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The CIA, offering the most optimistic estimate of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weaponry, forecasts that event within a decade. Other estimates see the storm breaking much sooner. Whatever the true pace of that progress, certainly President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric on the subject is as consistent as it is unsettling: belligerently proclaiming progress toward nuclear arms, asserting Iran’s pride and right in making it, and threatening the obliteration of Israel as its object. Such fire-breathing elicits threats of pre-emption or retaliation from the U.S. and Israel, spooks the oil markets, and complicates the strategic picture of the Middle East.
In addition to the strategic aspect, the crisis also has what might be called its theological aspect, in two parts. First is the Iranian threat to culminate the Muslim world’s war against Israel, a war now entering its seventh decade. Second, in Ahmadinejad the mullahs–whatever their supposed rational-actor calculations behind the scenes–chose as their public face a millenarian cipher who may see a nuclear exchange as the precursor to an apocalypse that will usher in an Islamic paradise. Both the strategic and theological dimensions of the crisis are worrisome. But disentangling them prompts a deeper contemplation. A nuclear attack on Israel would satisfy the Iranian regime’s thirst for jihad, but it would provide the regime virtually no strategic advantage. True, it would bolster Iranian leadership in the eyes of the Muslim world, for having accomplished what all the wars since 1948 could not. The real-world assets to be gleaned from such stature, however, are few.
Granted, this lack of any strategic advantage is no reason to doubt Tehran’s threats, given that the regime’s decision-making has been historically driven at least as much by theological or cultural imperatives as by any strategic calculation. It is nonetheless important to separate the two parts of the Iranian nuclear threat. Doing so clarifies a regional picture muddied by their conflation. Israel is the focus of Iranian vitriol. Israel is putatively one of Iran’s main reasons for pursuing nukes, and by most estimates will be the first target once those come on-line. But as a thought-experiment, the case can be made that for Tehran, Israel is much more a “theological” enemy than a strategic one. What if another party, even closer to hand, is both? Despite Iran’s rhetorical bloodlust, what if Israel isn’t the target?
Seen from Tehran, there is another possibility. It is a better target insofar as it would achieve for Iran both strategic and theological advantage, it is logistically easier to hit–and unlike Israel, it cannot reply in kind. A scant hundred miles across the Persian Gulf lie the oilfields of Saudi Arabia. Among these is the world’s largest deposit, Ghawar, which along with the rest of the sector is well within range of Iranian missiles and defenseless against a nuclear attack. While a counterintuitive proposal on its face, closer consideration shows that the oilfields offer the mullahs a tempting target on both realpolitik and religious grounds.
As a tactical matter, an Iranian strike on the oilfields would present few difficulties. As soon as a missile-deliverable Bomb is ready, it would have no trouble transiting the Gulf, whether launched from Iranian soil or from a ship. There is nothing resembling Israel’s battery of Arrow missile defenses to stop it once launched. Even one bomb of reasonable accuracy and power could destroy a large portion of the Saudis’ oil infrastructure. A nuclear strike would also render the destroyed area uninhabitable and unproductive for years to come.
As a political, military, and strategic matter, there are worse gambles than an oilfield strike. Could Saudi Arabia really mount a military response? Not a nuclear one, certainly, and not much of a conventional one either. If the Saudis did declare war in reply, they would be at a disadvantage from the start, given the size and structure of the Saudi military. Moreover, any counterattack that sought to establish a physical battlefront would necessarily have to pass through the war already in-progress in Iraq.
This leads to the question of an American response. A Saudi-Iran war fought through Iraqi territory would, at a minimum, worsen the headaches that Iran is already happy to give the U.S. in Iraq. A Saudi thrust through Iraq would bring the risk of American involvement. Indeed, Riyadh might do it precisely for that reason, since it is hard to imagine the U.S. would reply militarily to the Iranian strike otherwise. The U.S.-Saudi alliance could be construed as binding Washington to respond with force, although Washington would likely seek to finesse its way out of any such commitment.
