced in September 1992 that it would sell 150 F-16 aircraft to Taiwan, a move that the Chinese believed violated the terms of the August 1982 US–China agreement on US arms sales to Taiwan, in which the United States agreed that the quality of US arms sold to Taiwan would not exceed the quality of arms sold during the Carter administration and that the quantity of arms sold to Taiwan would gradually diminish. Robert Ross concludes of the controversy that China, in retaliation against the F-16 deal, transferred M-11 missiles to Pakistan and reached a formal agreement with Iran to cooperate on nuclear energy, breaking Beijing’s February 1992 commitment to abide by the MTCR.55

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The Chinese–US security competition Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan are pivotal states in the greater Middle East region and are increasingly likely to view China as an alternative source of security and as a counterbalance to American influence in the region. In a reflection of this strategic perception in the region, Saudi General Khaled opined that China’s rapid economic growth must soon make it a formidable military power, which we, in the Middle East, must take into account. Some estimates suggest that China will in the coming years become a large customer for Middle East oil, perhaps laying the basis for a future security partnership between us.56 Chinese diplomacy has signed on to an impressive array of international arrangements to curb international proliferation of WMD. China joined: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992 and supported its indefinite extension in 1995; the Chemical Weapons Convention signed in 1993 and ratified in 1997; bilateral pledges to abide by MTCR in 1992 then accepted the “inherent capability” concept in 1994 and agreed to cutting off nuclear capable ballistic missiles and technology in South Asia in June 1998; halted assistance to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities in 1996; cut off nuclear and anti-ship cruise missile-related trade with Iran in 1997; and has strengthened its export control regulations for nuclear, chemical, missile and military products.57 Nevertheless, the Chinese assiduously work around the letter of these agreements to continue to nurture regional strategic relationships. As Gill observes, Chinese export of sensitive military and dual-use technologies continues, and the country’s compliance with certain international, bilateral, and unilateral commitments often comes into question. Of special concern is not the quantity of Chinese exports, but their nature and the degree to which they consequently contribute to the development of weapons of mass destruction and advanced conventional weapons in recipient countries. In addition, it is not clear that China’s stated adherence to regimes necessarily equates to full acceptance of the norms, concepts, rules, and details that govern them.58 China takes similar efforts to steer around and through international arrangements to curb weapons proliferation in its own weapons programs. Although China ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997 and claims that it “does not produce or possess chemical weapons,” Beijing, according to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, has an advanced chemical

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warfare program, including research and development, production, and weaponization capabilities and its inventory of chemical agents includes a full range of advanced agents.59 China also signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention in 1984, but is believed to have had an offensive biological warfare program prior to its accession to the convention and that this program has likely been maintained.60 The struggle for influence in the greater Middle East region between the United States and China will likely grow into an important subset of the American-Sino strategic competition. The struggle for influence will likely manifest itself in the strategic calculus over ballistic missiles and missile defenses in the region. If the United States were to provide robust military capabilities, particularly ballistic missile defenses to Taiwan, the Chinese – as apparently had been the case, in part, regarding its controversial delivery of M-11 ballistic missile technology to Pakistan in the 1990s – might again resort to violating the spirit as well as the letter of the MTCR with ballistic missile sales to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran in an effort to undermine US counter-proliferation policy and to pressure Washington to reduce military support to Taipei. Despite China’s evasion of US policy objectives, dogged American diplomacy and arm-twisting under the auspices of international agreements can make headway. The MTCR, for example, appears to have played a useful political role in stemming the international transfer of ballistic missiles. The political costs for China – particularly vis-à-vis the United States – in making sales of entire ballistic missile systems are much larger with the MTCR in place than would have been the case without the regime. Sales such as China’s CSS-2 missiles to Saudi Arabia and M-11s to Pakistan are the exceptions rather than the rule. The Russians, too, appear to have been restrained from making major sales to modernize ballistic missile inventories in the greater Middle East regions initially stocked with Soviet-built Scuds in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the Chinese appear bent on playing a “cat-and-mouse game” with the United States in the proliferation field. The Chinese act against American counter-proliferation policy until caught, then deny all charges, only subsequently, and belatedly, to recant, saying that it will not again occur in the future. This cat-and-mouse game gets progressively harder for the United States to play. In each evolution the United States loses its edge in intelligence and the Chinese adapt as the strengths and weaknesses of American intelligence are revealed. The Chinese, for example, in the early 1980s denied that they were selling arms to Iran or Iraq during the war. American Undersecretary of State Michael Armacost was compelled to show Chinese officials pictures of missiles leaving China and arriving in the same ship in port at Bandar Abbas, Iran.61 Such exposures of American intelligence are often a necessity in the counter-proliferation diplomacy, but American intelligence will have to work hard to continue to 134


compensate for such exposures to keep abreast of WMD and missile proliferation. Blending intelligence, diplomacy, and policy to pressure China to abide by both the letter and spirit of international arrangements to curb weapons proliferation will be a daunting task. The Chinese security policy is much like a mountain stream: block it in one direction and it moves to another. The challenge will be for American intelligence, diplomacy and policy to monitor and rapidly adjust to China’s ever-changing efforts and methods to aid and abet WMD-related programs in the greater Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan.

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9 WHY NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL NOT PREVENT MAJOR WAR

What if Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others join Pakistan as nuclear weapons-armed states in the greater Middle East? And so what if China, North Korea, Russia, and other states outside the region aid and abet greater Middle Eastern states in their quests for nuclear weapons? Some observers argue that the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a natural inevitability and a trend that cannot be reversed. They even argue further that a wide distribution of nuclear weapons increases the risks and costs of war to the point that the incentives and chances of major war erupting would dramatically lessen to virtually zero in the greater Middle East. Are these, however, wise and reasonable expectations of the effects of nuclear weapons proliferation? Or are they expectations divorced from the realities of power, prestige, and interest that classical realists viewed as the root causes of war? Much of the scholarly literature on WMD is of marginal help in answering these questions because it focuses on technical questions such as the requirements for weapons production as well as weapons capabilities. Less attention has been devoted to the effects of the WMD proliferation on the conduct of international politics.1 Do nuclear weapons increase, decrease, or have no impact on the prospects for armed conflict between nation-states? Within the small body of scholarly literature that has probed this question, a notable school of thought counter-intuitively argues that the proliferation of nuclear weapons increases the prospects for international stability. The argument merits serious attention because of its profound policy implications. If the spread of nuclear weapons to increasing numbers of nation-states enhances international stability, then policy ought to be aimed at supporting proliferation rather than stemming it as currently conceived, particularly by the United States. To tackle the question, this chapter summarizes the case made by “nuclear proliferation optimists” that the spread of nuclear weapons has stabilizing effects on international relations.2 It then critiques the position, in part, by arguing that the optimists mistakenly project the stability of the Soviet– American security dilemma during the cold war to the major regional rivalries in contemporary international relations, especially in the greater Middle 136

W H Y N U C L E A R W E A P O N S W I L L N O T P R E V E N T M A J O R WA R

East region. The nuclear proliferation optimists – many of whom are considered as neo-realist scholars – also fail to incorporate human foibles into their analysis, which are critical to understanding the dynamics of past, present, and future conflict. This chapter examines the impact of nuclear weapons proliferation and does not address chemical and biological weapons proliferation for several reasons. First, the scholarly literature that touts the benefits of proliferation focuses on nuclear weapons. Second, chemical weapons, although capable of inflicting massive casualties on the battlefield and against civilian populations as evident during the Iran–Iraq war, are not capable of causing the material destruction on a scale comparable to that of nuclear weapons. Third, capabilities of chemical weapons pale in comparison to those of biological weapons, but biological weapons possession does not carry the prestige of nuclear weapons. Biological weapons are easier to manufacture than nuclear weapons, but the possession of the latter symbolizes the overcoming of substantial technological barriers for the possessing nation-state. Finally, biological weapons, because their effects would be slow to show in war, would not have the immediate and dramatic psychological impact that nuclear weapons would have on the battlefield.3

Nuclear weapons cause peace The intellectual architect of the optimistic school of thought on nuclear weapons proliferation is Kenneth Waltz. He poured the argument’s foundation and no once since has labored to better effect to erect the intellectual edifice. Waltz initially set out on this intellectual path because he was intrigued by the fact that nuclear weapons have never been used in a world in which two or more states possessed them and he wanted to explain why.4 His argument’s foundation rests on a robust confidence in the easy operation of deterrence, both in theory and in practice. Waltz hypothesizes that “Nuclear weapons and an appropriate doctrine for their use may make it possible to approach the defensive–deterrent ideal, a condition that would cause the chance of war to dwindle. Concentrating attention on the destructive power of nuclear weapons has obscured the important benefits they promise to states trying to coexist in a self-help world.”5 He argues that the defensive–deterrent is achieved between nuclear-armed states because nuclear weapons cannot be used for conquest. If weapons are not well suited for conquest, neighbors have more peace of mind. According to the defensive–deterrent ideal, we should expect war to become less likely when weaponry is such as to make conquest more difficult, to discourage pre-emptive and preventive war, and to make coercive threats less credible.6 137


Waltz characterizes a preventive war as one launched by a stronger state against a weaker one that is assessed to be gaining strength and a pre-emptive strike as one launched by one state to blunt an attack from another state.7 Because nuclear weapons could not be used for offensive operations, in Waltz’s judgment, they could only be used to deter an adversary from using them against the possessor nation-state. Military postures based on nuclear deterrence – instead of on war fighting postures – have a number of important benefits from Waltz’s point of view. First, deterrent strategies induce caution all around and thus reduce the incidence of war. Second, wars fought in the face of strategic nuclear weapons must be carefully limited because a country having them may retaliate if its vital interests are threatened. Third, prospective punishment need only be proportionate to an adversary’s expected gains in war after those gains are discounted for the many uncertainties of war. Fourth, should deterrence fail, a few judiciously delivered warheads are likely to produce sobriety in the leaders of all of the countries involved and thus bring rapid de-escalation.8 The conclusion to be drawn from these assumptions is that wars between nuclear-armed nation-states will be unlikely to start, and, if they do, the conflicts are likely to be limited because the belligerents will stop the fighting short of the intensity needed to bring about the resort to nuclear weapons. In Waltz’s words, “Deterrent strategies lower the probability that wars will be fought. If wars are nevertheless fought, deterrent strategies lower the probability that they will become wars of high intensity.”9 In his more recent work, Waltz appears to have dropped the caveats of his earlier analysis to assert baldly that, “The probability of major war among states having nuclear weapons approaches zero.”10 Waltz extrapolates from the stability – as defined as the absence of war between major powers – that has characterized the world since World War II that the spread of nuclear armed states will further bolster international stability in the post-cold war world, as long as the proliferation occurs at a measured pace. “Nuclear weapons in the hands of six or seven states have lessened wars and limited conflicts. The further spread of nuclear weapons can be expected to widen those effects.”11 He concludes: “the measured spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared.”12 This optimistic view of nuclear weapons proliferation has important policy implications for American and allied statecraft. Waltz confidently argues that US policy that aims at thwarting the proliferation of nuclear weapons is wrong-headed. He counter-intuitively argues that the aiding the proliferation of nuclear weapons would be more conducive to US interests. Present policy works hard to prevent additional states from acquir138


ing nuclear weapons. My examination of the effects of nuclear weapons leads to the conclusion that our policy is wrong without supporting the proposition that true proliferation – the rapid spread of nuclear weaponry – is desirable. Rapid change may be destabilizing. The slow spread of nuclear weapons gives states time to learn to live with them, to appreciate their virtues, and to understand the limits they place on behavior.13 Others have taken Waltz’s work and applied it to inform regional and country specific policy recommendations. John Mearsheimer, for example, argued that international stability would best be preserved had Ukraine retained a nuclear weapons inventory.14 More broadly, Mearsheimer assesses that international stability would be enhanced were the United States to “encourage the limited and carefully managed proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe.”15 Along similar lines, Stephen Van Evera has recommended that Germany acquire nuclear weapons to deter Russia.16

Questioning a linkage between nuclear weapons and peace The nuclear optimists’ position has escaped major critique in the scholarly community and has received little serious attention in policy circles. As Richard Betts observers, “The Waltz argument cannot be brushed off, but surprisingly few academic strategists besides Scott Sagan have refuted it in detail.”17 As far as policymakers’ reactions to the Waltz argument are concerned, John Lewis Gaddis has observed “To say that these arguments have not elicited widespread support would be putting it charitably; the harsher criticism is that they show what happens when theory is pursued beyond common sense.”18 Another critic, James Kurth, judges that “There probably has not been a single foreign policy professional in the US government who has found this notion to be helpful.”19 The nuclear optimists’ argument has escaped critical appraisal, in part, due to the lack of cases – fortunately, not yet anyway – of nuclear-armed nation-states fighting a major war to disprove the analysis. The lack of case studies, however, does not prove the argument that the proliferation of nuclear weapons decreases the chances of – or even precludes – war between nation-states. One must recall that in the span of human history, the existence of nuclear weapons, about sixty years, is a very recent development. As Gaddis observers, “the archaeological evidence shows that men – and often women as well – have been fighting wars for at least 5,000 years.”20 It is sobering to recall that about 300 years were needed for gunpowder to become a mainstay in warfare. William McNeill noted that although gunpowder was available in the year 1000, the Chinese only began to exploit it in war around 1290, when the first true guns appear to have been invented.21 John Keegan observers that although the crossbow appeared in Europe at 139


the end of the thirteenth century , it was not until the fourteenth century that it came into common use on the battlefield.22 The argument that nuclear weapons reverse the long and tragic history of warfare therefore demands a critical look. Because nuclear weapons have only been used twice in warfare, there is a poor empirical base with which to test competing views on the effects of nuclear weapons proliferation. Instead, a critical examination of the optimists’ argument must rely on qualitative reasoning, logic, inference, and historical analogy. Although such an approach falls short of the requirements for a strictly social scientific inquiry, it remains theoretically valid. As Stephen Walt argues “the history of both natural and social science suggests that theoretical innovations emerge not from abstract modeling exercises, but primarily from efforts to solve concrete empirical puzzles . . . In other words, induction and deduction are equally valid avenues for creating a theory, and the former may in fact be more fruitful.”23

Geopolitics and nuclear weapons: then and now Waltz’s argument is excessively influenced by the experience of the cold war rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. He implicitly takes that experience and intellectually overlays it on geopolitics after the cold war. Those elements that lent stability to the cold war bipolar distribution of power are lacking or missing in contemporary regional competitions for power, contrary to the premise held in Waltz’s argument of the stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons spread. As a broad observation, the Soviet Union and the United States did not have clashes of national interest of such a magnitude to warrant a full-scale war between the superpowers. As George Kennan remarked of the cold war, there were “no political issues between the Soviet Union and the United States which could conceivably be susceptible of solution by war, even if the state of weaponry had not made any major military conflict between the two powers unthinkable.”24 That is certainly not the case in the contemporary security environment in the greater Middle East. Nuclear weapons were only one of many factors that contributed to the cold war’s international stability. Gaddis assesses that the other stabilizing elements were the reconnaissance revolution, ideological moderation, “rules of the game” which included respect for spheres of influence, avoidance of direct military confrontation, and the understanding that nuclear weapons were only for use as a last resort, a preference for predictable anomaly over unpredictable rationality, and restraint from undermining the other side’s leadership.25 A brief survey of contemporary international relations belies the assumption implicit in the optimists’ argument that the elements of stability today between potential regional nuclear rivals are as strong as they were between 140


the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. First, territorial disputes are tripwires for war between major regional nation-states, particularly in the greater Middle East region. In the Persian Gulf, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait showed that military force is still viewed in the region as a means to redress border disputes. The United Arab Emirates today disputes Iranian claims to several Persian Gulf islands as Tehran builds up its ballistic missile forces and its suspected nuclear weapons program. The 1990–1991 Gulf war overshadowed the fact that Iran during the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war posed the greatest threat to Kuwaiti sovereignty.26 Elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel and Syria remain at odds over the status of the Golan Heights. While Israel is widely regarded as being a nuclear power, Syria is generally not considered as a nuclear weapons candidate due to economic shortcomings. In the longer run though, Syria might overcome political, military, and economic obstacles to embark on a nuclear weapons program to counter Israeli capabilities. The American military campaign in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors and Washington’s need for help from Pakistan and India have brought to the fore the unsettled border tensions in South Asia where India and Pakistan have fought several wars. Pakistan-backed tribesmen invaded the Indian-controlled province of Kashmir to spark the first war in 1947, a second war in 1965 erupted in the Punjab and Kashmir provinces, and the third war was fought in 1971 over the secession of East Pakistan from Pakistan to form Bangladesh. In May 1998, India tested five nuclear devices and Pakistan countered by detonating six devices to show the world that they are both nation-states armed with nuclear weapon. The testing of nuclear weapons did not stop Pakistan and India from military sparring in the Kargil crisis of 1999, in which Pakistan’s military sent infantry into Indian-controlled territory, calculating that India would not risk war over a limited land grab.27 In short, territorial disputes today have great potential for sparking major regional conflicts. In contrast, the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war lacked comparable disputes over territory. Second, the reconnaissance revolution is gradually moving from major to medium powers with the commercialization of the satellite industry, but regional capabilities probably fall short of those of the Soviet Union and the United States during the cold war. As Jeffrey Richelson describes the industry, France has produced a commercial satellite, which has been used to acquire photographs of a variety of military installations, and these photos have been published. In addition, France, along with Italy and Spain, is developing the HELIOS military reconnaissance satellite. Israel has placed an experimental satellite in orbit and is clearly on its way to deploying a photo-reconnaissance satellite. India will probably be next.28 141


Despite the increasing availability of satellite imagery, major regional nation-state rivals are unlikely for many years to have robust intelligence collection and analysis capabilities comparable to those that lent stability to the cold war Soviet–American rivalry. India, for example, discovered that it suffered from substantial intelligence shortcomings that hampered New Delhi’s understanding of the 1999 Kargil crisis with Pakistan. Consequently, India’s “political-military elite has begun to identify the limitations that exist in Indian intelligence’s ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence effectively,” according to a RAND study.29 Third, ideological moderation is not a characterization that immediately comes to mind in thinking about contemporary regional conflicts. India and Pakistan are experiencing militant nationalism evident with the fanfare and emotional public displays that accompanied the detonation of their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile test flights in recent memory. In the Middle East, although Israel’s diplomatic ties with Egypt and Jordan have tamed the rivalries of the 1967 and 1973 wars, the collapse of the Middle East peace process and Israeli and Palestinian violence in disputed territories are stark reminders of the potential for militant nationalism that could threaten to again sweep the region. The so-called moderates in Iranian politics are stymied by conservative clerics who with their ideological zeal could resume hegemonic ambitions against the Gulf states in the not too distant future. Fourth, “rules of the game” are inchoate in major disputes of the contemporary greater Middle East. Contested territories preclude the establishment of spheres of influence in the Indian–Pakistani, Arab–Israeli, and Persian Gulf conflicts; nor do the nation-states in these regions display any aversion to direct military clashes, as had the Soviets and Americans during the cold war. The Pakistanis and Indians have fought several wars, as previously mentioned, and periodically “rattle sabers” across their border with military exercises, small unit incursions, and artillery fire. The Arabs and the Israelis fought major wars in 1956, 1967, 1973, and Israel’s 1982 military intervention in Lebanon led to engagements with Syrian forces.30 The Iran– Iraq war was fought, in part, to unseat the leaderships in Baghdad and Tehran. Iraq launched a bid to capture Kuwait, only two years after its war with Iran ended. These wars demonstrate that – contrary to nuclear optimist assumptions – in many instances regional powers would rather risk the unpredictable consequences of war than live with the status quo regional distribution of power. A unique set of circumstances contributed to the stability that characterized the cold war rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, but regional rivalries in contemporary and future international relations are unlikely to be as stable. As Eliot Cohen wisely judges, It would be a terrible mistake to think that the elaborate and arid logic of nuclear deterrence that operated between the superpowers 142


will continue to hold elsewhere. The US–Soviet confrontation took place between a stable, pacific, and contented democracy and a highly rational, cautious dictatorship that found nothing inherently shameful about retreating in the face of superior force. It was, in many ways, an ideal opposition, and one highly unlikely to be repeated.31 Despite a rivalry beset by folly and crises, Soviet and American statesmen were able to keep the superpower relationship within bounds short of war. These fortuitous circumstances, however, are not directly analogous to contemporary security dilemmas in the Middle East and South Asia.

