I was talking with my friend John McKnight yesterday and he made what I considered an astute observation. He said that the issue with Iran, in terms of its getting nukes that destabilize the Middle East, is like some kind of termite infestation in one’s house. The Republicans’ solution seems to be to burn the house down, which ends up with the same result as letting the termites have at it: the house is gone.

In other words, to avoid the regional destabilization that Republicans (and the Israeli’s) say a nuclear-armed Iran presents, they are willing to go in and destabilize it themselves by starting a war with Iran. Seen that way, starting a war doesn’t make much sense.

We have had on this blog some discussions on the rationality/irrationality of Iranian leaders vis-à-vis what to do about the possibility of their developing nuclear weapons, and it so happens that 60 Minutes this coming Sunday will feature ex-Mossad Chief Meir Dagan. From CBS News:

The former head of Israel’s intelligence service believes the Iranian regime is a rational one and even its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who has called for Israel to be annihilated – acts in a somewhat rational way when it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions…

he doesn’t advocate a pre-emptive Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear industry anytime soon, an attack that he said would have to be against “a large number of targets.” There is time to wait before such dire actions need to be taken.

That sounds pretty much like what President Obama has said, no?

In any case, there was a good discussion on these issues on Morning Joe this morning between the great NBC News reporter, Richard Engel, and Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran from the Carnegie Endowment:

For yet another view on the rationality/irrationality of the Iranian regime, consider (and read) Paul Pillar’s article in the Washington Monthly, “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran.” Pillar first starts with the obvious:

Those in the United States who genuinely yearn for war are still a neoconservative minority. But the danger that war might break out—and that the hawks will get their way—has nonetheless become substantial…

There are indeed good reasons to oppose Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, and likewise many steps the United States and the international community can and should take to try to avoid that eventuality. But an Iran with a bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume, and a war to try to stop it from acquiring one would be less successful, and far more costly, than most people imagine.

Now, here is the heart of his analysis:

The notion that a nuclear weapon would turn Iran into a significantly more dangerous actor that would imperil U.S. interests has become conventional wisdom, and it gets repeated so often by so many diverse commentators that it seldom, if ever, is questioned. Hardly anyone debating policy on Iran asks exactly why a nuclear-armed Iran would be so dangerous. What passes for an answer to that question takes two forms: one simple, and another that sounds more sophisticated.

Here is “the simple argument”:

Iranian leaders supposedly don’t think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred…

The trouble with this image of Iran is that it does not reflect actual Iranian behavior. More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one…In fact, the Islamic Republic’s conduct beyond its borders has been characterized by caution. Even the most seemingly ruthless Iranian behavior has been motivated by specific, immediate concerns of regime survival.

Here is “the sophisticated-sounding argument about the supposed dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon” that mostly comes “from policy-debating intelligentsia,” who:

accepts that Iranian leaders are not suicidal but contends that the mere possession of such a weapon would make Tehran more aggressive in its region. A dominant feature of this mode of argument is “worst-casing,” [which] rests on speculation after speculation about what mischief Iran “could” commit in the Middle East, with almost no attention to whether Iran has any reason to do those things, and thus to whether it ever would be likely to do them.

The speculation includes “giving nuclear weapons or materials to a terrorist group,” which, Pillar notes, was “a selling point of the Iraq War.” But:

Nothing is said about why Iran or any other regime ever would have an incentive to do this. In fact, Tehran would have strong reasons not to do it. Why would it want to lose control over a commodity that is scarce as well as dangerous? And how would it achieve deniability regarding its role in what the group subsequently did with the stuff? No regime in the history of the nuclear age has ever been known to transfer nuclear material to a nonstate group. That history includes the Cold War, when the USSR had both a huge nuclear arsenal and patronage relationships with a long list of radical and revolutionary clients.

A former national intelligence officer now teaching at Georgetown, Pillar offers other examples of speculation that has been advanced as to a nuclear-armed Iran’s intentions and he attempts to knock them down with this reasoning:

A rich body of doctrine was developed during the Cold War to outline the strategic differences that nuclear weapons do and do not make, and what they can and cannot achieve for those who possess them. Such weapons are most useful in deterring aggression against one’s own country, which is probably the main reason the Iranian regime is interested in developing them. They are much less useful in “shielding” aggressive behavior outside one’s borders, except in certain geopolitical situations in which their use becomes plausible.

Pillar makes a most important point, one related to what Mr. Obama urged us to consider the other day:

No one knows what the full ramifications of such a war with Iran would be, and that is the main problem with any proposal to use military force against the Iranian nuclear program. But the negative consequences for U.S. interests are likely to be severe.

Some of those ramifications might include:

a regional conflagration involving multiple U.S. allies, sucking in U.S. forces far beyond the initial assault. When the Brookings Institution ran a war-games simulation a couple of years ago, an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities escalated into a region-wide crisis in which Iranian missiles were raining down on Saudi Arabia as well as Israel, and Tehran launched a worldwide terrorist campaign against U.S. interests.

The point of all this is that we need to think this one through based on more than the typical television coverage of the GOP candidates cowboy rhetoric on the issue, which seems to regard war as necessary or at least inevitable.

Again, I suggest reading the entire Pillar piece (he also appeared on NPR this morning with Steve Inskeep, which you can hear here).