No. of Recommendations: 14
Except that article shows that the strategy....is not working. The key piece:
The limits of military force against a nuclear programme are real, and as others have argued elsewhere, strikes can destroy facilities but cannot eliminate knowledge. The 440kg of enriched uranium remains unaccounted for.
A successor regime of any political colour will inherit a strategic environment in which the case for nuclear deterrence has been strengthened, not weakened. These are genuine long-term risks. But they are arguments for a comprehensive post-conflict diplomatic architecture, not arguments against the campaign itself.
That's the point, right? We're "degrading" nearly all of Iran's conventional military capabilities...but that doesn't affect their nuclear threat. We're not doing anything that will materially affect their ability to develop a nuclear weapon after the war, from where they were right before the war. We had destroyed their enrichment program back in June ("obliterated" was the word), but this war doesn't create any obstacles to them restarting the program at a future date that didn't exist before the war. The same is generally true of their conventional military capabilities and their ballistic missile programs - they can always be rebuilt, and indeed Iran had almost completely replenished their ballistic missile inventory within about six months after much of it was destroyed by the 12 Day war.
The author is absolutely wrong in concluding that these aren't arguments against the campaign itself. They are core arguments against the campaign. If the campaign isn't actually doing anything to stop Iran from restarting their nuclear program once the war is over, then the campaign doesn't further that strategic goal - which vastly affects whether the campaign should have been undertaken. Especially since (as acknowledged here) the attacks only strengthen the case for getting a nuclear weapon. And the same is true of the ballistic missile program.
When the author writes:
But the critics’ implicit alternative, continued restraint while Iran inched towards a nuclear weapon, is the policy that produced the crisis in the first place. Every year of strategic patience added centrifuges to the enrichment halls and kilogrammes to the stockpile.
...he's committing the politician's fallacy:
1. We must do something to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, we must do this.
The critics' aren't making an "implicit alternative" - pointing out that this war isn't going to do anything effective to stop Iran from inching towards a nuclear weapon is not a claim that any particular alternative would be better. Just that this particular alternative won't work, but has a lot of other costs that different tactics do not. Even if one is correct that Iran can't be bribed out of pursuing a nuke, that doesn't mean that they can be bombed out of pursuing a nuke - it just means that bribing them wouldn't work. Just because the "implicit alternative" wasn't working doesn't mean that this plan of action "is working."