The foibles of statesmen Beyond the nuclear optimists’ sanguine view of contemporary regional security dilemmas, they fail to incorporate the human dimensions of statecraft into their theories, reflecting a trend in much of political science scholarship.32 Statesmen, of course, are human beings subject to all of the shortcomings of mortals that make them in practice less than the perfectly rational entities pictured in Waltz’s analysis. His work is devoid of those factors identified by Thucydides and classical realists to be the origins of war: “honor, fear, and interest.”33 Waltz falls victim to the error identified long ago by Clausewitz: “Theorists are apt to look on fighting in the abstract as a trial of strength without emotion entering into it. This is one of a thousand errors which they quite consciously commit because they have no idea of the implications.”34 Waltz’s assumption of perfect rationally among statesmen is at sharp odds with that of classical realists. He argues that “Nuclear weapons make military miscalculation difficult and politically pertinent prediction easy.”35 But, as Scott Sagan points out, By assuming that all nuclear states will behave quite rationally and will therefore take all the necessary steps to fulfill the requirements of deterrence, Waltz and other nuclear proliferation optimists have confused prescriptions of what rational states should do with predictions of what real states will do. This is an error that the classical realist rarely committed: Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan believed that states should follow the logic of balance-of-power politics, but their whole enterprise was animated by a fear that the US would fail to do so.36 While Morgenthau argued that an assumption of rationality was essential for the purposes of theory development, he was well aware that “The contingent elements of personality, prejudice, and subjective preference, and of all 143


the weaknesses of intellect and will which flesh is heir to, are bound to deflect foreign policies from their rational course.”37 Nuclear weapons in of themselves do not grant statesmen the political wisdom needed to manage the balance of power. Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson assessed that the quality of statesmanship has had a profound impact on the success or failure of the balance of power in preserving international order. “The balance of power so often failed to preserve peace because either its principles were disregarded, or, more frequently, a nation erred in comparing its strength with that of another.”38 In gauging the international balance of power today, particularly in the greater Middle East, nuclear weapons are one of many factors that statesmen must weigh. Regional adversaries are unlikely to judge that nuclear weapons by themselves guarantee equilibriums of power and thereby reduce potential incentives to resort to war for honor, fear, and interest. How major regional powers view nuclear weapons is a critical question. Do statesmen in the greater Middle East value nuclear weapons principally for their deterrent qualities? Or do they believe that nuclear weapons could serve strategic and tactical purposes in war? During the cold war, American strategic thought on nuclear weapons was heavily influenced by Bernard Brodie who argued in The Absolute Weapon that nuclear weapons were only good for deterring a wars, not for fighting them.39 Brodie’s logic was that a major intercontinental exchange of nuclear arsenals between the Soviet Union and the United States could in no sense be used, as Clausewitz argued, to achieve political purposes. The argument had gained widespread currency by the end of the cold war in the United States and the Soviet Union. Do contemporary regional powers find logic similar to Brodie’s equally convincing in contemporary circumstances? Is it possible that Brodie and Clausewitz do not translate or resonate in non-Western cultures? As Peter Feaver has pointed out, the strategic culture of nation-states is a critical factor because it is produced by “the long shadow of military and political history which generates attitudes about the usefulness of military force (and particularly nuclear weapons) as an instrument of state policy.”40 He warns, “The ambiguity of the strategic culture factor is ample reason for being cautious about making dogmatic claims for its precise influence in proliferating countries.”41 Other nation-states might take away a “lesson of history” from the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II that nuclear weapons can be strategically used to win wars. In fact, in the early stages of developing American nuclear doctrine, the United States was inclined to view nuclear weapons as merely another weapon, much as we view artillery, aircraft, or tanks. Betts reveals that for twenty years after World War II American “presidents had an almost facile inclination to introduce vague nuclear threats in military confrontations despite the apparent vulnerability of the United States to Soviet retaliation.”42 President Eisenhower, for 144


example, threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Korean war and in the disputes between China and Taiwan.43 Of course, China and North Korea did not have the means to retaliate with nuclear weapons against the United States at the time, but these situations illustrate the point that states might view nuclear weapons as effective means to impose their will upon that of an adversary, even if that adversary is a nuclear-armed one, as will be discussed.

Viewing nuclear weapons as usable instruments of war Waltz’s analysis seeks to answer the question, why have nuclear-armed nation-states not fought a major war? Perhaps the best way to critique his analysis is to pose the opposite question. Why or under what circumstances might nuclear-armed nation-states fight a major war? This line of questioning opens a wide vista of potential scenarios, all within the realm of possibility in the greater Middle East. Nuclear weapons infrastructure and inventories might present attractive targets for preventive or preemptive strikes. The Middle East has experienced several historical examples of preventive and preemptive strikes. The Israelis in 1981, for example, preventively attacked Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osiraq, a central infrastructure for Baghdad’s nuclear weapons program. The strike was an attempt to stem Baghdad’s development of nuclear weapons. The massive scope of Baghdad’s nuclear ambitious came to light in the post-Gulf war revelations made by United Nations inspections teams. According to respected Israeli security expert Ze’ev Schiff, Israel under Prime Minister Menachem Begin established and publicly proclaimed “the determination to destroy the nuclear stockpile of any Arab country at war with Israel if there are grounds to believe that the country is manufacturing nuclear weapons.”44 The fact that Israel was willing to develop a policy of preventive war suggests that other countries might also see grounds for such a policy within their own strategic circumstances. As Scott Sagan recalls, Moscow in 1969 contemplated launching a preventive strike on Chinese nuclear facilities and the minister of defense reportedly favored a preventive strike “despite the existence of a small Chinese nuclear arsenal at that time,” but the Politburo did not approve of the attack.45 The United States’ war against Iraq in 1991 had overtones of being a preventive war in that US policymakers in the run up to the ground campaign were concerned about Iraq’s potential to develop nuclear weapons. Iraq’s nuclear weapons program provided an auxiliary justification, in addition to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, for going to war against Baghdad. A vulnerable command, control, communication, computer and intelligence (C4I) system might induce an adversary to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, perhaps in a long simmering crisis, to “decapitate” an adversary’s leadership. Major C4I nodes invariably lie in the capitals of nation-states, 145


which would be vulnerable to nuclear weapons. Nuclear nation-states today probably have less robust C4I systems than the United States and the Soviet Union had during the cold war.46 Redundant Soviet command and control systems, however, did not stop some Western observers from speculating about the prospects for holding the Soviet leadership at risk in a nuclear conflict.47 Similar arguments in the heated political circumstances of major regional rivalries today, particularly in the midst of a political-military crisis, might find a more receptive audience for such a strategy than they did in the United States during the cold war. A nation-state might calculate that a first-strike would catch the C4I infrastructure of an adversary unawares to maximize the destruction and minimize the adversary’s ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons. Indeed, the C4I systems of nation-states might remain vulnerable despite a heightened crisis and warnings of war. Betts has found in a survey of twentieth century conflict that All major sudden attacks occurred in situations of prolonged tension, during which the victim state’s leaders recognized that war might be on the horizon. Surprise succeeded despite ample political warning and, paradoxically, in some cases because of it. Conscious of the possibility of war and faced with evidence of developing enemy readiness to strike, leaders nevertheless often do not authorize effective counterpreparations.48 Had Saddam possessed nuclear weapons, he might have risked a preemptive nuclear strike against Israel during the Gulf war. Israel’s small geographic size might have led Saddam to think that he stood a relatively good chance of decapitating Israel’s political-military decision-making apparatus to preempt Israeli nuclear retaliation. For its part, “the Israeli government apparently debated whether to respond with nuclear weapons if Saddam Hussein attacked Tel Aviv or Haifa with missiles armed with chemical warheads.”49 To guard against nuclear “decapitation” nation-states might delegate release authority for the use of nuclear weapons to lower command echelons. The delegation of release authority would ensure that field commanders had the means to retaliate against an adversary that had succeeded in eliminating the country’s leadership in the capital or to ensure that fielded forces could resort to nuclear weapons to defend against offensive ground operations.50 Indeed, such a scenario has an historical precedent. Gaddis points out that during the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev had authorized the commander of Soviet forces in Cuba to use tactical nuclear weapons if an American military attack was underway and he could not reach Moscow to confirm permission to use them.51 More recently, Saddam Hussein claimed to a delegation of US senators, visiting Iraq months before Saddam ordered 146


the invasion of Kuwait, that he had predelegated launch authority for chemical weapons to military commanders in the event of an Israeli nuclear strike on Baghdad.52 Saddam would presumably have been willing to predelegate authority for nuclear weapons retaliation had he had that capability at the time. Indian civilians who control the country’s nuclear weapons have prepared sealed instructions to be opened by military commanders in the event that Pakistani or Chinese nuclear strikes have destroyed the civilian command authority in New Delhi.53 A field commander faced with the prospect of defeat might have fewer reservations about resorting to nuclear weapons than a statesman far removed from the battlefield. Major regional powers might one day be overly confident in the quality of their intelligence. It is entirely possible that a nuclear-armed state might obtain raw intelligence or intelligence analysis that confidently identifies the locations of an adversary’s nuclear weapons inventories and delivery systems. In the heat of an escalating crisis, leaders might seize on such intelligence as a justification for a bold military action, calculating that great risk is required in warfare to achieve strategic success. They might judge that the prospect of destroying an adversary’s nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles on the ground – coupled with the fear that the window of opportunity would be rapidly closing and that a delay might increase their own vulnerability to attack – would necessitate a preemptive attack. Nuclear weapons inventories may in fact be vulnerable to preemptive action. Pakistan, for example, in November 2001 in the midst of the American military campaign against the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network in neighboring Afghanistan was sufficiently anxious about the vulnerability of its nuclear weapons that President Musharraf ordered an emergency redeployment of the country’s nuclear arsenal.54 Major regional powers today – with smaller geographic areas, limited nuclear inventories, and less military infrastructure such as airbases for delivery systems – are more vulnerable to preventive and preemptive strikes than the United States and the Soviet Union were during the cold war. Nuclear-armed adversaries might calculate that honor, fear, and interest necessitate war and that its conduct could be limited and not result in nuclear weapons exchanges. For instance, a nation-state might calculate that it could initiate conventional military operations for limited objectives – such as territory – that would not threaten vital interests such as the regime survivability of the opponent, reducing the risk of nuclear retaliation. The historical record shows that non-nuclear states are willing to attack or go to war against nuclear powers. As Sagan points out, “History suggests that while many states facing nuclear adversaries may well be cautious, some states have nevertheless launched attacks in the face of such uncertainty.”55 Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973 and Argentina invaded the United Kingdom’s Falkland Islands in 1982. Israel’s reputed nuclear weapons capability did not deter the Iraqis from firing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in the 1991 Gulf war. 147


More recently, many Indians see the 1999 Kargil crisis with Pakistan as evidence that the Pakistanis believe their nuclear deterrent would allow them to take the contested territory in Kashmir without risking Indian retaliation.56 If these states were willing to fight against nuclear powers without a nuclear retaliatory capacity, it is reasonable to assume that they would do the same with a nuclear weapons inventory at the ready. Barry Posen has speculated that the United States, had it been faced with a nuclear armed Iraq in the 1990–1991 Gulf war, might not have been deterred from retaking Kuwait. Posen argues that the United States might have launched the military campaign while “convincing Saddam Hussein that the United States will retaliate in particularly horrible ways if he employs nuclear weapons.”57 Such resolve may have deterred Saddam from unleashing chemical or biological weapons against US forces during the Gulf war. President Bush, who was concerned that Iraq might resort to weapons of mass destruction to thwart the coalition military operations against Iraq, issued a veiled ultimatum to Saddam before the onset of the ground war. In a letter to Saddam dated 5 January 1991 Bush warned that “unconscionable acts” like “the use of chemical or biological weapons” would “demand the strongest possible response.”58 Alternatively, Saddam may not have resorted to chemical or biological attacks against American forces in the Gulf war because they never approached Baghdad and threaten his hold on power. The possession of nuclear weapons might paradoxically contribute to the confidence of a nation-state that it is safe to pursue limited conventional military operations against an adversary, even if that adversary too has nuclear weapons. Glenn Snyder coined this state of affairs as the “stability– instability paradox” in which nuclear deterrence prevents large-scale conventional war, but encourages confidence in the manageable risks of low intensity conflict.59 Jeffrey Knopf judges that the awareness of this paradox emboldens both Pakistan and India in their strategic competition in which the Pakistanis believe that their nuclear capability would prevent India from fully using its conventional force superiority, leaving Islamabad free to support the Kashmiri insurgency in India. By the same token, the Indians calculate that they can freely use their conventional forces to counter Pakistan because New Delhi judges that Pakistan would be deterred from responding in kind due to Indian nuclear weapons.60 India, Pakistan, Iran, or any other nuclear-armed state in the future might calculate that it could achieve with conventional military operations political objectives – the destruction of opposing conventional forces and the occupation of an adversary’s capital, for example – before an adversary could resort to nuclear weapons in its defense. While some might dismiss such a scenario as far-fetched, one must recall that the German military, for all of its reputed prowess at military planning, had assumed in the pre-World War I Schlieffen Plan that France could be defeated with dispatch before turning to defeat Russian forces to the east. It is a fair assumption that the Germany of old 148


will not be the last repository of military hubris and the possession of nuclear weapons today might even encourage such folly. The victim of a conventional attack – even if intended by the aggressor to achieve limited objectives – would be under enormous psychological and emotional strain. Under such circumstances, the attacked state might judge that the aggressor intends to bring about its total defeat, forcing the victim to unleash nuclear retaliatory strikes to stave off conventional military defeat. Such a scenario was close to becoming a reality in the 1973 Middle East war. Time magazine reported that Israel had readied its nuclear weapons in response to substantial battlefield losses to Arab armies.61 More recently, during the 1987 crisis between India and Pakistan that involved extensive military maneuvers in India’s territory close to Pakistan’s border, the man responsible for Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment program warned “we shall use the bomb if our existence is threatened.”62 A nation-state might calculate that the use of nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve political and military objectives. A nation-state with inferior conventional capabilities vis-à-vis an adversary, for instance, might use nuclear weapons to blunt the conventional assault of a nuclear-armed adversary. NATO during the cold war refused to adopt a no-first-use policy and assumed that it would have to resort to nuclear weapons to blunt a Soviet conventional assault in central Europe.63 Today, Pakistan’s conventional military posture is dwarfed by India’s and Islamabad could resort to a nuclear defense against an Indian conventional military penetration into Pakistan. Alternatively, a nation-state might employ nuclear weapons in conjunction with conventional military operations to take control of territory. Prior to the onset of the ground operations in the Gulf war, “nuclear weapons use seems indeed to have been considered by the US secretary of defense, and by the commander in chief of US forces in the Persian Gulf, and not solely for reasons of deterrence.”64 Nation-states might even judge that they could control the scope and magnitude of warfare even with nuclear exchanges. Henry Kissinger had such a scenario in mind when he wrote during the cold war that “it is possible to conceive of a pattern of limited nuclear war,” although he cautioned that the “concept of limitation of warfare” had to be established in advance via diplomacy to reduce the prospect for “miscalculation and misinterpretation which might cause the war to become all-out even should both sides intend to limit it.”65 Leaders of nation-states, moreover, might not share Professor Waltz’s awe of nuclear weapons: “Because catastrophic outcomes of nuclear exchanges are easy to imagine, leaders of states will shrink in horror of initiating them.”66 It would be hard to imagine megalomaniacs, the likes of a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein, “shrinking in horror” at the prospect of nuclear brinkmanship.

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Sailing uncharted waters The preceding analysis makes plain the weak analytic reeds on which nuclear proliferation optimists base their case. They mistakenly extrapolate the conditions in the cold war superpower rivalry to those of contemporary major regional rivalries. Today’s regional conflicts in the greater Middle East differ markedly from the US–Soviet standoff, most notably in that they involve border disputes that were not part of the superpower conflict in which spheres of influence were clearly delineated. Moreover, contemporary regional conflicts are pitted with nationalism and the drive for prestige, power, and interest where nation-states might prefer the risk of war than the perceived injustices of the “peaceful” status quo. Waltz and like-minded thinkers assume that nation-states will rationally calculate costs, benefits, and risks as would a detached third party. In reality, however, political actors may view their circumstances very differently than would outside observers. The scenarios described here with their historical analogies are illustrative of the complexities of statecraft and war that fundamentally undermine the notion that nuclear weapons – in any and all circumstances – will prevent the outbreak of war between nuclear-armed belligerents. In their quest for theoretical parsimony, the optimists overly simplify the realities of international politics. They fail to heed Morgenthau’s warning that “The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible.”67 The arguments by proliferation optimists are consequently inadequate for deriving policy prescriptions for dealing with the concrete dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons proliferation. A laissez faire policy toward nuclear weapons proliferation will not of itself render war obsolete as an instrument of statecraft. Instead, such a policy would likely increase the odds of more destructive wars between nation-states in the greater Middle East region.

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10 INSTRUMENTS FOR STATECRAFT Intelligence, diplomacy, and force

The greater Middle East nation-states that are pursuing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems are following the dictates of power politics. Their statesmen judge that they are unable to compete on equal footing in conventional military capabilities with their regional rivals as well as outside powers. They are turning to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to redress these perceived deficits of the power needed to ensure their autonomies and national interests in regional struggles for power. National leaders calculate that WMD will bolster their deterrence capabilities against potential adversaries. They also foresee that in the event that deterrence fails and war begins, WMD capabilities would prove to be important instruments for waging war. And war fought with WMD – especially nuclear and biological weapons – could have catastrophic consequences for hundreds of thousands or even millions of innocent civilians tragically caught in the crossfire of warring nation-states.

Tools for playing power politics Classical realists like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger viewed the world through the prism of power politics. They used the prism to illuminate the critical features of international politics, to diagnose the origins of conflicts of interest and struggles for power, and to identify the tools of statecraft needed to channel or mitigate the struggles for power along routes less conducive to the outbreak of war. Above all, classical realists sought to use theory to improve the quality of statesmanship, in marked contrast to their contemporary neo-realist successors whose theory more often than not offers little guidance to policymakers struggling with the dilemmas of politics and morality and war and peace. American national security officials have grown accustomed to avoiding the academy for scholarly aid in the formulation and implementation of policy. In an all too rare instance in which a high-level American policymaker solicited intellectual capital from scholars to help grapple with the dilemmas posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, 151

I N S T RU M E N T S F O R S T A T E C R A F T

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in a April 2003 speech at the National Defense University (NDU) described the University as an “incubator” for “some of this nation’s finest strategic thinking.” He challenged NDU faculty and students to “learn lessons about how to approach the challenge that weapons of mass destruction pose for the security of this nation and, indeed, for all nations.”1 Scholars should eagerly take up Armitage’s task in a genuine effort to contribute to the betterment of humankind and to bridge the gap between policy and academe so ably described by Alexander George.2 What lessons are we to learn and what tools are available for American statecraft to tackle the weapons of mass destruction challenge, particularly in the greater Middle East where the threats posed by WMD to international security are acute? The power politics behind the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will have to be managed using a variety of policy tools because no single approach will suffice. Although many policy proponents in and around Washington’s Beltway tend to advocate one approach or another to the exclusion of the others, prudent and sophisticated American statecraft demands the adroit exercise of the full range of policy instruments to manage the dangers posed by WMD. These instruments include intelligence, diplomacy, arms control, deterrence, defense, and the use of force. As American policymakers face the challenge and wield these instruments they must be ever mindful of the impact that WMD proliferation and delivery systems will have on the Arab–Israeli, Persian Gulf, and South Asian struggles for power that litter the greater Middle East. The proliferation of WMD is a reflection of power politics rather than the cause of the struggles for power endemic to the greater Middle East. The acquisition of WMD – particularly nuclear weapons – and their delivery systems in most instances, however, will heighten the tension in regional security dilemmas, in which a nation-state’s quest for more power in WMD causes other states to experience greater insecurity. These tensions will need to be reduced to prevent the possibility of military conflict in which WMD is unleashed.

