Confused readers — arent we already mired in a war started because of a Middle Easterns dictators nuclear ambitions that didnt turn out to be quite fulfilled? — need to keep a couple of things in mind as this debate unfolds in the coming weeks. First of all, the U.S. military is always war-gaming possible scenarios to attack potentially vexing nations, especially those with a hankering for weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, the U.S. Army and Marines — make no mistake about it — are stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan. So if Washington opts for that dubious hat trick — wars under way in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, all at the same time — an Iranian attack will come from the skies, not from the ground.
The last time the U.S. military waged an air war against a WMD threat, it was in the form of a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998. Dubbed "Desert Fox" by the Pentagon, it got relatively little press because President Clintons impeachment and doomed House Speaker-to-be Bob Livingstons extramarital-affair scandal were exploding at the same time. As the attack unfurled, Pentagon officials privately conceded their barrage was based on crude estimates of where Saddam Hussein might be hiding elements of his banned WMD programs.
And indeed, the bombardment didnt disturb the Iraqis all that much. In fact, some simply shrugged it off. "The Iraqis I spoke with were actually quite satisfied and pleased" following Desert Fox, said Charles Duelfer, the WMD expert who went looking for such contraband inside Iraq both before and after the U.S. invasion. "One individual I spoke with said, `Well, gee, if we knew that that was all you were going to do — meaning the four days of bombing — `we would have ended this [standoff with U.N. arms inspectors], you know, earlier," Duelfer told a Senate panel in 2004. Following the bombing, the U.N. remained sidelined in Iraq until just before 2003s invasion. All this suggests that any U.S.-led military attack on Iran designed to root out — or even merely delay — Tehrans nuclear-weapons program is going to have to be far more violent and sustained than Desert Fox. In other words, any talk of a relatively pain-free surgical strike against Iran would certainly qualify as misinformed speculation.