Would the U.S. reply to a pre-emptive Iranian nuclear attack on the Saudi oilfields with a nuclear counterstrike on Tehran? Unlikely in the extreme. Would Washington instead order a conventional-military response, even assuming that it had the means, let alone the stomach, to do so given the continuing demands of Iraq? Also unlikely; and it is hard to imagine the American public being willing to see a single soldier die for the Saudi regime. A U.S. response that included a military component would be a possibility- but the mullahs might well bet against it, figuring that the U.S.-Saudi alliance is too frayed, and the American military and public too exhausted, to widen the regional conflict.
A pre-emptive attack would cement Iran’s status as the nonpareil pariah nation. But the mullahs are halfway to that status as it is, making it unlikely that they would care much, especially since they know that they can count on Russia and China at the U.N., and that their oil makes it unlikely that Europe would sustain any meaningful ill will for very long. This, in fact, points to the biggest advantage Iran would reap. At a stroke, the production capacity of its main petro-competitor would be unusable for years. The price per barrel could consequently, and easily, return to $150-per-barrel territory, perhaps topping $200. This would net the mullahs-currently struggling with low oil prices and a creaking domestic economy-an annual windfall of hundreds of billions of dollars well into the foreseeable future, as Iran displaced the Kingdom as the world’s leading oil producer.
Nor would the “displacing” end there. While the rival strains of Sunni and Shia Islam seem to be in a state of on-again-off-again war more or less permanently in Iraq and elsewhere, the closest they have come to battle via the vessels of nation-states was the Iran-Iraq War. There again, realpolitik was arguably the more important driver of the conflict. But for the Iranians at least, the intrafaith holy war was not far from the surface. The Basiji sent legions of enraptured suicide-bombers into the field as cannon- (or more accurately, landmine-) fodder. Part of what drove them was the radical-Shi’ism that the Revolution had enthroned; part of who drove them was Ahmadinejad himself, in his capacity as Basiji trainer.
The effect of a pre-emptive attack on the Iranian population is uncertain. By many accounts the regime is deeply unpopular. However, the mullahs’ control of state and religious machinery might suffice to rally the Iranian people to the Shiite cause, as the long latent war between Shia and Sunni broke into the open with a dramatic attack on the latter’s heartland. The Revolution was able to produce Basiji and military manpower in the hundreds of thousands for a suicidal war on Saddam Hussein’s ostensibly secular but actually Sunni regime. The odds are good that Iran would be able to produce the necessary numbers for a war on the Sunni-est regime of all in Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, even without playing the anti-Sunni card to justify an attack, the regime could deploy its fundamentalist Shi’ism in another way. Ahmadinejad has publicly alluded to what he sees as his destiny: preparing the way for the return of the twelfth imam, Muhammad Ibn Hassan, as a prelude to the Shia-Islamic rapture. True, an attack on Israel would be as good or better a candidate for sparking that apocalypse. It would allow Iran to rally the Islamic world. But an attack on Saudi Arabia would allow Shia Iran to dominate the Islamic world. And the potential apocalypse that could emerge from such an attack would be impressive indeed- and close enough to count, for the chaos it would unleash, as a step toward the imam’s return.
The safe bet is that the mullahs’ regime means what it says in threatening Israel, and that any attack would be aimed there. But the longer-odds prospect of an Iranian nuclear attack on the Saudi oilfields should not be overlooked. Either course presents both costs and benefits to Tehran. For the likes of Ahmadinejad, and presumably the Iranian regime for which he speaks, Israel would be the more emotionally satisfying target. But the Saudi oilfields would be the colder and wiser one. If below their fiery rhetoric is a cooler calculation of strategy, it is one that the mullahs must have considered. With the fait accompli of a wrecked, radioactive Saudi oil sector, a nuclear Iran would be predominant in the region, and atop the Islamic- and oil-producing- worlds. It would also be far richer far into the future–and thus in an even stronger position to continue its war against Israel long after the mushroom cloud on the Gulf had dissipated.
Tags: iran, nuclear proliferation
Jason Parker
Jason Parker is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of _Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962_ (Oxford University Press, 2008), a CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title for 2009. He has also published articles in Diplomatic History, the Journal of African American History, and International History Review. He has received research fellowships from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University and the Smith Richardson Foundation in support of his current project on U.S. Cold War public diplomacy in the Third World. His broad research interests are U.S. foreign relations, decolonization and the Cold War, race and diplomacy, and Caribbean/inter-American affairs.