The intelligence imperative The cornerstone for all American policy tools for managing WMD proliferation is intelligence. Without robust, timely, and accurate intelligence against WMD proliferation, the adroit modulation of a statecraft that combines diplomacy, arms control, and the threat or use of force will not be possible. Accurate intelligence is essential for monitoring the development of WMD programs and delivery systems to gauge the right mix of policy instruments, whether they are diplomacy, covert action, or overt military intervention. As former senior policymaker Richard Haass points out, for example, “Preventive uses of force will be futile unless the location of sufficiently vulnerable 152


targets is known; in the case of unconventional weapons, those targets must also represent all or most of the relevant capability.”3 The demands on intelligence will be particularly acute to gauge potential windows of opportunity for taking military action. As Philip Zelikow observes, there is today a kind of inverse continuum of threat and vulnerability. As a potential enemy’s WMD capability becomes more threatening, it becomes less vulnerable to military disruption. Such programs are most vulnerable when they are immature, but that is when the threats they pose are so ambiguous that it is harder to rally allies to act against them.4 American intelligence’s track record for accurately gauging the threat posed by WMD proliferation, especially nuclear weapons, has been less than stellar. This causes problems for policymakers. In the case of Iraq, American intelligence gravely underestimated the scale and sophistication of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program in the run up to the 1991 war while it grossly overestimated his nuclear weapons program on the eve of the 2003 war. The American intelligence community also failed to warn policymakers of Indian nuclear weapons tests in 1998, which were reciprocated by Pakistani nuclear weapons tests to unleash the overt nuclear weapons race in South Asia. American intelligence too, judging from press disclosures, was surprised by the sophistication of Iran’s centrifuge program for enriching uranium, uncovered by on-the-ground International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. American intelligence will have to perform better in the future than it has in the past against Iraq, India, and Pakistan by providing a steady stream of timely and accurate intelligence to monitor Iranian compliance or noncompliance with any negotiated arrangements with the IAEA as well as to provide the information needed to militarily target Iranian assets as part of a coercive diplomacy campaign. American intelligence – especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – will have to work hard and fast to fill the undoubtedly large intelligence gaps against Iran’s political, military, and WMD apparatuses. Unfortunately, CIA’s history of human intelligence successes in penetrating the ruling power circles into which the United States was locked in bitter conflict – including the Soviet Union, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Iraq – has been either slim or nonexistent.5 This dismal history offers little hope of significantly narrowing the intelligence gaps vis-à-vis Iran and other countries in the greater Middle East in the near term, unless profoundly more innovative and aggressive approaches to human intelligence collection are adapted soon. David Kay – a former UN weapons inspector who advised the Director of Central Intelligence on the hunt for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs – wisely warns that determined proliferators pay close 153


attention to sources and methods used to counter them. As the United States shares its intelligence widely with the international community, both the strengths and the limitations of US intelligence will become much more widely understood.6 US intelligence will have to become faster and smarter if it is to keep one or two steps ahead of the WMD proliferation challenge.

Untidy diplomacy American diplomatic intervention in regional crises may be needed in the future in the Middle East and South Asia to lessen the risks of nuclear warfare. Nation-states with pride and prestige who become fully committed in a future crisis will be likely to see their situations in a less than objective light. US diplomatic intervention to help the parties recognize their drift toward war – and the potential use of nuclear weapons – might offer parties a means to stand down and reduce crisis escalation. President George Bush the elder, for example, exercised such a constructive role in dispatching Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates to India and Pakistan during their 1987 crisis. That intervention might serve as a useful model for future American diplomatic efforts in which nuclear-armed states are at the precipice of conflict. More recently, Secretary Armitage performed a similarly constructive diplomatic role shuttling between Pakistan and India to ease both countries down from dangerous heights of the security dilemma. Diplomacy and politics are akin to horse-trading, but in domestic debates about international relations the term horse-trading translates too easily and frequently to “appeasement,” condemning any policy option so labeled to an immediate withdrawal from active policy discussion. The loudest accusations of appeasement tend to come from members of Congress who, oddly enough, are well aware of the trade, which they practice daily, if not hourly, on Capitol Hill. But appeasement is a longstanding and legitimate tool of statecraft. To be sure, it was practiced disastrously in Munich in 1938 by encouraging Hitler’s lustful drive for military domination of Europe. The Munich example, however, is not directly analogous or helpful in grappling with the hard realties of the power politics, weapons proliferation, and conflict in the greater Middle East region. Appeasement exercised by weak states is a recipe loaded with risk, but it could be effectively exercised by a strong power such as the United States. To escape the political pitfalls and intellectual baggage tied to the word appeasement, contemporary observers often use the term engagement as a synonym. As Richard Haass and Meghan O’Sullivan observe, using more contemporary parlance, what distinguishes engagement strategies “is their reliance on the extension or provision of incentives to shape the behavior of countries with which the United States has important disagreements.”7 If the United States can achieve its national interests by providing diplomatic, political, military and economic rewards to rival states by measures short 154


of war, it behooves American statesman to explore those potential opportunities and on occasion make horse trades to seize them. The levying of economic punishments – in contrast to engagement or appeasement – has been perceived politically in the United States as relatively cost free. Haass notes the variety of political uses for economic sanctions to include coercion, deterrence and punishment, but that the “ambitious and common use of sanctions – for coercive or ‘compellent’ purposes – rarely succeeds, especially as the size of the objective grows.”8 More specifically, Haass and O’Sullivan observe, Sanctions almost always result in some economic hardship, but this impact is often insufficient or unable to force the desired political change in the target country. Moreover, sanctions can be costly for innocent bystanders, particularly the poorest in the target country and American businesses and commercial interests. In addition, sanctions often evoke unintended consequences, such as the strengthening of obnoxious regimes.9 Three powerful cases that illustrate these points are Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan where economic sanctions failed to stop the regimes in Baghdad, Tehran, and Islamabad from harboring WMD aspirations and programs. After the study of a variety of economic sanctions for a host of political purposes against Iran since the 1979 revolution, Patrick Clawson concludes, “The sanctions may well have reduced Iran’s ability to carry out parts of its plans, such as conventional rearmament, but they have not changed its intentions or its capabilities significantly.”10 Similarly, Eric Melby in reviewing economic sanctions levied against Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait concludes that sanctions had “put constraints on Saddam but have not changed him or his objectives.”11 Dennis Kux assents, after reviewing US economic sanctions against Pakistan, that the experience “points up how hard it is to achieve a fundamental change in the national security policy of another country unless, as in the case of Korea and Taiwan, that country is dependent on the United States for its survival – or thinks it is. This was not the case with Pakistan.”12 Despite the poor results of economic sanctions for coercive and compellent policy purposes, politicians are likely to keep calling for economic sanctions as a mainstay instrument for countering WMD proliferation. Politicians know that they do not risk a political backlash or suffer a political vulnerability for calling for economic sanctions, but that they would if they called for engagement options that would open them up for charges of “appeasement” from political rivals. The struggle for power, as classical realists recognize all too well, takes place in the domestic arena just as it does in the international realm. The executive branch of government will have to have political courage to rein in Congressional calls for broad and wide use of 155


economic sanctions to curb WMD proliferation as well as grit to withstand Congressional criticism while exploring engagement policy options. On the other hand, punitive economic sanctions coupled by positive economic incentives and a threat of military force offers a potentially powerful mix of statecraft instruments that could influence the behavior of nationstates with WMD and ballistic missile aspirations and programs. The most dramatic case in this regard is Libya, which after several months of secret negotiations with Washington and London agreed in December 2003 to abandon its nuclear and chemical weapons and ballistic missile programs in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions and reintegration into the global economic and political community.13 Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi also no doubt feared that the United States had detected Libya’s clandestine nuclear weapons program and was willing and able to militarily challenge the Libyan regime just as Washington had confronted the Taliban and Saddam regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively.

Arms control at the margins The use of arms control as a diplomatic tool in American statecraft has fallen out of favor in the aftermath of the cold war when arms control was a central feature of the American–Soviet relationship. And arms control during the cold war was by no means a panacea to the cold war rivalry as many in the arms control intellectual community seem to believe. Colin Gray has coined the concept of the “arms control paradox” that in many respects characterizes arms control: “if arms control is needed in a strategic relationship because the states in question might go to war, it will be impracticable for that very reason of need, whereas, if arms control should prove to be available, it will be irrelevant.”14 The history of arms control in the Middle East lends empirical weight to the argument that arms control succeeds where it is not needed, but fails where the competition for power is acute and the demand for weapons and the prospects for conflict and war are high. The region has had only minimal flirtation with arms control. The multilateral Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) process, which was a byproduct of the 1992 Madrid Conference, managed to hold a series of regional plenary meetings and expert workshops with participation by Arabs and Israelis before it died in 1995. Egypt had wanted the Israeli nuclear forces discussed while Tel Aviv objected. Tel Aviv insisted that conventional weapons be addressed before any discussion of nuclear forces. Cairo also wanted to discuss a regional nuclearfree zone.15 In the future, a de-emphasis of nuclear weapons in the United States’s defense posture might provide an important impetus to kick-start diplomatic discussion of a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. While arms control related to the WMD proliferation in the greater Middle East region suffers from substantial weaknesses that limit its potential 156


contribution to aiding American interests, it does offer some marginal opportunities that policymakers should not dismiss outright. As Louis Halle put it, the objective of arms control should be mutual deterrence based on a stable balance-of-power. If one can have such a balance on the basis of a lower rather than a higher level of armaments, so much the better. But the primary objective must be the balance-of-power.16 Smaller inventories of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery means in the greater Middle East arguably would be more conducive to stable balances of power than massive inventories. And even if that hypothesis proved incorrect and war erupted, lower WMD inventories would reduce the potential peril for civilians caught in war’s fray. Multilateral arms control arrangements related to WMD and their delivery systems have certainly hampered weapons proliferation in the greater Middle East. The key arms control endeavor to hamper the proliferation of ballistic missiles is the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) that restricts the transfer of missiles and technology suitable for carrying a 500kilogram warhead at least 300 kilometers.17 Although the MTCR has not stopped nation-states in the greater Middle East from acquiring ballistic missiles, it has made it more difficult for them to do so and probably has slowed the outright sale of complete ballistic missiles to the region, especially from China and Russia. Instead, because of the political constraints imposed by the MTCR, nation-states are compelled to use a variety of slower and painstaking clandestine means and circuitous routes to acquire ballistic missiles. The Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and its monitoring organization, the IAEA, are potential speed bumps for WMD proliferation in the greater Middle East region, although they need shoring up after the debacle in Iraq. As T. V. Paul observes, in conflict prone regions such as the greater Middle East, states “engaged in enduring rivalries or protracted conflicts are most likely to defy the rules, principles, and norms” of international regimes such as the NPT.18 Saddam’s Iraq, for example, had developed a robust nuclear weapons research, development, and procurement program under the noses of IAEA inspectors, who after a program of inspection visits in Iraq, had regarded Baghdad as being in full compliance with the NPT. The IAEA failed to detect the then massive $10–15 billion Iraqi program that involved thirty or more sites, a staff of 20,000, and a clandestine enrichment program. An IAEA inspection in Iraq in April 1991, a few months before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, characterized the cooperation from Iraqi nuclear officials with the IAEA as “exemplary.”19 Despite IAEA oversight, the Iraqis managed to accelerate their nuclear weapons program on the eve of the Gulf war in an attempt to produce a nuclear device for use against Israel if Saddam’s demise was imminent.20 157


Saddam’s Iraq had a sophisticated denial and deception program that brilliantly countered IAEA inspection techniques. Kay points out that Iraq’s major declared nuclear research center at Al Tuwaitha was visited every six months by IAEA safeguard inspectors, but Iraqi officials escorted them to only a handful of almost 100 buildings at Al Tuwaitha while trees and the internal road system made it difficult for inspectors without access to satellite imagery to understand accurately the size of Al Tuwaitha and the relationship of the buildings to each other.”21 To add insult to the IAEA’s injury, as Iraqi defector and nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza recalls, “Everything at al-Tuwaitha was bought and built for only one purpose: to construct a nuclear bomb.”22 The lessons of Iraq surely have not been lost on those states that will exploit the Iraqi experience of denial and deception operations. Iran has no doubt studied and learned from the Iraqi denial and deception successes. Revelations regarding the advancement of Iran’s nuclear weapons program highlight both the promise as well as the shortcomings of the NPT and IAEA inspections. The IAEA acting on tips from Iranian opposition sources received permission from the Iranian regime to inspect, in August 2002, a pilot uranium enrichment plant 200 miles south of Tehran. The IAEA, much to its surprise, discovered a vast complex being built that is planned to have 5,000 centrifuges by 2005 capable of producing enough weapons grade uranium for several nuclear weapons each year.23 India and Pakistan, too, have probably benefited from watching the Iraqi success in denial and deception even though they are not NPT members. A sophisticated understanding of the American intelligence capabilities undoubtedly contributed, in part, to India’s ability to surprise American intelligence with the detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1998. An independent review of the intelligence community’s failure to warn of India’s nuclear weapons detonation in May 1998 determined that its analytic resources were stretched too thin, technical collection by satellites was limited or poorly suited and vulnerable to simple deception, and the human intelligence assets were seriously limited.24 Even comprehensive and rigorously monitored arms control agreements will not be unbeatable for nation-states determined to acquire WMD. The IAEA in the future will be unlikely to enjoy the unprecedented intrusive inspections that the UN had orchestrated in Iraq until 1998 and will have to run – much like the American intelligence community – hard and fast to keep apace of other nation-states in the greater Middle East working assiduously on nuclear weapons, most notably Iran. The IAEA will have to show that it has shaken off its arrogance and naivety and learned a bitter lesson from Iraq on how its inspection regime can be defeated.

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Deterrence and defenses The United States grew intellectually accustomed to deterrence in the cold war. Deterrence does have a large role to play as Washington seeks to prevent the use of WMD in the greater Middle East, especially against American and partnered forces. As Haass recommends, deterrence can be enhanced through the private and public communication of warnings to adversaries of the consequences, to include punitive attacks with conventional weapons against political and economic targets, possible retaliation in kind, and the threat of regime change.”25 For deterrence to be credible, the threats to use force too must be credible. Notwithstanding American efforts to deter war and the resort to WMD, adversaries in the future may place a higher value to changing the international status quo and risk US retaliation. The United States therefore needs to be prepared to face adversaries armed with WMD in battle. In times of peace the intellectual arguments against ballistic missile defenses are high pitched, but they rapidly fade in times of war. In the early 1990s and then in the early 2000s the voices of opposition against ballistic missile defenses on grounds that they destabilized American relationships with Russia and China were at a high pitch. In marked contrast, an observer heard little from these opponents in the midst of the 1991 or 2003 wars with Iraq. Instead, most observers were grateful that Patriot missile batteries provided some measure of defense, particularly in 2003. No voices were heard in public calling for Patriot systems to be disbanded. Although Patriot systems are theater-level defenses, they do provide substantial strategic protection, particularly for the smaller Arab Gulf states such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. If such defenses measures were appropriate for American partners in the Persian Gulf, why should they be considered inappropriate for American citizens at home? The strategic discourse over ballistic missile defenses is often lacking an examination of the moral dimensions of American national security policy. As it stands today, American security policy on weapons of mass destruction is predicated on the effective operation of deterrence. It is convenient for Americans to assume that in any and all strategic circumstances, all adversaries will refrain from using ballistic missiles armed with WMD warheads out of fear of suffering “massive retaliation” from American strategic forces. But, is nuclear deterrence infallible? Is the assumption that nuclear deterrence is inherently easy and foolproof the basis for a prudent defense policy? What does the United States do in the future conflict in which deterrence fails? If in a distant future conflict Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan should fire ballistic missiles with WMD warheads against American forces or homeland, would it make strategic and moral sense to retaliate and inflict massive nuclear retaliation against Iranian, Saudi, or Pakistani centers of government and military power that share space with millions of innocent civilians?

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American nuclear retaliation might kill those regime and military figures responsible for using WMD against Americans as well as to help deter followon uses of WMD – assuming there remains sufficient command and control and government authority to keep tight reigns on WMD inventories – but millions of civilians could perish in the grisly process. Would such a result be reconcilable with the care that the United States took in the past fifteen years to reduce the pain and suffering and “collateral damage” to civilian populations in the conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan? If future adversaries calculate, moreover, that the United States would be politically unwilling to inflict massive civilian casualties on them, then the threat to do so will not be credible and substantially lessen our ability to deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. These are profound moral dilemmas that opponents of ballistic missile defenses appear unwilling to contemplate. A prudent step is to work toward ballistic missile defenses to provide a cushion of safety, even if they will not be foolproof. American forces and territory need a hedge against the all-too real possibility that they will be targeted in a future conflict by ballistic missiles armed with WMD. Such an ugly contingency could cause substantially more casualties than those the United States painfully suffered at Dhahran during the 1991 Gulf war. Ballistic missile defenses will complicate the calculus of potential aggressors and increase their levels of uncertainty over their prospects for prevailing over American forces in potential conflict. That uncertainty is likely to bolster deterrence rather than to undermine it, reducing the chances that American leaders will ever have to face the grim contemplation of resorting to nuclear weapons again. To any would-be aggressor, an opponent armed with both a sword and shield is likely to be a more formidable foe on the battlefield than one armed only with a sword.

Force to buttress policy The United States should continue efforts to contain the spread of WMD, particularly nuclear weapons, but, in the end, recognize that proliferation will occur and that nuclear deterrence is unlikely to be a perfect failsafe against war. The United States and its security partners must be prepared to deter and fight, if need be, nuclear-armed adversaries. The Bush Administration’s explicit recognition of the tool of military preemption or preventive war in countering WMD has been a lightening rod for the administration’s critics. Frequently lost though in public discourse on the use of force is the failure to distinguish between preventive and preemptive use of force. Robert Litwak points out that Prevention refers to a repertoire of strategies to forestall the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) through a variety of means, including, in extreme circumstances, the possible use of force. 160


Pre-emption pertains narrowly to military action when actual WMD use by an adversary is imminent. In much of the public discourse, pre-emption has been used to mean both.26 As Richard Betts elaborates, “The rationale for preventive war is that conflict with the adversary is so deep and unremitting that war is ultimately inevitable, on worse terms than at present, as the enemy grows stronger over time.”27 In contrast, preemption is “an act of anticipatory self-defense in a war effectively initiated by the enemy.”28 Critics charge that the Bush Administration is likely to resort to preventive or preemptive military action in any and all circumstances against potential WMD threats. The administration’s declaratory policy, however, is more refined than critics portray: To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively. The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.29 The controversy surrounding preventive and preemptive military action is intimately wrapped with the decision to wage war against Iraq in 2003. For a sense of perspective, it is important to recall that the 1990–1991 Gulf war had overtones of preventive war. President George H. W. Bush ordered a military campaign to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction infrastructure as well as Iraqi conventional forces in and around Kuwait. And the 1991 war stopped Saddam from acquiring nuclear weapons. The 2003 war against Iraq was depicted by the President George W. Bush as a preemptive one to remove Saddam’s regime before it struck the United States in some aggressive attack with WMD reminiscent of the al-Qaeda orchestrated 11 September 2001 attacks. Post-war discoveries that Saddam’s WMD programs, especially his nuclear weapons program, were in a state of chaos cast the 2003 war as a preventive one in which the United States removed Saddam before he had time to reinvigorate his WMD programs at a future date after the lifting of UN economic sanctions. The irony is that the 2003 war against Iraq was less a preventive war than it was a continuation of the 1991 war. That war never formally ended and Saddam violated the terms of the ceasefire. The 2003 war probably would be most accurately depicted as a continuation of unfinished business from 1991 than as an entirely new undertaking spawned in post-11 September 2001 events. Critics charge that Bush’s war against Iraq would set an international precedent for preventive and preemptive war, but nation-states have always 161


reserved the right of striking first when their interests were threatened. The Soviet Union contemplated attacking China’s nascent nuclear weapons capabilities in 1969.30 Neither the Pakistanis nor the Indians have renounced their right to exercise conventional military power preemptively against the other. The Israelis were the first to strike in the 1967 war and in a brilliant air campaign largely destroyed the Egyptian air force while it was still on the ground. And the Israeli air force attacked an Iraqi nuclear power plant in 1981 that was a hub of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. The Israeli preventive attack against Iraq was comparatively easy to mount. Baghdad learned from that attack and later diversified and nurtured more sophisticated denial and deception techniques to reduce its vulnerability to preventive strikes. These trends made US operations against Iraqi WMD targets harder during the 1991 war. As Litwak notes, UNSCOM and the Gulf war Air Power Survey conducted after the 1991 war made disturbing findings. “UNSCOM inspectors revealed the existence of twenty-one nuclear-related facilities in Iraq, whereas the pre-war target list included only two such sites. The Survey analysts concluded that the air campaign no more than ‘inconvenienced’ Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme.”31 These lessons are not lost on other states in the greater Middle East. Iran, for example, is likely to widely disperse and hide its WMD infrastructure to reduce vulnerability to American or Israeli preventive or preemptive military actions. The dilemmas inherent in preemptive and preventive war are not unique to Republican presidents. There is ample evidence that Democrats have grappled with the same dilemmas. President Kennedy considered preemptive military options during the Cuban missile crisis.32 Carter administration officials in 1979 formed an interagency task force that debated options for curtailing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program to include a covert operation to sabotage a uranium enrichment facility, but they abandoned the idea because they judged it to be too dangerous and politically provocative.33 And more recently in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration had contemplated military action against North Korea and Libya to stem their nuclear and chemical weapons programs, respectively.34 Preemptively moving against an adversary could be seen as a potential tool for prudent and responsible statesmanship. If, in a counterfactual treatment of history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had had a fuller intelligence picture of Japanese war preparations on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, what American would have faulted him for preemptively attacking Japanese naval forces in the Pacific? Had President Clinton opted to wage a more aggressive preemptive war against al-Qaeda, the United States might not have lost twelve Americans among the 263 killed in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. President Bush, too, probably regrets that he had not ordered robust military action against alQaeda before 11 September 2001. To his credit, he did not want to make such a mistake twice and moved against Iraq to prevent either Saddam’s eventual 162


resumption of the 1991 Gulf war, which for Saddam had never ended, or another future crisis. The United States is likely to find itself facing a nuclear-armed nationstate – or soon to be nuclear weapons capable state – in a future international crisis. American policymakers under these circumstances will have to contemplate preemptive or preventive military action. To be sure, such operations will be laden with risks. They will need to be supported by robust intelligence to fully and accurately identify targets as well as by the weapons systems needed to destroy nuclear weapons and their support infrastructure in short order to reduce the chances of retaliatory strikes.35 Even if successful, American preemptive or preventive military operations may only set back, and not stop, the nuclear weapons programs of belligerent states, as the Israelis learned in the intervening years between the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear power plant at Osirak in 1981 and the Gulf war. Americans are unaccustomed to thinking in terms of preventive and preemptive war, but the events of 11 September underscore the need for thinking in this direction now. In regard to a specific case, preventive or preemptive war against Saudi Arabia if it were determined that the Saudis were poised to or had acquired a nuclear weapons capability would be imprudent in the near term. Saudi Arabia, unlike Iraq under Saddam or Iran under the clerics, is a status quo power. The United States, moreover, has no standing state war with Saudi Arabia as was the case with Iraq. And the Saudi government has not used terrorist organizations as instruments of state policy as the Iranians have used Hezbollah to target American interests and citizens. On the other hand, the Saudis have been guilty of sponsoring Wahhabism, an extreme militant sect of Islam that is an ideological seedbed for al-Qaeda. The Saudis have collaborated with the Wahhabists since before the founding of the modern Saudi state for internal political legitimacy. The United States still has the means diplomatically to pressure the Saudis to undertake the overdue political and internal security showdown to stamp out the Wahhabists and extinguish al-Qaeda networks in Saudi Arabia as well as to clamp down on private Saudi funding for al-Qaeda. The United States over the longer run would have to guard against internal upheaval in Saudi Arabia that could place potential nuclear weapons in the hands of political elements predisposed to challenge the USA as a matter of state policy or to clandestinely transfer nuclear weapons to transnational actors to threaten US interests and citizens. Such as course of events would put the United States in the same set of policy circumstances that loom vis-à-vis Iran and Pakistan.

Diminishing WMD’s appeal Perhaps the most optimistic and realistic hope is for WMD to become obsolescent as instruments for competing for power in the greater Middle East in particular, and in international politics in general. Along these lines, Patrick 163


Morgan has suggested that the revolution in military affairs that magnifies the destructive power and accuracy of conventional weapons “could put weapons of mass destruction in the shade, superseding them as weapons of choice and causing them to be gradually discarded as an outmoded form of military power.”36 Morgan continues that “WMD could also turn out to be so unacceptable and so clearly passé that they have little use as tokens of prestige and status, being taken instead as unusable, backward, uncompetitive, or ineffective.”37 The United States needs to parlay conventional military capabilities to supplant nuclear capabilities in order to deter adversaries. As Michael Brown assesses, the United States will continue to be the dominant military power in the world for at least the next decade or two. And the United States’ military advantages, both quantitative and qualitative, will probably grow due to high levels of defense spending. Current US defense spending makes up more than 38 percent of worldwide defense expenditures and the United States spends more on military research and development than any other country spends on total defense.38 American conventional military power can now replace nuclear weapons to deter WMD-armed adversaries. Conventional military means to destroy regimes and more limited strikes against WMD facilities could be just as effective as nuclear deterrence. And conventional force will be politically more viable – but by no means non-controversial, as the war against Iraq showed – than nuclear weapons for military action against WMD in the greater Middle East region. There can be no more powerful a deterrent for potential US adversaries than the 2003 war against Iraq which demonstrated American resolve to move against an enemy, as Libya appears to have wisely concluded in surrendering its WMD programs to the international community. American conventional forces could even replace tactical nuclear weapons for attacking adversaries, particularly their WMD-related facilities. A commander of US Strategic Command, for example, wisely wanted to reduce the United States’s dependence on nuclear weapons by using conventional, precision-guided bombs and missiles to destroy deeply buried targets that some officials in the Pentagon say can be threatened only by a new nuclear warhead. And if conventional weapons could not penetrate targets buried deep in mountains, conventional strikes guided by special forces could block entrances and exits to make the sites unusable.39 Washington should avoid steps that could be interpreted as making nuclear weapons more usable as instruments for statecraft. A strategic misstep for the United States would be to rely on nuclear weapons to preventively or preemptively target WMD facilities. As Walter Pincus reports, “The Bush administration is reviving interest in developing low-yield nuclear devices that could be used to destroy targets, such as reinforced bunkers holding chemical or biological weapons, with less damage to the surrounding 164


area than today’s giant warheads.”40 As James Wirtz wisely points out, however, “using nuclear weapons to disarm one state might accelerate nuclear proliferation by providing an example of the utility of actually using nuclear weapons.”41 The urge for the American scientists in the defense community to find technical ways to make nuclear weapons useable needs to be resisted by civilians who govern the use of American force for political purposes. The United States needs to do all in its power to degrade the international appeal of nuclear weapons to include moving more rapidly and deliberately in substantially reducing its still massive inventory of strategic nuclear weapons, numbering in the thousands of weapons even after the completion of the contemplated cuts over the next ten years. Limited American nuclear weapons inventories in the hundreds could be retained to preserve a minimal nuclear deterrent posture against adversaries. An increased American reliance on conventional weapons coupled with a substantial reduction in Washington’s reliance on nuclear forces for deterrence, moreover, might have an added benefit of encouraging Israel to follow suit to likewise de-emphasize its opaque nuclear weapons deterrent. Tel Aviv has comfortably superior conventional military capabilities and is not nearly as vulnerable to Arab forces as it had been earlier in Israel’s history. A public admission of nuclear weapons capabilities might open up diplomatic vistas for negotiating restraint in Arab aspirations for nuclear weapons, perhaps even open opportunities for negotiating a nuclear free zone in the Middle East. The major stumbling block on this score, however, might prove to be Iran’s ideological zeal. The Israelis could hardly be expected to negotiate a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East unless Iran was fully integrated into the diplomatic process. Israel’s geography is destined to make it extraordinarily vulnerable to even one nuclear weapon. The decommissioning of Israeli nuclear forces would be unimaginable unless Tel Aviv could have a very high level of confidence – probably via on-site and no-notice inspections – that Iran and other regional powers are not clandestinely harboring a nuclear weapons stockpile. American diplomacy might coax more prudent regional strategic thinking than that which overly relies on weapons of mass destruction. As Mitchell Reiss wisely argues, one of the most significant factors influencing proliferation behavior is the quality of political leadership. “Good leaders can, and do, help make their states more secure and more prosperous. Poor leaders, on the other hand, bring adversity and hardship. They miss opportunities, aggravate relations with neighbors and key allies, and can even blunder into war.”42 The United States needs to undertake measures that will aid wise leaders and undermine imprudent leaders with proliferation on their strategic agendas. Concrete steps that show that the United States judges that the military and political benefits of nuclear weapons are negligible would work along this approach. American diplomacy could leverage our national security posture to persuade aspirants to power in the inevitable global 165


competition for power that they would be better advised to sink resources into conventional military weapons than into WMD. Even after deposing Saddam Hussein, the future Iraq will have strong balance of power incentives to procure nuclear weapons regardless of the type of regime that ultimately consolidates power in Baghdad.43 US policy needs to persuade leaders in the greater Middle East that power and prestige in the twenty-first century will stem from conventional military power, not nuclear weapons, as was the case in the last century.

Blending instruments of statecraft Does the war against Iraq set a new model or standard for the American response to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the post11 September world? Not necessarily. The United States needs to continue to strengthen international regimes that stem the flow of technology which fuels the development of weapons of mass destruction programs and their delivery systems such as ballistic missiles, as well as interdict international weapons and technology shipments when possible. While these regimes and interdiction efforts are invaluable, they have not been, and will not be, foolproof. In some cases, the dangerous combination of hostile intent married with growing WMD capabilities will warrant the contemplation of preemptive or preventive military action by the American commander-in-chief, whether Republican or Democrat. Although the phrase “force should only be used as a last resort” is widely accepted as self-evident wisdom, a more accurate depiction of the realities of international politics is that force in some cases might be better used sooner to alleviate the need for larger and more costly uses of force later. Despite a common perception, diplomatic and military options are not mutually exclusive. Rather, diplomacy and force can be exploited to reinforce one another to maximize power and persuasion. Instruments of American power could be combined, for example, to increase pressure on Tehran to accept intrusive IAEA inspections, including no-notice inspections and broad and routine interviewing of Iranian scientists, technicians, and even military and security officials. The United States and the international community would also have to insist that Tehran end its efforts at achieving a full fuel cycle; without such an insistence Iran will have the infrastructure in place to shift to a robust nuclear weapons program in short order. As Gary Milhollin assesses, the only real solution is to convince Iran to dismantle all the plants that can make fuel for nuclear weapons.44 Tehran would be unlikely to reverse course and end its nuclear fuel cycle efforts without the specter of American military power. Some observers argue that the United States should offer Iran a “nonaggression pact” as a means to reduce Iran’s insecurity and incentive to procure nuclear weapons.45 Such a gesture, however, would be a profound 166


strategic misstep. A pledge from the United States not to use military force against Iran would substantially lessen Tehran’s incentive to bow to the will of the international community and to abide by its formal NPT commitments. In the final analysis, American political resolve and military clout would improve, but by no means guarantee, the long-shot chances of striking a diplomatic deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons because Tehran would have to worry that Washington would contemplate escalating the crisis with military force. In the years ahead, the United States will probably have to pursue coercive diplomacy with Iran to alter its drive for nuclear weapons while deterring Iran from undertaking other challenges to US security interests, especially the sponsorship of terrorist operations against American citizens and interests. The American deterrence against Iran probably has not been sufficiently robust in the past two decades. The Iranians had probably grown confident that the United States was too muscle bound to retaliate against Iranianbacked terrorist operations, in no small measure due to the United States’ failure to retaliate against Iran for backing the bombings against US military personnel in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration’s national security endeavors probably have shored up sagging deterrence vis-à-vis Iran. The exercise of American force projection a world away from its shores in Afghanistan and Iraq bolsters the American deterrence profile. Al-Qaeda terrorists prior to 11 September probably viewed the United States as a “paper tiger.” Washington had demonstrated little stomach for waging war beyond token cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in response to the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Africa. Al-Qaeda, too, had witnessed the US abandon the military operation in Somalia after the loss of eighteen soldiers; while tragic, the number of losses was miniscule in the history of warfare. Al-Qaeda probably misjudged what the US would do after suffering a major terrorist attack and assumed that the US would not risk sending soldiers into Afghanistan after 11 September. And even if Washington did, al-Qaeda assumed it could mount a guerrilla campaign as many of its fighters had done against Soviet forces in Afghanistan to compel Moscow to depart. The American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq will induce more caution in Iranian clerics because they recognize that the US today is more willing and able to use substantial military force than had been the case in the past two decades. The problem of strategic surprise post-11 September links the policy challenges of Saddam’s Iraq and Iran’s regime. President Bush and his national security lieutenants were blind-sided by the 11 September attacks and the deaths of 3,000 American civilians on home soil. No doubt on a personal level they are steely determined to prevent situations from again arising to cause such grave damage to American security. When they survey the global geopolitical landscape, the features that stand out as the greatest potential sources of another strategic surprise in the near term are al-Qaeda, Iran, 167


North Korea, and perhaps Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, while China and Russia loom as potential longer-range challenges. The administration has taken prudent actions against al-Qaeda and Iraq while Iran and North Korea are outstanding. While there is no “axis of evil” in the sense of a formal treaty arrangement for coordinating grand strategy against the United States, these actors all pose dangers of strategic surprise. To use WMD as the sole lodestar or central governing concern for American national security policy would be strategically shortsighted. The United States need not be acutely threatened by any and all WMD. The United States has to weigh both military means as well as hostile intentions in its threat perception formulae.46 WMD capabilities coupled with hostile political intentions must be the equation for evaluating the use of preemptive or preventative military options. Israel, the United Kingdom, and France, for example, have nuclear weapons capabilities but pose little to no threat to American interests. If Germany or Japan in the future, for example, should feel compelled to seek a nuclear weapons options, the United States could view such a posture much as it views Israel, France, and the United Kingdom, each of which have robust nuclear weapons capabilities, but have no hostile intent and pose no dire threat to the United States. In contrast, Iran harbors hostile intent against the United States that could soon be married with nuclear weapons capabilities to pose a potential grave threat to US and regional interests. The United States will have its work cut out for it to ensure that Iran’s strategic calculus concludes that the pursuit of nuclear weapons will bring more insecurity than security to the regime in Tehran. The classical realist’s strategic objective regarding the competition for power and WMD proliferation in the greater Middle East region and the world at large is a stable distribution of power in which states are mutually deterred from waging war. Halle, in the classical realist tradition, wrote that “As in the history of our most advanced domestic societies, the more stability we achieve, the longer we succeed in maintaining it, the more the consequent usage becomes established custom. Under such circumstances of behavioral stability, based on custom, the qualitative arms race will lose its momentum as it loses the incentive on which it is based. And so will the quantitative arms race. Then we will find that stability engenders more stability, and that security breeds itself.”47 Although written in the context of the cold war, theses words succinctly and insightfully capture a classical realist’s approach to international security that should guide American statecraft in the post-11 September world.

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1 Power politics: the master-key for strategic wisdom 1 Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “Two Nuclear Experts Briefed Bin Laden, Pakistanis Say,” Washington Post, 12 December 2001, A1. 2 For an analysis that distinguishes between various forms of WMD and underscores the substantial dangers posed by biological weapons, see Richard K. Betts, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 1 (January/ February 1998). 3 The Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are institutions that superbly and authoritatively track weapons proliferation. See the Monterey Institute’s publications “Chemical and Biological Weapons: Possession and Programs Past and Present,” “Overview of Weapons of Mass Destruction Capabilities in the Middle East and South Asia,” and “Ballistic Missiles and Space Launch Vehicles Deployed in the Middle East” available at http://cns.miis.edu/research. Also, see Joseph Cirincione with Jon B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002). 4 Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1997), xiii. 5 Ibid., 15. 6 Ibid., xiii. 7 Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 8. 8 Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1985), 31–32. 9 Ibid., 194. 10 Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, Second Edition (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1946), 10. 11 Morgenthau and Thompson, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 227–228. 12 John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2 (January 1950), 157. 13 John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism: A Study in Theories and Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 4.

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14 Ibid., 4. 15 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 67. 16 Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” 158. 17 Arnold Wolfers, “National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol,” in Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), 159. 18 For a discussion of the variants of political realism, see Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51 (October 1998), 144–172. 19 See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley Publishing Company, 1979). 20 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8–9. 21 Ibid., 9. 22 Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Offense–Defense Theory and Its Critics,” Security Studies 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995), 660–661. 23 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 117, footnote 1. 24 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 3. 25 Ibid., 21. 26 Ibid., 20. 27 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 87. 28 Richard L. Russell, “Persian Gulf Proving Grounds: Testing Offence–Defence Theory,” Contemporary Security Policy 23, no. 3 (December 2002), 213. 29 See Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 30 Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993), 21. 2 The strategic landscape: regional struggles for power 1 Robert Harkavy, “Strategic Geography and the Greater Middle East,” Naval War College Review LIV, no. 4 (Autumn 2001), 37. 2 Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1985), 187. 3 Ibid., footnote 1, 187. 4 Inis L. Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), 41. 5 Louis J. Halle, The Elements of International Strategy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 37. 6 Ibid., 41. 7 Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 5. 8 David Priess, “Balance-of-Threat Theory and the Genesis of the Gulf Cooperation Council: An Interpretative Case Study,” Security Studies 5, no. 4 (Summer 1996), 169. 9 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley Publishing Company, 1979), 168. 10 L. Carl Brown, “Introduction,” in L. Carl Brown (ed.), Diplomacy in the Middle

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers (New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2001), xiv. Barry Rubin, The Tragedy of the Middle East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 73. Ibid., 274. Efraim Inbar, The Israeli–Turkish Entente (London: King’s College London Mediterranean Studies, 1994), 55. Eugene B. Rumer, Dangerous Drift: Russia’s Middle East Policy, Policy Paper no. 54 (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000), 43. Daniel Byman, Shahram Chubin, Anoushiravan Ehteshami, and Jerrold Green, Iran’s Security Policy in the Post-Revolutionary Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 81. Ibid., 83. Zalmay Khalilzad, Ian O. Lesser, and F. Stephen Larrabee, The Future of Turkish–Western Relations: Toward a Strategic Plan (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), 34. Dov Waxman, “Turkey and Israel: A New Balance of Power in the Middle East,” The Washington Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 27. Inbar, The Israeli–Turkish Entente, 20. Khalilzad, Lesser, and Larrabee, The Future of Turkish–Western Relations: Toward a Strategic Plan, 32–33. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 33. Byman, Chubin, Ehteshami, and Green, Iran’s Security Policy in the PostRevolutionary Era, 66. Brown, Diplomacy in the Middle East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers, xv. Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, “Introduction,” in Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick (eds.), Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 4. Byman, Chubin, Ehteshami, and Green, Iran’s Security Policy in the PostRevolutionary Era, 75. Ibrahim A. Karawan, “The Erosion of Consensus: Perceptions of GCC States of a Changing Region,” Chapter 3 in Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick (eds.), Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 102. J. E. Peterson, Saudi Arabia and the Illusion of Security, Adelphi Paper 348 (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 26. Muhcammed Saleh Al-Musfir, “The GCC States: Internal Dynamics and Foreign Policies,” Chapter 18 in Joseph A. Kechichian (ed.), Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Gulf States (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 321. Abdullah K. Alshayji, “Mutual Realities, Perceptions, and Impediments between the GCC States and Iran,” Chapter 10 in Potter and Sick (eds.), Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus, 224. Brenda Shaffer, Partners in Need: The Strategic Relationship of Russia and Iran, Policy Paper no. 57 (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001), 36. Rumer, Dangerous Drift: Russia’s Middle East Policy, 62. Bates Gill, “Chinese Arms Exports to Iran,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 2, no. 2 (May 1998), 57. Ahmed Hashim, The Crisis of the Iranian State: Domestic, Foreign, and Security

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Policies in post-Khomeini Iran, Adelphi Paper 296 (London: Oxford University Press for International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1995), 40. Ibid., 61. Shahram Chubin, Whither Iran?: Reform, Domestic Politics and National Security, Adelphi Paper 342 (New York: Oxford University Press for The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 45. Karawan, “The Erosion of Consensus: Perceptions of GCC States of a Changing Region,” 101. Stephen Philip Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), 200. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 204. Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamison Joe Medlby, Limited Conflicts Under the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from Kargil (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 20. P. R. Kumaraswamy, “India and Israel: Emerging Partnership,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 25, no. 4 (December 2002), 202. Ashley J. Tellis, India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 46. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 48. 3 Gulf lessons: chemical weapons deterrence and war fighting

1 Benedict Brogan, “We Won’t Scrap WMD Stockpile Unless Israel Does, Says Assad,” Daily Telegraph (London), 6 January 2004, 1. 2 The documents are posted on GulfLink, a website maintained by the Office of the Assistant for Gulf war Illness, Office of the Secretary of Defense, US Department of Defense, located at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil 3 For an analysis that critiques the Arab view that Soviet-built weapons were largely responsible for poor Arab military battle performances, see Michael Eisenstadt and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Arms of Snow and Armies of Sand: The Impact of Soviet Military Doctrine on Arab Militaries,” Middle East Journal 55, no. 4 (Autumn 2001), 549–578. 4 Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 574. 5 Ibid., 574. 6 Michael Eisenstadt, “The Military Dimension,” Chapter 4 in Patrick Clawson, Michael Eisenstadt, Eliyahu Kanovsky, and David Menashri (eds.), Iran Under Khatami: A Political, Economic, and Military Assessment (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), 74. 7 Steven L. Spiegel, “Arms Control: In the Region’s Future?,” Chapter 10 in Judith S. Yaphe (ed.), The Middle East in 2015 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2002), 197–198. 8 Susan B. Martin, “The Role of Biological Weapons in International Politics: The Real Military Revolution,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 25, no. 1 (March 2002), 85. 9 Colin S. Gray, “Thinking Asymmetrically in Times of Terror,” Parameters XXXII, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 13. 10 Ibid., 14. 11 Martin, “The Role of Biological Weapons in International Politics: The Real Military Revolution,” 69–71 and 75–76.

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12 Frederic J. Brown, Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 3, 33, and 37. For a more recent treatment, see Richard M. Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 13 John Ellis van Courtland Moon, “Chemical Weapons and Deterrence: The World War II Experience,” International Security 8, no. 4 (Spring 1984), 9. 14 W. Andrew Terrill, “The Chemical Warfare Legacy of the Yemen War,” Comparative Strategy 10 (April/June 1991), 109. 15 Ibid., 115. 16 Ibid., 115. 17 Joshua Sinai, “Libya’s Pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” The Nonproliferation Review (Spring–Summer 1997), 92. 18 Directorate of Central Intelligence, Use of Toxins and Other Lethal Chemicals in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE 11/ 50/37–82), Volume II, Supporting Analysis, February 1982, 22. The document is made available by the National Security Archive, a library and archive of declassified US documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, at http:// www.gwu.edu~nsarchive/ 19 Ibid., 22. 20 Director of Central Intelligence, Use of Toxins and Other Lethal Chemicals in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, Special National Intelligence Estimate Memorandum to Holders, March 1983, 4. This report is also made available by the National Security Archive. 21 Terrill, “The Chemical Warfare Legacy of the Yemen War,” 116. 22 Ibid., 117. 23 Dany Shoham, “Chemical and Biological Weapons in Egypt,” The Nonproliferation Review (Spring–Summer 1998), 50. 24 Ibid., 51. 25 GulfLink, CIA, Director of Intelligence, Intelligence Assessment, “Impact and Implications of Chemical Weapons Use in the Iran–Iraq War,” undated. 26 Timothy V. McCarthy and Jonathan B. Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” Chapter 2 in Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz (eds.), Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 61. 27 Ibid., 62. 28 GulfLink, CIA, Director of Intelligence, Intelligence Assessment, “Impact and Implications of Chemical Weapons Use in the Iran–Iraq War,” undated. 29 Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 516. 30 GulfLink, CIA, Director of Intelligence, Intelligence Assessment, “Impact and Implications of Chemical Weapons Use in the Iran–Iraq War,” undated. 31 Ibid. 32 GulfLink, CIA Research Paper, “Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program: More SelfReliant, More Deadly,” August 1990. 33 McCarthy and Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” 64. 34 Ibid., 64. 35 Ibid., 63. 36 GulfLink, CIA, Director of Intelligence, Intelligence Assessment, “Impact and Implications of Chemical Weapons Use in the Iran–Iraq War,” Undated. 37 Ibid.

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38 GulfLink, CIA Research Paper, “Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program: More SelfReliant, More Deadly,” August 1990. 39 McCarthy and Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” 64–65. 40 GulfLink, CIA, Director of Intelligence, Intelligence Assessment, “Impact and Implications of Chemical Weapons Use in the Iran–Iraq War,” undated. 41 Cordesman and Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, 518. 42 Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 264–265. 43 Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror,” The New Yorker, 25 March 2002. 44 Avigdor Haselkorn, The Continuing Storm: Iraq, Poisonous Weapons, and Deterrence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 22. 45 Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, 262. 46 Ibid., xvii. 47 Goldberg, “The Great Terror.” 48 Ibid. 49 Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, 1. 50 Ibid., 35. 51 Goldberg, “The Great Terror.” 52 Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, 12. 53 George H. W. Bush, “Letter to Saddam Hussein,” 5 January 1991, Gulf War Exhibit, George Bush Presidential Library, Texas A&M University. 54 McCarthy and Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” 69. 55 Charles A. Duelfer, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate, 27 February 2002, available on the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ website at http://www.csis.org 56 GulfLink, CIA Memorandum, “Why WMD Were Withheld,” March 1991. 57 Ibid. 58 GulfLink, CIA Intelligence Report, “Comments on Iraq’s Non-Use of Chemical or Biological Weapons During the Gulf War,” August 1995. 59 GulfLink, CIA Memorandum, “Why WMD Were Withheld,” March 1991. 60 Amatzia Baram, “An Analysis of Iraqi WMD Strategy,” The Nonproliferation Review 8, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 33. 61 Duelfer, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. 62 Ibid. 63 McCarthy and Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” 58. 64 Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), 71. 65 Ibid., 77. 66 GulfLink, CIA Memorandum, “Why WMD Were Withheld,” March 1991. 67 Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, 37. 68 Ibid., 170–171. 69 GulfLink, CIA Research Paper, “Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program: More SelfReliant, More Deadly,” August 1990. 70 McCarthy and B. Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” 70.

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71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Ibid., 72. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 54. GulfLink, CIA Memorandum, “Why WMD Were Withheld,” March 1991. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, 264–265. Excerpts from “Key Judgments: Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” National Intelligence Estimate, October 2002 made available in a White House background briefing on 18 July 2003. The text is available from the Federation of American Scientists at http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/ iraqwmd.html Ibid. See the full text of Secretary Powell’s presentation, see “Secretary Powell at the UN: Iraq’s Failure to Disarm,” Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, US Department of State, 5 February 2003, available at http://www.state.gov/p/nea/disarm/ “Key Judgments: Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” National Intelligence Estimate. David Kay, “Interim Progress Report on the Activities of the Iraq Survey Group,” Statement Given Before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2 October 2003, 2. Available at http://intelligence.house.gov/PDF/KayStatement100203.pdf Ibid., 3. Ibid., 2 and 5. Ibid., 6. Steve Coll, “Hussein Was Sure of Own Survival,” Washington Post, 3 November 2003, A1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Kenneth Pollack, “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong,” The Atlantic Monthly 293, no. 1 (January–February 2004), 82. David Kay, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: Lessons Learned and Unlearned,” Miller Center Report 20, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004), 8. Barton Gellman, “Iraq’s Arsenal of Ambitions,” Washington Post, 7 January 2004, A1. Coll, “Hussein Was Sure of Own Survival,” A1. Ibid. For a treatment of this issue, see Scott D. Sagan, “The Commitment Trap: Why the United States Should Not Use Nuclear Threats to Deter Biological and Chemical Weapons Attacks,” International Security 24, no. 4 (Spring 2000), 85–115 and William M. Arkin, “Calculated Ambiguity: Nuclear Weapons and the Gulf War,” Washington Quarterly 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1996), 3–18. 4 Swords and shields: ballistic missiles and defenses

1 For a thorough and insightful review of the evolution of US thinking on ballistic missile defenses and the American relationship with Russia, China, and allies in Asia and Europe on this score, see Peter W. Rodman, Shield Embattled: Missile Defense as a Foreign Policy Problem (Washington, DC: The Nixon Center, 2001). The book is available on the Nixon Center’s website at www.nixoncenter.org/ publications/monographs/shieldembattled.pdf 2 The Chinese fired several ballistic missiles north and south of Taiwan in a 1996

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4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18

crisis, but those firings were acts of political coercion, not warfare. For details of that crisis, see Richard L. Russell, “The 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis: The US and China at the Precipice of War?” Pew Case in International Affairs, no. 231 (Washington: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 2000). W. Seth Carus, Ballistic Missiles in the Third World: Threat and Response (Westport, CT: Praeger for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1990), p. 2. For a thorough and concise treatment of German wartime missile programs, see Aaron Karp, Ballistic Missile Proliferation: The Politics and Technics (New York: Oxford University Press for Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1996), 37–44. Ballistic missiles are characterized by range: short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) fly under 1,000 km, medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) travel 1,000 to 3,000 km; intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM) reach 3,000 to 5,500 km; and, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are capable of hitting targets located more than 5,500 km away. These definitions are taken from the National Intelligence Council’s unclassified 1999 National Intelligence Estimate “Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States Through 2015” which is available at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/ nie/nie99msl.html Carus, Ballistic Missiles in the Third World: Threat and Response, 27. Chaim Herzog, The Arab–Israeli Wars (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 227. Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., “Ballistic Missiles in the Third World: Egypt and the 1973 Arab–Israeli War,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 3, no. 12 (December 1991), 537. For treatments of Israel’s nuclear deterrent, see Yair Evron, Israel’s Nuclear Dilemma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Karp, Ballistic Missile Proliferation, 45. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 45. Thomas L. McNaugher, “Ballistic Missiles and Chemical Weapons: The Legacy of the Iran–Iraq War,” International Security 15, no. 2 (Fall 1990), 5. Anthony H. Cordesman, Iran and Iraq: The Threat from the Northern Gulf (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 90. McNaugher, “Ballistic Missiles and Chemical Weapons: The Legacy of the Iran– Iraq War,” 15. The debate over strategic bombing and the “decisiveness” of airpower was renewed in the wake of the Gulf and Kosovo wars. For important contributions to the debate, see Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) and Daniel A. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Airpower Debate,” International Security 24, no. 4 (Spring 2000). The debate is likely to receive another infusion of interest in light of US air operations in Afghanistan. Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 76. Ibid., 78. “The Iraq War and Missile Defense,” Strategic Comments 9, no. 6 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003), 2. Also see, Dennis M. Gromley, “Missile Defence Myopia: Lessons from the Iraq War,” Survival 45, no. 4 (Winter 2003/04), 61–86. Steve Fetter, “Ballistic Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction: What Is the Threat? What Should be Done?” International Security 16, no. 1 (Summer 1991), 6. For a comparative analysis of ballistic missiles and aircraft, see John R. Harvey, “Regional Ballistic Missiles and Advanced Strike Aircraft: Comparing Military Effectiveness,” International Security 17, no. 2 (Fall 1992).

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19 The MTCR’s initial participants were the United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan. The MTCR controls the export of components for ballistic missiles capable of flying more 300 km and carrying a payload of at least 500 kg. 20 Aaron Karp, “Regional Perspectives: The Middle East,” in Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies and Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, University of Southampton, Occasional Paper No. 5, International Perspectives on Ballistic Missile Proliferation and Defenses (March 2001), 57. 21 Janne E. Nolan, Trappings of Power: Ballistic Missiles in the Third World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 76. 22 Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, Appendix III: Unclassified Working Papers (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 15 July 1998), 25. Hereafter referred to as the Rumsfeld Commission Report. It may be found at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/ newnote.html 23 Carus, Ballistic Missiles in the Third World, 7. 24 Rumsfeld Commission Report, 12. 25 Ibid., 12. 26 See Michael Eisenstadt, “Living with a Nuclear Iran?” Survival 41, no. 3 (Autumn 1999), 124–148. 27 Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, “No UAE Sanctions,” Washington Times, 14 April 2000, A10. 28 Rumsfeld Commission Report, 2–3. 29 Carus, Ballistic Missiles in the Third World, 24. 30 Rumsfeld Commission Report, 27. 31 Nolan, Trappings of Power, 86. 32 Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, “The Implications for Postures and Capabilities in South Asia,” in Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies and Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, University of Southampton, Occasional Paper No. 7, Missile Proliferation and Defenses: Problems and Prospects (May 2001), 61. 33 Rumsfeld Commission Report, 15. 34 Ibid., 16. Pakistan started receiving M-11 missiles from China in the early 1990s. Beijing later may have helped Islamabad to build an M-11 production facility. The M-11’s range of 300 km and payload of 500–800 kg suggest that the transfer was a violation of the MTCR. Pakistan is estimated to have between 30 and 84 M-11s. The Pakistanis also test-fired a 800 km missile which might be a Chinese M-9 or an improved M-11. See the Rumsfeld Commission Report, 23. 35 Sidhu, “The Implications for Postures and Capabilities in South Asia,” 62. 36 Alaa Issa, “The Drivers Behind Missile Proliferation,” in Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies and Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, University of Southampton, Occasional Paper No. 7, Missile Proliferation and Defenses: Problems and Prospects (May 2001), 4. For the controversial article that was the vanguard of studies calling into question the Patriot’s performance during the Gulf war, see Theodore A. Postol, “Lessons of the Gulf War Experience with Patriot,” International Security 16, no. 3 (Winter 1991/92), 119–171. 37 See Michael O’Hanlon, “Star Wars Strikes Back,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 6 (November/December 1999), 68. For a variety of background materials including facts, figures, and graphics on ballistic missile defenses, see the US Ballistic Missile Defense Organization’s website at http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/ bmdolink.html

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38 Charles L. Glaser and Steve Fetter, “National Missile Defense and the Future of US Nuclear Weapons Policy,” International Security 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001), 49 and 52–53. 39 The Pentagon is working on a variety of ballistic missile defense systems to include: the PAC-3, an improved version of the Patriot; a low-altitude theater defense that uses a modified Standard antiaircraft missile based on Navy Aegisclass ships called “Navy Area Defense System”; a ground-based Theater HighAltitude Area Defense System (THAAD); the Navy Theater Wide system (NTW); and, the airborne laser (ABL) being developed by the Air Force. These programs tend to be less controversial with the American public – as well as with foreigners – than plans for an American homeland defense system that uses radars abroad and in Alaska for surveillance and tracking for hundreds of interceptor missiles based in the continental United States. For discussions of these programs, as well as the potential implication for the American defense budget and relations with China and Russia, see James M. Lindsay and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Defending America: The Case for Limited National Missile Defense (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, Press, 2001) and Dean A. Wilkening, Ballistic-Missile Defence and Strategic Stability, Adelphi Paper 334 (New York: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2000). 40 Aaron Karp, “The Middle East in Strategic Transition: From Offense to Defense Dominance?” in Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies and Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, University of Southampton, Occasional Paper No. 7, Missile Proliferation and Defenses: Problems and Prospects (May 2001), 79–80. 41 Ed Blanche and Duncan Lennox, “Shifting Balance,” Jane’s Defense Weekly 31, no. 10 (10 March 1999), 63. For a discussion of Israeli ballistic missile defense efforts, see Eliot A. Cohen, Michael J. Eisenstadt, and Andrew J. Bacevich, Knives, Tanks, and Missiles: Israel’s Security Revolution (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), 125–126. 42 The Economist, “The Missile Threat: Rockets Overhead,” 31 July 1999, 19. 43 Karp, “The Middle East in Strategic Transition: From Offense to Defense Dominance?,” 81. 44 Ibid., 82. 45 Sidhu, “The Implications for Postures and Capabilities in South Asia,” 59. 46 For discussions of potential deployment areas, see Lindsay and O’Hanlon, Defending America, 108. Also see, Kori N. Schake and Judith S. Yaphe, The Strategic Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran, McNair Paper 64 (Washington, DC: Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 2001), 69. For an argument for the forward deployment of anti-ballistic missiles to permit boost-phase intercepts, see Richard L. Garwin, “Boost-Phase Intercept: A Better Alternative,” Arms Control Today (September 2000), 8–11. 47 For a similar point, see Glaser and Fetter, “National Missile Defense and the Future of US Nuclear Weapons Policy,” 44. 48 W. Seth Carus, Cruise Missile Proliferation in the 1990s (Westport, CT: Praeger for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1992), 17–18. For a study that anticipated the strategic significance of cruise missiles, see Richard K. Betts, Cruise Missiles and US Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1982). For a recent treatment, see Dennis M. Gormley, Dealing with the Threat of Cruise Missiles, Adelphi Paper 339 (New York: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2001).

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5 Iran in Iraq’s shadow: Tehran’s nuclear weapons bid 1 The Military Balance, 2002–2003 (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 104. 2 Jerry Seper, “US Raids Firms Over Arms Gear Sold to Iran,” Washington Times, 11 July 2003, A1. 3 Christine Hanley, “Two Men Tried to Illegally Export Military Parts to China, US Says,” Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2003, B5. 4 Michael Eisenstadt, “Living with a Nuclear Iran?” Survival 41, no. 3 (Autumn 1999), 140. 5 Kori N. Schake and Judith S. Yaphe, The Strategic Implications of a NuclearArmed Iran, McNair Paper 64 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2001), 6. 6 Anoushiravan Ehteshami, “Tehran’s Tocsin,” in Alexander T. J. Lennon (ed.), Contemporary Nuclear Debates: Missile Defense, Arms Control, and Arms Races in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 152. 7 Graham E. Fuller, The Youth Factor: The New Demographics of the Middle East and the Implications for US Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy Analysis Paper No. 3 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, June 2003), 2. 8 Ray Takeyh, “Iran’s Nuclear Calculations,” World Policy Journal (Summer 2003), 23. 9 See “A Survey of Central Asia: At the Crossroads,” The Economist, 26 July 2003, 3. 10 Joseph Cirincione with John B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 255–256. 11 Alon Ben-David, “Iran Successfully Tests Shahab-3,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, 9 July 2003, accessed online at http://jdw.janes.com/ 12 See “Iran’s Ballistic Missiles: Upgrades Underway,” Strategic Comments 9, no. 9 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003). 13 Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2003, A6. 14 Seymour M. Hersh, “The Iran Game,” The New Yorker, 3 December 2001, 43–44. 15 Ibid., 44. 16 Azadeh Moaveni and Douglas Frantz, “Are Iran’s Nuclear Promises Real?” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 2003. 17 Quoted in Nazila Fathi, “Iran Says It Has Developed Ability to Fuel Nuclear Plants But Won’t Seek Weapons,” New York Times, 10 February 2003, A12. 18 David Holley, “Iran Sets Its Sights on More Reactors,” Los Angeles Times, 3 July 2003, A3. 19 Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” A7. 20 “Fissionable: Iran’s Nuclear Program,” The Economist, 14 June 2003, 24. 21 Gary Milhollin, “The Mullahs and the Bomb,” New York Times, 23 October 2003. 22 Fathi, “Iran Says It Has Developed Ability to Fuel Nuclear Plants But Won’t Seek Weapons,” A12. 23 Robert J. Einhorn and Gary Samore, “Ending Russian Assistance to Iran’s Nuclear Bomb,” Survival 44, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 53. 24 Joby Warrick and Glenn Kessler, “Iran’s Nuclear Program Speeds Ahead,” Washington Post, 10 March 2003, A1. 25 Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” A7. 26 Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer, America’s

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27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 131–132. Douglas Frantz, “Iran Discloses Nuclear Activities,” Los Angeles Times, 24 October 2003; and, Douglas Frantz, “Iran Closes in on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb,” A1. Farideh Farhi, “To Have or not to Have? Iran’s Domestic Debate on Nuclear Options,” Chapter 3 in Geoffrey Kemp (ed.), Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Options: Issues and Analysis (Washington, DC: The Nixon Center, January 2001), 52. The monograph is available at http://www.nixoncenter.org/monograp.htm Schake and Yaphe, The Strategic Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran, 3–4. Shahram Chubin, Whither Iran?: Reform, Domestic Politics and National Security, Adelphi Paper 342 (New York: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 78–79. Economist, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Europe Spies a Threat,” 21 June 2003, 27. The author is indebted to Henry Sokolski for these important points. Takeyh, “Iran’s Nuclear Calculations,” 25. Geoffrey Kemp, “How to Stop the Iranian Bomb,” The National Interest 72 (Summer 2003), 54. Alexander L. George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1991), 5. Robert J. Art, “Coercive Diplomacy: What Do We Know?,” Chapter 9 in Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin (eds.), The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003), 388. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook available at http://www.cia.gov/cia/ publications/factbook/geos/iz.html and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/ factbook/geos/ir.html For an argument against using Iraqi ties to terrorist groups for a strategic rationale for waging war against Saddam, see Richard L. Russell, “War and the Iraq Dilemma: Facing Harsh Realities,” Parameters XXXII, no. 3 (Autumn 2002), 47–48. Peter Finn and Susan Schmidt, “Al-Qaeda Plans a Front in Iraq,” Washington Post, 7 September 2003, A26. Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Preparing for a Larger War?” The New Yorker, 14 October 2002, 183. Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God: Hezbollah Sets Up Operations in South American and the United States,” The New Yorker, 28 October 2002, 183, 184, and 185. Louis J. Freeh, “American Justice for Our Khobar Heroes,” Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2003, A18. Daniel Byman, “Should Hezbollah be Next?,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 6 (November/ December 2003), 59. George Perkovich, “Dealing with Iran’s Nuclear Challenge,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 28 April 2003, 4. Gary Sick, “Iran: Confronting Terrorism,” Washington Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Autumn 2003), 87. Kenneth M. Pollack, “Securing the Gulf,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 4 (July/August 2003), 7.

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6 Fallout from Iran’s nuclear weapons 1 Arab Human Development Report 2003, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, United Nations Development Programme, 3. 2 Kori N. Schake and Judith S. Yaphe, The Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran, McNair Paper 64 (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2001), 31. 3 The author is indebted to Eliot Cohen on this point. See his “The Mystique of US Air Power,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 1 (January–February 1994). 4 Quoted in Thomas Fuller, “A Top EU Aide Backs Iran in Feud over Arms,” International Herald Tribune, 18 November 2003. 5 Anthony H. Cordesman, Saudi Arabia: Guarding the Desert Kingdom (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 178. 6 For a discussion of the Saudi strategic logic for nuclear weapons, see Richard L. Russell, “A Saudi Nuclear Option?” Survival 43, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 69–79. 7 Ewen MacAskill and Ian Traynor, “Saudis Consider Nuclear Bombs,” The Guardian, 18 September 2003, 1. 8 Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Pakistan, Saudi Arabia in Secret Nuke Pact,” Washington Times, 22 October 2003, 1. 9 For background on these disputes, see Simon Henderson, The New Pillar: Conservative Arab Gulf States and US Strategy, Policy Paper No. 58 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2003), 24–25. 10 Henderson, The New Pillar: Conservative Arab Gulf States and US Strategy, 72. 11 Ephraim Kam and Yiftah Shapir (eds.), The Middle East Strategic Balance (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 2003). 12 The Military Balance, 2003–2004 (London: Oxford University Press for International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003), 289 and 299. 13 Ibid., 276 and 279. 14 For background on Turkey’s fits and starts with nuclear power, see Mustafa Kibaroglu, “Turkey’s Quest for Peaceful Nuclear Power,” The Nonproliferation Review (Spring–Summer 1997), 33–44. 15 See Nuclear Threat Initiative website for analysis on Syria provided by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies at http://www.nti.org/e_research/proflies/Syria/2074_2076.html Accessed on 21 November 2003. 16 Quoted in Judith Miller, “Senior US Official to Level Weapons Charges Against Syria,” New York Times, 16 September 2003. 17 Kam and Shapir (eds.), The Middle East Strategic Balance. 18 Joseph Cirincione with Jon B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 85. 19 Nicholas Kralev, “Egypt Fears Dwindling Influence,” Washington Times, 19 November 2003, 16. 20 For background on Egypt’s past contemplation of a nuclear weapons option, see Barbara M. Gregory, “Egypt’s Nuclear Program: Assessing Supplier-Based and Other Developmental Constraints,” The Nonproliferation Review (Fall 1995), 21. 21 See Nuclear Threat Initiative website for analysis on Egypt provided by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies at http://www.nti.org/e_research/proflies/Egypt/index.html Accessed on 21 November 2003. 22 Wisconsin Project, “Egypt’s Budding Nuclear Program,” The Risk Report 2, no. 5 (September–October 1996), available at http://www.wisconsinproject.org/ countries.egypt/nuke.html Accessed 21 November 2003.

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23 Dany Shoham, “Chemical and Biological Weapons in Egypt,” The Nonproliferation Review (Spring–Summer 1998), 50–51. 24 Cirincione, Wolfsthal and Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals, 10. 25 Kam and Shapir (eds.), The Middle East Strategic Balance. 26 Wisconsin Project, “Egypt’s Missile Efforts with Help from North Korea,” The Risk Report 2, no. 5 (September–October 1996), available at http://www. wisconsinproject.org/countries/egypt/miss.html 27 Bertil Lintner and Steve Stecklow, “Paper Trail Exposes Missile Merchants,” Far Eastern Economic Review 166, no. 6 (13 February 2003), 12–16. 28 “Behind the Condor Carbon-Carbon Smuggling Scam,” US News and World Report, 25 July 1988, 38. 29 Cirincione, Wolfsthal, Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals, 299. 30 Jon B. Alterman, “Egypt: Stable, but for How Long?” The Washington Quarterly 23, no. 4 (Autumn 2000), 116. 31 Quoted in Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 443.

7 Desert realists: Saudi strategy and nuclear weapons 1 US News and World Report, Triumph without Victory: The History of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Random House, 1993), 73; and Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 367. 2 Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 240. 3 Ibid., 271. 4 The Military Balance, 2000–2001 (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2000), 152. 5 Steve Fetter, “Ballistic Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction: What Is the Threat? What Should be Done?” International Security 16, no. 1 (Summer 1991), 14. 6 The Military Balance, 139. 7 Yair Evron, Israel’s Nuclear Dilemma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 11. 8 Fetter, “Ballistic Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction: What Is the Threat? What Should be Done?”, 14. 9 The Military Balance, 142. 10 Anne Marie Squeo and Daniel, “United Arab Emirates Snags Deal as Weapons Firms Cling to Life,” Wall Street Journal, 20 April 2000, A1 and A10. 11 Salameh Ne’matt, “Keeping the Options Open,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 7 March 2001, 57. 12 Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, “No UAE Sanctions,” Washington Times, 14 April 2000, A10. 13 Steve Rodan, “Israel, USA Claim Egyptian Missile Links with North Korea,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 23 February 2000, 18. 14 J. E. Peterson, Saudi Arabia and the Illusion of Security, Adelphi Paper 348 (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 10. 15 Kenneth M. Pollack, “The Regional Military Balance,” Chapter 4 in Richard D. Sokolsky (ed.), The United States and the Persian Gulf: Reshaping Security Strategy for the Post-Containment Era (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2003), 78.

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16 Evron, 33. The source of Evron’s information is unclear. Evron cites, “Private information received by the author in the United States.” See endnote 66, 280. 17 Yitzhak Shichor, East Wind over Arabia: Origins and Implications of the Sino– Saudi Missile Deal (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1989), 27. 18 Khaled bin Sultan with Patrick Seale, Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the Gulf War by the Joint Forces Commander (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 139. This account is remarkable because the literature produced by former policymakers and military commanders in the Middle East is slim. The accounts that are published from the Arab world, moreover, are generally circumspect given the sensitivities of national security issues in the region. 19 Ibid., 139. 20 Jim Mann, “Threat to Mideast Military Balance: US Caught Napping by Sino– Saudi Missile Deal,” Los Angeles Times, 4 May 1988, A1. 21 Anthony H. Cordesman, Saudi Arabia: Guarding the Desert Kingdom (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 178. 22 Duncan Lennox (ed.), Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems (Alexandria, VA: Jane’s Information Group, Inc., 2000), 34. 23 Cordesman, Saudi Arabia: Guarding the Desert Kingdom, 178. 24 Lennox, Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, 35. 25 Shichor, East Wind over Arabia: Origins and Implications of the Sino–Saudi Missile Deal, 58. 26 Khaled, Desert Warrior, 142. 27 Ibid., 143. 28 Ibid., 145. 29 Lennox, Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, 34. 30 For an examination of the marginal advantages of ballistic missiles over combat aircraft, unless they are intended for the delivery of nuclear weapons, see John R. Harvey, “Regional Ballistic Missiles and Advanced Strike Aircraft,” International Security 17, no. 2 (Fall 1992), 41–83. 31 Khaled, Desert Warrior, 141. 32 For a related discussion, see Dany Shoham, “Does Saudi Arabia Have or Seek Chemical or Biological Weapons?” The Nonproliferation Review (Spring–Summer 1999), 122–130. 33 Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security, 372 and 440. 34 Joseph Kechichian, “Trends in Saudi National Security,” The Middle East Journal 53, no. 2 (Spring 1999), 50. 35 Neil Joeck, Maintaining Nuclear Stability in South Asia, Adelphi Paper 312 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997), 67. 36 Samina Ahmed, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Turning Points and Nuclear Choices,” International Security 23, no. 4 (Spring 1999), 199. 37 Roula Khalaf, Farhan Bokhari, and Stephen Fidler, “Saudi Oil Money Joins Forces with Nuclear Pakistan,” Financial Times (London), 5 August 2004. 38 Patrick E. Tyler, “China Raises Nuclear Stakes on the Subcontinent,” New York Times, 27 August 1996, A6. 39 “China’s Nuclear Exports and Assistance to Pakistan,” Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies available at http:// www.cns.miis.edu/research/india/china/npakpos.htm 40 David E. Sanger, “US Rebukes Pakistanis for Lab’s Aid to Pyongyang,” New York Times, 1 April 2003, B15. 41 Sharon A. Squassoni, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade Between North Korea

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and Pakistan,” Congressional Research Service Report, 7 May 2003 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2003), 9. Joby Warrick, “Iran Admits Foreign Help on Nuclear Facility,” Washington Post, 27 August 2003, A17. Jane Perlez, “Saudi’s Visit to Arms Site in Pakistan Worries US,” New York Times, 10 July 1999, A7. Marie Colvin, “Britain’s Gulf War Ally Helped Saddam Build a Nuclear Bomb,” Sunday Times, 24 July 1994. Ibid. Simon Henderson, “The Coming Saudi Showdown,” The Weekly Standard, 15 July 2002, 19. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2. Cohen developed this concept with Benjamin Frankel in Opaque Nuclear Proliferation: Methodological and Policy Implications, ed. Benjamin Frankel (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 14–44. 8 China’s strategic prongs: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan

1 Richard A. Bitzinger, “Arms to Go: Chinese Arms Sales to the Third World,” International Security 17, no. 2 (Autumn 1992), 105. 2 Robert Einhorn, “China and Non-Proliferation,” In the National Interest 2, no. 13 at http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Vol2Issue13/vol2issue13 einhorn1.html Accessed 27 May 2003. 3 Daniel Byman and Roger Cliff, China’s Arms Sales: Motivations and Implications (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1999), 38. 4 Ibid., 38–39. 5 John Calabrese, “China and the Persian Gulf: Energy and Security,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 3 (Summer 1998), 353. 6 Philip Andrews-Speed, Xuanli Liao, and Roland Dannreuther, The Strategic Implications of China’s Energy Needs, Adelphi Paper 346 (London: Oxford University Press for International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 11. 7 Ibid., 65. 8 Erica Strecker Downs, China’s Quest for Energy Security (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), 46. 9 Andrews-Speed, Liao, and Dannreuther, The Strategic Implications of China’s Energy Needs, 66. 10 Strecker Downs, China’s Quest for Energy Security, 25. 11 Calabrese, “China and the Persian Gulf: Energy and Security,” 353. 12 Robert G. Sutter, Chinese Policy Priorities and Their Implications for the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 157. 13 Ibid., 161. 14 Ibid., 161. 15 Ibid., 157. 16 Ibid., 157. 17 Michael D. Swaine, China: Domestic Change and Foreign Policy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1995), 90. 18 Toshi Yoshihara and Richard Sokolsky, “The United States and China in the Persian Gulf: Challenges and Opportunities,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 26, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2002), 70–71. 19 R. Bates Gill, Chinese Arms Transfers: Purposes, Patterns, and Prospects in the New World Order (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 92. 20 Bates Gill, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Dynamics of Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Policy-Making in an Era of Reform,”

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Chapter 9 in David M. Lampton (ed.), The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform, 1978–2000 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 272–273. Swaine, China: Domestic Change and Foreign Policy, 90. Denny Roy, China’s Foreign Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998), 75–76. For an insightful treatment, see Yitzhak Shichor, “Israel’s Military Transfers to China and Taiwan,” Survival 40, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 68–91. Gill, Chinese Arms Transfers: Purposes, Patterns, and Prospects in the New World Order, 114. Khaled bin Sultan with Patrick Seale, Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the Gulf War by the Joint Forces Commander (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 139. Ibid., 141. Jon Brook Wolfsthal, “US and Chinese Views on Proliferation: Trying to Bridge the Gap,” The Nonproliferation Review 2, no. 1 (Fall 1994), 61. Khaled, Desert Warrior, 141. Robert E. Mullins, “The Dynamics of Chinese Missile Proliferation,” Pacific Review 8, no. 1 (1991), 141. Eric Hyer, “China’s Arms Merchants: Profits in Command,” China Quarterly, Issue 132 (December 1992), 1113. Gill, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Dynamics of Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Policy-Making in an Era of Reform,” 266. Ibid., 268–269. Ibid., 266. Barry Rubin, “China’s Middle East Strategy,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 3, no. 1 (March 1999), 48. Yoshihara and Sokolsky, “The United States and China in the Persian Gulf: Challenges and Opportunities,” 66. Bates Gill, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Dynamics of Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Policy-Making in an Era of Reform,” 267. Ibid., 268. Quoted in “China Helps Iran Develop Arms Despite US Plea to End Trade,” New York Times, 10 November 1995, A14. Bates Gill, “Chinese Arms Exports to Iran,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 2, no. 2 (May 1998), 66. Gill, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Dynamics of Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Policy-Making in an Era of Reform,” 270. Quoted in Einhorn, “China and Non-Proliferation.” Gill, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Dynamics of Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Policy-Making in an Era of Reform,” 269–270. Gill, Chinese Arms Transfers: Purposes, Patterns, and Prospects in the New World Order, 142. Ibid., 142. Harry Harding, “China’s Co-operative Behavior,” Chapter 14 in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh (eds.), Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 386. Michael Pillsbury, China Debates the Future Security Environment (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2000), 107. Ibid., 153. Gill, Chinese Arms Transfers: Purposes, Patterns, and Prospects in the New World Order, 150.

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49 Zachary S. Davis, “China’s Nonproliferation and Export Control Policies: Boom or Bust for the NPT Regime?,” Asian Survey 35, no. 6 (June 1995), 590. 50 Monterey Institute of International Studies, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Resources on India and Pakistan, “China’s Nuclear Exports and Assistance to Pakistan,” available at http://cns.miis.edu/research/india/china/npakpos.htm Accessed on 22 May 2003. 51 Ibid. 52 Mullins, “The Dynamics of Chinese Missile Proliferation,” 142–143. 53 Ibid., 142–143. 54 Ibid., 143. 55 Robert S. Ross, “The Bush Administration: The Origins of Engagement,” Chapter 1 in Ramon H. Myers, Michel C. Oksenberg, and David Shambaugh (eds.), Making China Policy: Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 38. 56 Khaled, Desert Warrior, 474. 57 Gill, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Dynamics of Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Policy-Making in an Era of Reform,” 266. 58 Ibid., 266. 59 Zalmay M. Khalilzad, Abram N. Shulsky, Daniel L. Byman, Roger Cliff, David T. Orletsky, David Shlapak, Ashley J. Tellis, The United States and a Rising China (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1999), 41. 60 Ibid., 41–42. 61 James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 168. 9 Why nuclear weapons will not prevent major war 1 For a thorough review of the scholarly literature on the impact of nuclear weapons on international politics, see Peter R. Lavoy, “The Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation,” Security Studies 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995). 2 For an elaboration on differing schools of thought, see Peter Feaver “Optimists, Pessimists, and Theories of Nuclear Proliferation Management,” Security Studies 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995). 3 For an analysis that underscores the substantial dangers posed by biological weapons, see Richard K. Betts, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 1 (January/February 1998). 4 Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), 13. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Ibid., 5. It is significant to note that Waltz’s argument implies that weapons are determinants of political behavior. In contrast, Clausewitz argued that war should serve political ends, not determine political objectives. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 7 Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 14. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Ibid., 24. 10 Kenneth N. Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (September 1990), 740. 11 Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 26. 12 Ibid., 30. 13 Ibid., 26.

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14 See John J. Mearsheimer, “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993). 15 John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War,” International Security 15, no. 1 (Summer 1990), 54. 16 Stephen Van Evera, “Primed for Peace: Europe After the Cold War,” International Security 15, no. 3 (Winter 1990/91), 54. 17 Richard K. Betts, “Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism,” Chapter 3, in Victor A. Utgoff (ed.), The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, US Interests, and World Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 11. Betts is one of the few scholars to note the sharp contrast between the thoughts of the traditional or classical realists with those of the Waltzian neo-realists. He has aptly dubbed Waltz and liked-minded scholars as “utopian realists” because they hold that “nuclear weapons can produce the permanent peace that liberals have always believed in and realists have always said is impossible.” 18 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 171. For an analysis of the pitfalls of reductionism, see Hans Morgenthau, “Common Sense and Theories of International Relations,” Journal of International Affairs 21, no. 2 (1967). 19 James Kurth, “Inside the Cave: The Banality of I.R. Studies,” The National Interest 53 (Fall 1998), 33. 20 John Lewis Gaddis, “Living in Candlestick Park,” The Atlantic Monthly 283, no. 4 (April 1999), 70. 21 William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since  1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 38–39. 22 John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 328. 23 Stephen M. Walt, “Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies,” International Security 23, no. 4 (Spring 1999), 31. 24 George F. Kennan, “After the Cold War: American Foreign Policy in the 1970s,” Foreign Affairs 51, no. 1 (October 1972), 20. 25 John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security 10, no. 3 (Spring 1986), 123. 26 For details of the Iranian military movement toward Kuwaiti territory, see Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume II: The Iran–Iraq War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 217–270. 27 Sumit Ganguly, “Back to Brinkmanship: How India and Pakistan Arrived at a Nuclear Standoff,” The American Prospect, 1 July 2002, 19. 28 Jeffrey T. Richelson, America’s Secret Eyes in Space: The US Keyhole Spy Satellite Program (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1990), 264. For a discussion of the commercialization of satellite imagery, see Robert Wright, “Private Eyes,” New York Times Magazine, 5 September 1999, 50–55. 29 Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamison Jo Medby, Limited Conflicts Under the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 19. 30 For an account of Israel’s air battle with Syria, see Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, Edited and Translated by Ina Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 167–168. 31 Eliot Cohen, “The Future of Force,” The National Interest 21 (Fall 1990), 4. 32 For exceptions to this trend, see Neta C. Crawford, “The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships,” International Security 24, no. 4 (Spring 2000) and Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack,

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33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46

47

“Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In,” International Security 25, no. 4 (Spring 2001). Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 8. For a discussion of Thucydides’ influence on the school of political realism, see Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997): 49–92. For a discussion of Waltz’s neglect of human nature in his analysis, see Daniel Deudney, “Dividing Realism: Structural Realism versus Security Materialism on Nuclear Security and Proliferation,” Security Studies 2, no. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1993), 17. Clausewitz, On War, 138. Kenneth N. Waltz, “More May be Better,” in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 8. Scott D. Sagan, “More Will be Worse,” in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 86–87. Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1985), 7. Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson (eds.), Principles and Problems of International Politics: Selected Readings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 103. See Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946). Peter D. Feaver, “Proliferation Optimism and Theories of Nuclear Operations,” Security Studies 2, no. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1993), 173. Ibid., 174. Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987), 213. For an examination of presidents and their views of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, see John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (eds.), Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For background on the Quemoy and Matsu crises of 1954–1955 and 1958, see McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 273–287. For background on Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in the Korean War, see John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107–110. Ze’ev Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army: 1874 to Present (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985), 119. For a treatment of the dilemmas of Israeli security policy after the Gulf War, see Ze’ev Schiff, “Israel After the War,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 2 (Spring 1991). Sagan, “More Will be Worse,” 65. For an analysis that argues for buttressing the command, control, communications of Pakistani and Indian nuclear forces to improve crisis stability, see Neil Joeck, Maintaining Nuclear Stability in South Asia, Adelphi Paper 312 (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997). See Colin S. Gray, “Nuclear Strategy and the Case for a Theory of Victory,” International Security 4, no. 1 (Summer 1979). For an articulate counter-argument, see Michael E. Howard, “On Fighting Nuclear War,” International Security 5, no. 4 (Spring 1981). It is far from clear, however, the Professor Howard’s sagacity is appreciated in leadership circles in Tel Aviv, Tehran, New Delhi, or Islamabad.

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48 Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1982), 18 (emphasis in original). 49 Lewis A. Dunn, “New Nuclear Threats to US Security,” Chapter 2, in Robert D. Blackwill and Albert Carnesale (eds.), New Nuclear Nations: Consequences for US Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 22. 50 See Peter D. Feaver, “Command and Control in Emerging Nuclear Nations,” International Security 17, no. 3 (Winter 1992/93), 167. 51 Gaddis, We Now Know, 276. 52 Timothy V. McCarthy and Jonathan B. Tucker, “Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: Chemical and Biological Weapons in the Gulf Wars,” Chapter 2 in Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz (eds.), Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 58. 53 Stephen Peter Rosen, “Nuclear Proliferation and Alliance Relations,” Chapter 5 in Utgoff, The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, US Interests, and World Order, 128. 54 Molly Moore and Kaman Khan, “Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Post, 11 November 2001, A1. 55 Scott D. Sagan, “Sagan Replies to Waltz,” in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 129. 56 Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, “India’s Nuclear Use Doctrine,” Chapter 5 in Lavoy, Sagan, and Witz, Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons, 130. 57 Barry R. Posen, “US Security Policy in a Nuclear-Armed World, Or: What If Iraq Had Had Nuclear Weapons,” Security Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring 1997), 17. 58 Quoted in Michele A. Flournoy, “Implications for US Military Strategy,” Chapter 6 in Blackwill and Carnesale, New Nuclear Nations: Consequences for US Policy, 160. 59 The author is indebted to Jeffrey W. Knopf on this point. See his “Recasting the Proliferation Optimism–Pessimism Debate,” Security Studies 12, no. 1 (Autumn 2002), 52. Also see, Glenn H. Synder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). 60 Knopf, “Recasting the Proliferation Optimism–Pessimism Debate,” 52. 61 Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume I: The Arab–Israeli Conflicts, 1973–1989 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 108. 62 Joeck, Maintaining Nuclear Stability in South Asia, 21. 63 On NATO’s conventional and nuclear military posture during the Cold War, see Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 283–302. 64 Posen, “US Security Policy in a Nuclear-Armed World, Or: What If Iraq Had Had Nuclear Weapons,” 20. 65 Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 185. 66 Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” 734. 67 Morgenthau and Thompson, Politics Among Nations, 23. 10 Instruments for statecraft: intelligence, diplomacy, and force 1 Richard L. Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State, “Iraq and the Global Challenge of Proliferation,” Speech Delivered at the National Defense University, Washington, DC, 30 April 2003. Available at the US Department of State website http://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/20088.htm

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2 Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993). 3 Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the PostCold War World (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution Press for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1994), 130. 4 Philip Zelikow, “The Transformation of National Security: Five Redefinitions,” The National Interest 71 (Spring 2003), 26. 5 For critical appraisals of CIA’s performances, see Richard L. Russell, “CIA’s Strategic Intelligence in Iraq,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 2 (Summer 2002); Richard L. Russell, “Intelligence Failures: The Wrong Model for the War on Terror,” Policy Review, no. 123 (February and March 2004); and Richard L. Russell, “Spies Like Them,” The National Interest, no. 77 (Fall 2004). 6 David A. Kay, “Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferators: Iraq and Beyond,” The Washington Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Winter 1995), 100. 7 Richard N. Haass and Meghan L. O’Sullivan (eds.), Honey and Vinegar: Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 2. 8 Richard N. Haass, “Conclusions: Lessons and Recommendations,” in Richard N. Haass (ed.), Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1998), 199. 9 Haass and O’Sullivan, Honey and Vinegar: Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy, 2. 10 Patrick Clawson, “Iran,” Chapter 4 in Haass, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, 101. 11 Eric D. K. Melby, “Iraq,” Chapter 5 in Haass, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, 123. 12 Dennis Kux, “Pakistan,” Chapter 7 in Haass, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, 172. 13 Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, “Two Decades of Sanctions, Isolation Wore Down Gaddafi,” Washington Post, 20 December 2003, A1 and Peter Slevin and Glenn Frankel, “Bush and Blair Hail Results of Nine Months of Secret Talks,” Washington Post, 20 December 2003, A1. 14 Colin S. Gray, House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 17. 15 Steven L. Spiegel, “Arms Control: In the Region’s Future?,” Chapter 10 in Judith S. Yaphe (ed.), The Middle East in 2015 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2002), 208–209. 16 Louis J. Halle, The Elements of International Strategy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 100. 17 As Henry Sokolski explains, “What the MTCR was geared to block were aerospace technology and hardware transfers that might contribute to the development of rockets or unmanned air vehicles capable of lifting a crude nuclear device strategic distances. After some discussion, the performance parameters of such ‘nuclear capable’ missiles were pegged at systems that could lift a 500 kilogram payload (the weight of a crude, first-generation nuclear device) a minimum of 300 kilometers (i.e., the distance considered to be strategic in the Middle East and Korea, where nuclear-armed missiles might be bought, developed, or used).” See Sokolski’s, Best of Intentions: America’s Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 67. 18 T. V. Paul, Power versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 29. 19 Chen Zak, Iran’s Nuclear Policy and the IAEA: An Evaluation of Program 93+2,

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36 37 38

39 40 41 42

Military Research Paper no. 3 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002), 5. Khidhir Hamza with Jeff Stein, Saddam’s Bomb Maker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda (New York: Scribner, 2000), 237. Kay, “Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferators: Iraq and Beyond,” 93–94. Khidhir Hamza with Stein, Saddam’s Bomb Maker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda, 120. Joby Warrick and Glenn Kessler, “Iran’s Nuclear Program Speeds Ahead,” Washington Post, 10 March 2003, A1. Walter Pincus, “Spy Agencies Faulted for Missing Indian Tests,” Washington Post, 3 June 1998, A18. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World, 129. Robert S. Litwak, “The New Calculus of Pre-emption,” Survival 44, no. 4 (Winter 2002–03), 54. Richard K. Betts, “Striking First: A History of Thankfully Lost Opportunities,” Ethics and International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2003), 18. Ibid., 18. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002), 15. Available at http:// www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf For an examination of this case, see Lyle J. Goldstein, “Do Nascent WMD Arsenals Deter? The Sino-Soviet Crisis of 1969,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 53–79. Litwak, “The New Calculus of Pre-emption,” 63. Zelikow, “The Transformation of National Security: Five Redefinitions,” 27. Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 85. Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 93. For insightful analysis that begins to explore the difficult policy dilemmas as well as military and intelligence demands surrounding preemptive and preventive attacks as instruments of American national security policy, see Philip Zelikow, “Offensive Military Options,” Chapter 7, and Robert D. Blackwill and Ashton B. Carter, “The Role of Intelligence,” Chapter 9, in Robert D. Blackwill and Albert Carnesale (eds.), New Nuclear Nations: Consequences for US Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 162–195 and 216–250, respectively. Patrick M. Morgan, “The Impact of the Revolution in Military Affairs,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 23, no. 1 (March 2000), 143–144. Ibid., 146. Michael E. Brown, “Security Problems and Security Policy in a Grave New World,” Conclusion in Michael E. Brown (ed.), Grave New World: Security Challenges in the Twenty-first Century (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 314. Quoted in Walter Pincus, “Future of US Nuclear Arsenal Debated,” Washington Post, 4 May 2003, A6. Walter Pincus, “US Explores Developing Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Post, 20 February 2003, A9. James J. Wirtz, “Counterproliferation, Conventional Counterforce and Nuclear War,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 23, no. 1 (March 2000), 10. Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), 329.

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NOTES

43 For a provocative argument alone these lines, see Andrew Flibbert, “After Saddam: Regional Insecurity, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Proliferation Pressures in Postwar Iraq,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 (Winter 2003–04), 547–567. 44 Gary Milhollin, “The Mullahs and the Bomb,” New York Times, 23 October 2003. 45 For an analysis sympathetic of this point, see Shahram Chubin and Robert S. Litwak, “Debating Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations,” The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Autumn 2003), 110. 46 The author is indebted to Richard Betts for this point. 47 Halle, The Elements of International Strategy, 116.

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Sanger, David E., “US Rebukes Pakistanis for Lab’s Aid to Pyongyang,” New York Times, 1 April 2003. Seper, Jerry, “US Raids Firms Over Arms Gear Sold to Iran,” Washington Times, 11 July 2003, A1. Slevin, Peter and Glenn Frankel, “Bush and Blair Hail Results of Nine Months of Secret Talks,” Washington Post, 20 December 2003, A1. Tyler, Patrick E., “China Raises Nuclear Stakes on the Subcontinent,” New York Times, 27 August 1996, A6. US News and World Report, “Behind the Condor Carbon–Carbon Smuggling Scam,” 25 July 1988. Warrick, Joby, “Iran Admits Foreign Help on Nuclear Facility,” Washington Post, 27 August 2003. Warrick, Joby and Glenn Kessler, “Iran’s Nuclear Program Speeds Ahead,” Washington Post, 10 March 2003, A1. Wright, Robin and Glenn Kessler, “Two Decades of Sanctions, Isolation Wore Down Gaddafi,” Washington Post, 20 December 2003, A1. United States government and United Nations documents Arab Human Development Report 2003, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, United Nations Development Programme. Armitage, Richard L., Deputy Secretary of State, “Iraq and the Global Challenge of Proliferation,” Speech Delivered at the National Defense University, Washington, DC, 30 April 2003. Available at the US Department of State website http:// www.state.gov/s/d/former/armitage/20088.htm Bush, George W., The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002). Available at http://www. whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book. Available at http://www.cia.gov Directorate of Central Intelligence, Use of Toxins and Other Lethal Chemicals in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE 11/ 50/37–82), Volume II, Supporting Analysis, February 1982. The document is made available by the National Security Archive, a library and archive of declassified US documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, at http:// www.gwu.edu~nsarchive/ Director of Central Intelligence, Use of Toxins and Other Lethal Chemicals in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, Special National Intelligence Estimate Memorandum to Holders, March 1983. This report is also made available by the National Security Archive. Duelfer, Charles A., Testimony before the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate, 27 February 2002. Available on the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ website at http://www.csis.org GulfLink, Office of the Assistant for Gulf War Illness, Office of the Secretary of Defense, US Department of Defense, located at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil Kay, David, “Interim Progress Report on the Activities of the Iraq Survey Group,” Statement Given Before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and Senate

204


Select Committee on Intelligence, 2 October 2003. Available at http:// intelligence.house.gov/PDF/KayStatement100203.pdf National Intelligence Council, “Key Judgments,” Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Intelligence Estimate, October 2002 made available in a White House background briefing on 18 July 2003, available at http:// www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html National Intelligence Council, “Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States Through 2015,” Unclassified 1999 National Intelligence Estimate, available at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/nie/nie99msl. html Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 15 July 1998). Available at http:// www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/newnote.html “Secretary Powell at the UN: Iraq’s Failure to Disarm,” Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, US Department of State, 5 February 2003. Available at http://www.state. gov/p/nea/disarm/ Squassoni, Sharon A. “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade Between North Korea and Pakistan,” Congressional Research Service Report, 7 May 2003 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2003).

205

INDEX

Abdel Aziz al Saud, Sultan bin 114, 117 Abdul Aziz, Abdullah bin 24, 97, 118 Abu Musa Island 24, 98, 111, 141 Afghanistan 4, 15, 26, 29, 36, 58, 71, 74, 75, 84, 85, 96, 104, 124, 141, 147, 156, 160, 167; ballistic missile use in 60, 61; chemical weapons use in 38, 39 aflatoxin 45, 50 Africa, northern 90, 121; sub-Sahara 2 Aghazadeh, Gholamreza 77 Ahmed, Samina 116 Algeria 4, 66, 103, 104, 126 alliances 17, 18 Alshayji, Abdullah 26 Alterman, Jon 104 Anfal campaign 45, 46 anthrax 2, 50 Antiballistic Missile Treaty 58, 59, 65–67, 69 appeasement 154, 155 al-Aqsa intifada 87 Arafat, Yasser 19 Argentina 2, 64, 147 Armacost, Michael 134 Armenia 22 Armitage, Richard 152, 154 arms control 152, 156–158 arms control paradox 156 Arms Control and Regional Security process 156 Art, Robert 82 Asad, Bashar 20, 33, 101 Asad, Hafez 20 Asia 2, 30, 121; Central 24, 75; west 25 asymmetric warfare 37, 46 “axis of evil” 168 Aziz, Tariq 46, 53

Ba’ath Party 45 Bahrain 23, 25, 61, 66, 68, 74, 97, 106, 107, 159 Baker, James 46 balance of power 6, 7, 9, 10–12, 16, 17, 33, 107, 108, 111, 119, 122, 143, 144, 157, 166 balance of threat 17 ballistic missile defenses 13, 58–60, 65–69, 107, 116, 134, 159, 160 ballistic missiles 2–4, 6, 12, 13, 48, 53, 58–60, 63, 65–70, 100, 110, 111, 113, 115, 119, 125–129, 133, 134, 151, 159, 166; CSS-2 missiles 113, 114, 116–118, 126–128, 134; Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) 65, 66, 68; M-9 and M-11 missiles 101, 121, 130, 132, 134; Scud missiles 60–64, 98–102, 110, 111, 115, 134, 147 Bangladesh 141 Barak, Ehud 19 Baram, Amatzia 47 Begin, Menachem 145 Betts, Richard 139, 144, 146, 161 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 131 biological weapons 1, 2, 4, 5, 12, 34, 36, 37, 45–48, 50–52, 56, 62, 69, 115, 116, 129, 137, 148, 151, 164 Biological Weapons Treaty 3, 14, 75, 134 Bitzinger, Richard 121 Blix, Hans 80 Bolton, John 100 Bosnia 160 botulinum toxin 50 Brazil 2 Brodie, Bernard 144 Brown, Frederic 38 Brown, L. Carl 18, 23

206

INDEX

Brown, Michael 164 Bush, George H. W. 46, 70, 108, 109, 111, 132, 154, 161 Bush, George W. 59, 70, 161, 167, Byman, Daniel 87, 122 Calabrese, John 122, 123 Camp David 19 Camp Doha, Kuwait 62 Carr, E. H. 7 Carter, Jimmy 106, 109, 162 Carter Doctrine 106, 107 Caspian Basin conflict 5 Caspian Sea 78 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 34, 39, 41–44, 47, 49, 50, 86, 130, 153 Chad 38, 39 chemical weapons 1–5, 12, 36, 38, 41–44, 46, 48–52, 56, 62, 69, 115, 116, 129, 137, 148, 151, 164 Chemical Weapons Treaty 3, 14, 75, 133 China 2, 4, 13, 15, 18, 26, 33, 58, 59, 64, 65, 69, 122, 136, 145, 168; ballistic missiles 101, 126, 127, 128, 157; biological weapons 134; chemical weapons 133, 134; conflict with India 30, 64, 67, 131; cruise missiles 128; demand for oil 121, 122; military modernization 125; Ministry of Foreign Affairs 125, 126; nuclear assistance to Algeria 103; nuclear weapons 114, 127, 145, 162; People’s Liberation Army 125, 126, 128; Polytechnologies Incorporated 128; relations with European states 124; relations with Iran 27, 64, 73, 75, 85, 120–122, 126, 128–130, 133, 135; relations with Israel 121, 126; relations with Pakistan 30, 31, 65, 116, 117, 120–122, 126, 130–135; relations with Saudi Arabia 64, 96, 97, 108, 113–116, 120–123, 126–128, 133, 135; relations with Syria 121; relations with the United States 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130, 132–135, 159 Chubin, Shahram 28, 79 Claude, Inis 16 Clausewitz, Carl von 11, 115, 143, 144 Clawson, Patrick 155 Cliff, Roger 122 Clinton, William 84, 162 Cohen, Avner 118

Cohen, Eliot 142 Cohen, Stephen 28, 29 cold war 1, 14, 20, 58, 65, 71, 107, 120, 136, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 156, 159, 168; containment policy 1, 71, 120, 124 command, control, communication, computer, and intelligence (C4I) 145, 146 Cordesman, Anthony 41, 44, 96, 114 cruise missiles 2, 69, 83, 128, 129, 133, 167 Cuba 146 Cuban missile crisis 146, 162 Davis, Zachary 131 Dhahran, Saudi Arabia 62, 160 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) 34, 128 defensive–deterrent ideal 137 deterrence 5, 34, 37, 59, 62, 116, 119, 137, 138, 143, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 159, 160, 167; from chemical and biological weapons 12, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41, 47, 56, 102; from conventional weapons 1, 95, 107, 164, 165; from nuclear weapons 1, 12, 13, 36, 46, 47, 56, 95, 106–108, 112–114, 118, 142, 148, 159, 160, 164, 165; “poor man’s deterrent” 36, 38, 100, 102 diplomacy, coercive 82, 84, 153, 155, 167 decapitation, military 145, 146 Downs, Erica Strecker 123 Duelfer, Charles 46, 47, 48 economic sanctions 80, 81, 111, 122, 155, 156 Einhorn, Robert 122 Eisenhower, Dwight 144 Eisenstadt, Michael 36, 73 Egypt 4, 18, 19, 66, 99, 121, 126; Badr 2000 ballistic missile program 64; ballistic missile cooperation with Argentina, Iraq, and North Korea 64, 102, 103, 111; ballistic missiles 60, 64, 67, 102, 103, 104, 105; biological and chemical weapons programs 102; chemical weapons assistance to Iraq 40, 41, 102; chemical weapons use in Yemen 38, 39, 40; chemical warfare plant at Abu Za’abal 40; Condor ballistic missile program 64, 103, 104;

207

INDEX

interest in nuclear weapons 99, 101, 103, 105, 136; military contribution to 1990–91 Gulf war 40; relations with Israel 101, 102, 120, 147, 156; relations with the United States 102–105 Ehteshami, Anoushiravan 74 engagement 124, 154, 155, 156 Europe 5, 15, 18, 68, 79, 82, 139, 149, 154, European Union 79, 95 Falkland Islands 147 Farhi, Farideh 78 Al Faw Peninsula 43, 44 France 31, 73, 98, 124, 141, 148, 168 Feaver, Peter 144 Fetter, Steve 62 force, preventive or preemptive use of 14, 76, 79, 83, 93, 98, 100, 106, 108, 119, 137, 138, 145–147, 152, 160–164, 166, 168 Freeh, Louis 86 Gaddis, John Lewis 139, 140, 146 Gates, Robert 154 Gellman, Barton 54 George, Alexander 11, 82, 152 Georgia 22 Germany 60, 124, 139, 148, 168; Nazi experience with ballistic and cruise missiles 59 Gill, Bates 27, 125, 127–131, 133 Golan Heights 20, 21, 86, 141 Goldberg, Jeffrey 86 Gray, Colin 37, 156 Greece 22 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 17, 25, 28, 91, 107; Peninsula Shield 26 Gulf States 12, 17, 23–27, 33, 66, 73, 75, 83, 87, 88, 91–94, 97, 98, 104, 119, 142, 159; relations with France and United Kingdom 98; relations with Saudi Arabia 26, 98, 106; relations with the United States 25, 26, 72, 98, 106 Gulf War Air Power Survey 162 Gulf war illness 34 Haass, Richard 152, 154, 155, 159 Halle, Louis 17, 157, 168 Harkavy, Robert 4, 5, 15 Hamas 87 Hamza, Khidhir 158

Harding, Harry 131 Hart, Liddel 115 Haselkorn, Avigdor 45 Hashim, Ahmed 27, 28 HELIOS 141 Henderson, Simon 98, 118 Hersh, Seymour 76 Herz, John 7, 8 Hezbollah 21, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, 163, see also Iran Hitler, Adolph 149, 154 Human Rights Watch 45, 46, Hussein, Saddam 20, 23, 27, 31, 41, 42, 43, 46, 71, 72, 74, 91, 146, 166; on economic sanctions 54, 155, 161; on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons for deterrence and war fighting 47, 48, 51, 146–149, 157; perception on eve of 2003 war 53 Hyer, Eric 128 Inbar, Efraim 20, 21 India 4, 15, 16, 121, 141; ballistic missile defenses 67; ballistic missiles 64, 65; conflict with China 30, 67, 131, 147; conflict with Pakistan 28–30, 64, 131, 141, 142, 147–149, 154, 162; nuclear tests (1974) 29, 131; nuclear tests (1998) 131, 141, 142, 153, 158; nuclear weapons 76, 77, 85, 90, 147, 148; relations with Israel 29; relations with the United States 30, 141 Indian Ocean 131 intelligence 14, 21, 46, 49, 63, 80, 83, 89, 114, 127, 134, 135, 142, 147, 152–154, 158, 163; American performance against WMD proliferation 153, 154, 158; American pre-2003 war assessment of Iraq’s WMD programs 51, 52, 153 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 77–82, 89, 90, 103, 104, 130, 153, 157, 158, 166 Iran 2, 4, 13, 15–18, 20, 23, 37, 66, 68, 71, 72, 168; Arak 77; Atomic Energy Organization 75, 77; ballistic missiles 27, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 75, 77, 92, 95, 104, 110, 130, 134, 141, 159; Bandar Abbas 98, 134; biological weapons 75; Basij 72, 83; Bushehr nuclear power plant 77, 83, 98; chemical weapons 75, 110, 128, 129; experience with Iraqi

208

INDEX

chemical warfare attacks 42, 44; Kalaye Electric Company 78; military forces 36, 72, 73, 83; Ministry of Foreign Affairs 86; Ministry of Intelligence and Security 86; Natanz uranium enrichment facility 77, 78; nuclear energy 27, 75–77, 79, 98, 132; nuclear weapons 27, 30, 71, 76–99, 101, 104, 107, 108, 119, 120, 128, 130, 136, 141, 148, 153, 158, 162, 165–168; perception of weapons of mass destruction 75; relations with China 27, 63, 64, 73, 75, 76, 85, 120–122, 126, 128–130, 133, 135; relations with Gulf States 26, 106; relations with North Korea 64, 75, 85; relations with Pakistan 27, 28, 75, 78, 85, 117; relations with Russia 27, 63, 64, 73, 75, 76, 85, 120; relations with Saudi Arabia 24, 95, 96; relations with Syria 20, 21, 99; relations with the United States 35, 72, 74, 76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 155, 162, 167, 168; Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) 21, 26, 45, 72, 76, 79, 83, 85, 86; revolution 17, 18, 23, 25, 35, 72, 81, 95, 155; Shah 17, 18, 23, 36, 72, 79, 109; support for Hezbollah and terrorism 21, 83, 85–87, 92, 163, 167; threat perception of Israel 76, 87, 162 Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988) 3, 12, 20, 23, 25, 34, 36, 39, 40–44, 46, 49, 50, 55, 60, 61, 72, 75, 87, 91, 95, 96, 104, 108, 110, 125, 128, 134, 137, 141, 142; “war of the cities” 61 Iraq 4, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27, 36, 58, 66, 70–72, 74, 84, 104, 106, 124, 126, 168; army 45; ballistic missiles 52, 60–64, 67, 70, 115, 147; chemical warfare doctrine from Soviet Union 41; chemical weapons assistance from Egypt 40, 41; chemical weapons command and control 43; chemical weapons inventory 50; chemical weapons preparations in 1991 war with Kuwait 49; chemical weapons use 34, 42, 45; General Security Directorate 45; intelligence services 45, 48; international weapons inspections 80, 104, 153, 157, 158; post-2003 war assessment of chemical and biological weapons 53–55; invasion of Kuwait

26, 108, 109, 120, 141, 144, 147, 155, 157, see also Iraq war (1990–1991); nuclear weapons 95, 96, 99, 104, 130, 144, 153, 157, 158, 162, 166; relations with Syria 20, 106; relations with the United States 94, 95, 155; Republican Guard 45, 50; threat perception of Iran 94, 95; al Tuwaitha nuclear complex 158 Iraq Survey Group 52, 53 Iraq war (1990–1991) 13, 23, 34, 39, 41, 46, 50, 51, 54, 56, 59, 60–63, 65, 72, 73, 80, 89, 91, 100, 103, 106, 107, 109, 112, 115, 117, 141, 144, 147, 148, 153, 159–163; Desert Shield and Desert Storm 108, 113 Iraq war (2003) 24, 34, 39, 41, 51, 54, 56, 73, 80, 93, 102, 107, 153, 156, 159, 161, 164, 167 Islamic Jihad 86, 87 Israel 4, 12, 13, 15–21, 87, 141; ballistic missile defenses 66, 100, 101; ballistic missiles 63, 110; conflict with Arab states 5, 18, 23, 94, 142, 147, 149, 162; conflict with Palestinians 24, 142; conflict with Syria 100, 101, 105, 106, 141; in Gulf war (1990–91) 61, 62, 146, 147; military capabilities 34, 35; nuclear weapons 36, 47, 60, 63, 76, 77, 85, 92, 96, 97, 101, 110, 118, 141, 146, 147, 149, 156, 165, 168; preventive strike on Iraq’s nuclear weapons infrastructure 83, 145, 162, 163; relations with China 121, 126; relations with Egypt 101, 102, 120, 156, 162; relations with India 29; relations with Turkey 21, 22, 94; relations with the United States 21, 35; threat perception of Iran 93, 94, 106 Italy 141 Japan 2, 131, 144, 162, 168; chemical weapons use 37, 38 Jervis, Robert 8, 10, Jordan 18, 19, 66, 99, 105; relations with Turkey 22 Kagan, Donald 6 Karawan, Ibrahim 25, Kargil crisis 29, 141, 142, 148 Karp, Aaron 63, 66, Kashmir 29, 141, 148,

209

INDEX

Kay, David 52, 53, 54, 153, 158 Kazakstan 4, 68, 75 Kechichian, Joseph 116 Keegan, John 139 Kemp, Geoffrey 4, 5, 81 Kennan, George 74, 140, 143, 151 Kennedy, John 162 Kenya 162 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 74, 78, 79, 87 Khan, A. Q. 78, 117 Khatami, Mohammad 24, 73, 76, 77, 79, 81, 86, 91, 129 Khomeini, Ayatollah 72, 76 Khrushchev, Nikita 146 Kissinger, Henry 149, 151 Knopf, Jeffrey 148 Korea, North 2, 5, 53, 56, 63, 64, 71, 76, 136, 145, 153, 168; ballistic missiles 75, 98, 102, 111, 117; economy 99; nuclear weapons 77, 80, 85, 89, 99, 162; security cooperation with Egypt 64, 102, 111; security cooperation with Iran 64, 75, 85; security cooperation with Pakistan 64, 117, 118 Korea, South 2, 155 Korean war 145 Kosovo war 84, 160 Kralev, Nicholas 101 Kumaraswamy, P. R. 29 Kurdistan 45; insurgency 21, 22, 44, 45 Kurth, James 139 Kuwait 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 62, 66, 72, 74, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97, 106, 141, 142, 148, 159, 161 Kux, Dennis 155 Kyrgyzstan 75 Laden, Osama bin 2, 58 Lampedusa Island 61 Latin America 2 Lebanon 19, 21, 66, 85, 94, 99, 142; terrorist attacks 86, 167 Levant 13, 90, 99 Libya 66, 126; ballistic missiles 60, 63, 67; chemical weapons 38, 39, 162; nuclear weapons 103, 117; support of terrorism 60, 63; surrender of WMD 156, 164 Litwak, Robert 160, 162 Lynn-Jones, Sean 9 McNaugher, Thomas 61

McNeill, William 139 Madrid Conference 156 al-Majid, Ali Hassan 45 al-Majid, Husayn Kamil Hasan 47, 48, 49 Majnoon Islands 42, 43 Martin, Susan 36 Mearsheimer, John 10, 139 Melby, Eric 155 Middle East 3, 4, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 28, 33, 38, 55, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 74, 86, 90, 91, 101, 111, 112, 121–126, 133, 141, 143, 145, 154, 156, 157; ballistic missile defenses 68, 69; ballistic missile use 59–63; 1973 war 60, 149 Middle East, greater 3–5, 11–17, 31, 32, 36–39, 55, 56, 60, 67, 69, 70, 82, 84, 119–126, 133–137, 140–142, 144, 145, 150–154, 156, 157, 159, 162–164, 166, 168 Milhollin, Gary 77, 166 Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) 3, 14, 31, 63, 111, 130, 132, 133, 134, 157 Monterey Institute of International Studies 132 Moon, John Ellis van Courtland 38 Morgan, Patrick 163, 164 Morgenthau, Hans 6, 7, 16, 17, 143, 144, 150, 151 Morocco 15, 66, Mubarak, Hosni 103 Mullins, Robert 128, 132 Musfir, Muhammed Saleh al 5 Musharraf, Pervez 67, 97, 103, 147 mustard gas 38, 39, 42, 45, 49, 50, 51 mutual assured destruction 65, 69 National Defense University (NDU) 151 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 52 National Missile Defense system 65, 66, 68, 70 Nolan, Janne 63 North America 5 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 58, 59, 65, 69, 95, 149 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) 3, 14, 79, 80, 84, 89, 103, 104, 119, 130, 133, 157, 158, 167 nuclear opacity 118, 119

210

INDEX

nuclear proliferation optimists 136–140, 143, 150 nuclear weapons 1–6, 13, 14, 48, 56, 57, 62, 69, 88, 107, 129, 136–140, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150–152, 160, 162, 164, 165; no-first-use 149; possible use in war 149, 153 nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East 101, 156, 165 offense–defense theory 9, 10 Office of the Secretary of Defense 133 oil 4, 23, 24, 84, 93, 122, 123, 133 Oman 23, 25, 66, 68, 74, 97, 106 Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) 24 O’Sullivan, Meghan 154, 155 Pakistan 2, 4, 13, 15, 16, 37, 75, 98, 121, 125, 168; ballistic missiles 30, 65, 116, 117, 132, 134, 159; conflict with India 28, 29, 64, 97, 131, 141, 142, 148, 149, 154, 162; economy 99; Ghauri missiles 118; Hatf-1, -2, and -3 missiles 31, 132; M-9 and M-11 missiles 31, 101, 116, 132, 134; nuclear tests (1998) 28, 141, 142, 153, 158; nuclear weapons 29–31, 56, 76, 77, 85, 90, 92, 99, 103, 105, 116, 117, 131, 136, 147–149, 162; relationship with the United States 30, 131, 132, 141, 155; security cooperation with China 30, 31, 65, 116, 117, 120–122, 126, 130–135; security cooperation with Iran 27, 28, 75, 78, 85, 117; security cooperation with North Korea 65, 117, 118; security cooperation with Saudi Arabia 31, 97, 108, 116–119; Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Organization 30 Palestinian Authority (PA) 19 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 94 Patriot missiles 62, 65, 68, 159 Paul, T. V. 157 Peloponnesian War 6 Perkovich, George 87 Persian Gulf 13, 16, 18, 23, 25, 33, 34, 37, 39, 62, 68, 71, 72, 74, 87, 90–92, 94, 98, 99, 106, 108, 110, 116, 118, 122, 123, 141, 149, 159; conflict 5, 39, 142 Peterson, J. E. 25, 111,

Pillsbury, Michael 131 Pincus, Walter 164 plutonium 77, 83 Pollack, Kenneth 35, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 87, 112 Posen, Barry 148 Potter, Lawrence 24 power 6–11, 13, 15–18, 31–33, 37, 115, 120, 136, 140, 141, 148, 150–152, 156, 165, 166, 168 power politics 1, 5, 13, 151, 152, 154, see also realism Pressler Amendment 30 prestige 6, 8, 103, 107, 115, 136, 137, 150, 166 Priess, David 17 Punjab 141 al-Qaeda 1, 2, 13, 15, 24, 26, 29, 75, 85, 96, 112, 118, 141, 147, 161–163, 167, 168 Qaboos, Sultan 26 Qadhafi, Moammar 39, 156 Qatar 23–25, 66, 68, 74, 97, 106, 107, 159 Rafsanjani, Ali Akbar Hashemi 79, 87 RAND 24, 142 Reagan administration 114, 127, 128 realism 5–7, 9; classical 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 136, 143, 151, 155, 168; defensive 9, 10, 11; neo- 9–11, 17, 137, 151; offensive 9–11; Reidel, Bruce 129 Reiss, Mitchell 165 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 35, 36, 37, 164 Richelson, Jeffrey 141 Roosevelt, Franklin 162 Ross, Robert 132 Roy, Denny 126 Rubin, Barry 19, 128 Rumer, Eugene 20, 27 Russia 2, 4, 15, 18, 20, 26, 33, 59, 65, 69, 124, 136, 139, 148, 157, 159, 168; nuclear weapons stocks 2; relations with Iran 27, 64, 73, 75–77, 85, 120; relations with Syria 100, 120; SA-300 air defense system 65 Sadat, Anwar 60 Safavi, Yayha Rahim 74 Sagan, Scott 139, 143, 145, 147

211

INDEX

sarin 42, 45, 49, 50, 51, 63, 100 Saudi Arabia 2, 4, 13, 16, 18, 23–25, 49, 54, 66, 68, 74, 168; ballistic missiles 64, 96, 97, 105, 108, 113, 118, 119, 126, 127, 134, 159; experience with ballistic missile attacks in Gulf war (1990– 1991) 61, 62; experience with ballistic missile attacks in Iran–Iraq war (1980– 1988) 72, 91; Khobar Towers 86, 92, 93, 167; nuclear weapons incentives 96, 108, 113, 114, 117–119, 127, 163; nuclear weapons interest 30, 97, 98, 105, 112, 113, 136; relations with Arab Gulf states 26, 106; relations with China 64, 96, 97, 108, 113–116, 120– 123, 126–128, 133; relations with Iran 24, 95, 96; relations with Pakistan 31, 97, 108, 116–119; relations with United States 75, 93, 96, 97, 105, 108, 109, 111–114, 118, 119, 127, 163; relations with Wahhabists 163; threat perception 96, 109–112, 114 Schiff, Ze’ev 145 Schlieffen Plan 148 Scowcroft, Brent 109 security dilemma 7, 8, 10, 12, 36, 136, 143, 152, 154 September 11, 2001 1, 13, 15, 23, 74, 96, 97, 119, 161–163, 166–168 Serbia 84 Shaffer, Brenda 27 Shamkhani, Ali 74, 129 Shatt al Arab 95, 108 Shoham, Dany 40 Sick, Gary 24, 87 Sinai, Joshua 38, 39 Slovakia 102 Snyder, Glenn 148 Snyder, Jack 10 Sokolsky, Richard 125 Somalia 167 South Africa 2 South Asia 3, 4, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 26, 30, 33, 38, 55, 60–62, 66, 90, 121, 123, 131, 132, 141, 143, 153, 154; ballistic missile defenses 68, 69; ballistic missiles 59, 61, 63, 64, 68; conflict 5 Southeast Asia 5 Soviet Union 1, 7, 14, 20, 74, 120, 123, 140–142, 144, 146, 147, 153; chemical weapons use in Afghanistan 37–39; contemplation of preemptive military

strikes on China 145, 162; invasion of Afghanistan 3, 106 Spain 141 Spiegel, Steven 36 stability–instability paradox 148 Stalin, Joseph 53 strategic culture 144 Sudan 91, 167 Sultan, Bandar bin 109 Sultan, Khaled bin 113–115, 127, 133 Sutter, Robert 123, 124 Swaine, Michael 125, 126 Syria 4, 16, 18, 20, 21, 66, 85, 91, 94, 99; ballistic missiles 63, 67, 100, 101, 121; chemical and biological weapons 33, 63, 100; conflict with Israel 141, 147; nuclear weapons interest 99, 100, 105, 141; relations with China 121; relations with Iran 20, 99; relations with Russia 100, 120; threat perception 20, 99, 100 Taba negotiations 19 tabun 50 Taiwan 59, 84, 116, 124, 125, 127, 132, 134, 145, 155 Tajikistan 75 Takeyh, Ray 74, 81 Taliban 15, 26, 58, 74, 141, 147, 156 Tanzania 162 Tellis, Ashley 30 Tenet, George 130 Terrill, Andrew 38, 40 Theater Missile Defense system 65, 66, 70 Thompson, Kenneth 6, 7, 16, 144 Thucydides 6, 16, 143 transformation in military affairs 35 tritium gas 132 Tunb Islands 24, 98, 111, 141 Tunisia 66 Turkey 16, 21, 66, 68; nuclear weapons interest 95, 99; relations with Israel 22, 94; relations with Jordan 22; relations with Syria 99, 105 Turkmenistan 68 Ukraine 139 United Arab Emirates 4, 23–25, 54, 64, 66, 68, 74, 92, 97; ballistic missiles from North Korea 98, 99, 111; relations with the United States 98,

212

INDEX

110; threat perception of Iran 98, 110, 111, 141 United Kingdom 73, 98, 115, 147, 168 United Nations 52, 66, 67, 80, 90, 124; economic sanctions 20, 80, 161; weapons inspections 46, 48–51, 53, 80–81, 144, 162 United States 1–3, 6, 9, 12–15, 17, 18, 33, 36, 37, 60, 65, 73, 93, 115, 140–142, 144, 147, 154; ballistic missile defenses 58–62, 65–70, 107, 116, 125, 134, 146, 159, 160; Central Command 121; counter-proliferation policy 136, 138, 139, 164; European Command 121; Gulf war (1990–91) 62, 149, 160; national security policy 1, 161, 168; nuclear weapons 47, 56, 85, 92, 106, 107, 144, 149, 156, 164, 165; Pacific Command 121; relations with Arab Gulf states 25, 26, 72, 106, 107; relations with China 120, 121, 123–126, 129–135; relations with Egypt 19, 103–105; relations with Israel 35; relations with India 30, 141; relations with Iran 35, 72, 80, 81, 84, 85, 93, 106, 107, 155, 163, 166–168; relations with Iraq 94, 95, 155; relations with Jordan 19; relations with Pakistan 30, 131, 132, 141, 155, 163; relations with Russia 120; relations with Saudi Arabia 75, 93, 96, 97, 105, 108, 109, 111–114, 118, 119, 127; relations with Syria 99, 105; Strategic Command 164; threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons 47, 148, 159, 160; vulnerability to ballistic missiles 58, 59, 69, 70, 160

uranium enrichment 77–80, 83, 117, 129, 130–132, 149, 157, 158, 162; centrifuge use 78, 117, 132, 153, 158 Uzbekistan 68, 75 Van Evera, Stephen 10, 139 Vietnam, North 153 VX nerve agent 45, 48, 50, 51, 100 Wagner, Abraham 41, 44 Walt, Stephen 17, 140 Waltz, Kenneth 9, 11, 18, 137–140, 143, 145, 149, 150 Waxman, Dov 21 weapons of mass destruction 1–5, 11–15, 21, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 47, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 62, 67, 69, 71, 79, 83, 90, 97, 98, 110, 111, 118–122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 133, 135, 136, 148, 151–161, 163–166, 168 Wirtz, James 165 Wisconsin Project 101, 102 Wolfers, Arnold 8 Wolfstahl, Jon 127 World War I 8, 38, 148 World War II 3, 6, 7, 16, 37, 38, 53, 54, 138, 144; experience with ballistic and cruise missiles 59 Yaphe, Judith 73, 78, 91 Yemen 4, 26, 91, 97; ballistic missiles 60, 61; chemical weapons use 34, 38–40; civil war 3, 61 Yoshihara, Toshi 125 Zakaria, Fareed 9 Zelikow, Philip 152

213

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The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana Series in Middle East Studies)

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