Operation Opera Redux? Iran’s Nuclear Program and the Preventive War Paradox
A key concept in Silverstone’s analysis is the difference between preventive war and preemptive attack. The latter carries far fewer political costs than preventive war, as it is understood by the international community to be a true act of self-defense leveraging an option of last resort. No state is obligated to suffer an imminent attack from an enemy, so preempting it with an attack of its own is justifiable. The imminence factor aligns the attack with the underlying security challenge, thereby ensuring that the politics of the attack and the politics of the security challenge are one and the same. This is not the case for preventive war. Indeed, a state can argue that it is preempting some notional future attack from an enemy, but the existence of nonmilitary options to manage the associated threat over the timescale in question is damning.
All states’ security interests are grounded in the rights of sovereignty and territorial integrity within the international system, and they do not sacrifice those rights simply by taking actions that another state sees as carrying threat potential at some point in the future. Granted, rights in the international system are more based in behavioral norms than enforceable rules, and strong states like Israel and the United States can certainly defy norms as they choose. But, as Operation Opera and Silverstone’s other case studies demonstrate, aggressive action when there are nonmilitary options available to address a nonimminent threat brings political consequences that even strong states should be concerned about. Other states will now potentially view them as untrustworthy and even threatening, thereby constraining future alliances and other security cooperation arrangements. And like with Iraq, the target state—assuming it survives the preventive war action—can be compelled to develop strategic deterrents to better secure itself against the aggressive state, perhaps even to wage its own preventive war in the future.
Decades on from Operation Opera’s operational success but strategic failure, these dynamics remain instructive. Recent weeks have seen the largest (and most visible) overseas deployment of US B-2 stealth bombers since 2003. Two carrier strike groups are now afloat in the Arabian Sea region. A longstanding bilateral security alliance whose respective foreign policies of the moment seem increasingly aggressive. Such is the backdrop to the recent indirect talks between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program held in Oman. These moves might best be understood as a threatening initial negotiation overture—as Thomas Schelling famously described, a “diplomacy of violence.” If these are indicators that a combined American-Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear program may be coming, then the simultaneous occurrence of US-Iranian talks suggests the availability of nonmilitary means to address the issue. And because that is a key distinction between preventive war and preemptive attack, policymakers in Washington and Tel Aviv would be well-advised to consider the last time Israel sought to eliminate a regional opponent’s nuclear program, and the resultant security paradox that it created.
Where Is the Tipping Point for Nuclear Programs?
The best way to manage a paradox is to avoid it. In the case of the preventive war paradox, this means waiting on the military option until it is in fact the last resort (i.e., the tipping point between a preventive war scenario and a preemptive attack scenario has passed). Where is that tipping point for a nuclear weapons program? Herein lies the strategic rub. A state cannot wait until its opponent successfully tests a weapon, because a preemptive attack would risk a nuclear response if the attack were unsuccessful. So, do you wait for a breakout threshold—the point just prior to a state having enough weapons-grade fissile material to test a functional weapon in a matter of weeks or months? This seems reasonable, but there could be no uncertainty in the intelligence gathered to inform a preemptive attack decision, and because this is exceedingly difficult to achieve, it incentivizes erring well on the side of caution. If you err on this side enough, then you can justify attacking even a peaceful nuclear energy program, just like the Israelis did against Iraq. To wit, every successful nuclear weapons program is supported by peaceful nuclear energy research and production capability.
In reality, there probably is no tipping point for a nuclear weapons program and yet, the preventive war paradox still holds. So, assuming a policy that Iran cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon—without weighing too much into the regional security dynamics and historical animus, it seems pretty evident that the Iranian nuclear program is not entirely peaceful—what are Israel and its allies to do? A tipping point has to be selected.
A Running Estimate of Cold Calculation
In selecting a tipping point, Israel and its allies would be signaling to Iran that certain conditions would have to be met at a certain time about its nuclear program—for example, Iran’s abandonment the program entirely, or at least its assent to an active monitoring and inspection regime. Such conditions-setting serves an “either-or” purpose in bargaining politics or negotiation theory—either choose to behave in the way that we want, or we will force the behavior on you.
Time and conditions are important in selecting a tipping point, but not solely as a basis for negotiation. Negotiation and diplomacy are useful, of course, and it would be nice for Israel and its allies to achieve Iran’s denuclearization at a comparatively low cost. But any negotiation exists in parallel for a military option that is available today if Israel and its allies choose to exercise it, irrespective of the progress of negotiations and diplomacy. The decision to choose the military option—the real tipping point—is about how the cost compares between it and other options.
This is not a novel insight, of course. Comparative costing across policy options is the basis for Graham Allison’s rational policy model and has informed so-called political prudence at least since Machiavelli was analyzing the political and economic machinations of the House of Medici in Florence during the sixteenth century. In determining the normatively best policy option across a range of alternatives, the prudent leader will select the one that has maximal (or near maximal) distance between anticipated benefits and realized costs. So, a rational policy is one in which the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Although the rational policy model is logical to the point of intuitive, most policy choices for most states are surprisingly irrational. This is due to either estimation errors in benefits and costs (due to ideological capture or other logical fallacies), or the roles played by organizational processes and bureaucratic politics. These alternate models suggest that policy decisions are not choices per se, but rather the outputs of organizational routines of the various parts of a government (none of which have the full policy picture) or the outcomes of bargaining among influential individuals and groups within the government.
In order to select a normatively right tipping point for a potential attack against Iran’s nuclear program, Israel and its allies must aim for pure rationality—the cold calculation and weighing of objectively estimated costs and benefits. This requires two acts of self-consciousness. First, Israel and its allies must constrain the organizational processes and bureaucratic politics that bring ideology, historical memory, personal agendas, or other biases into their respective decision-making. Second, they must recognize the preventive war paradox and accept that it cannot be avoided for this particular policy decision.
The first act will ensure that the estimation of costs and benefits is not skewed. The second act will ensure that the costs and benefits are measured in terms of long-term security, not just near-term operational success or visceral political satisfaction. Just like with Operation Opera, a preventive war action against Iran’s nuclear program will carry significant costs that may not be immediately apparent. They can be forecasted though. We know what happened after Operation Opera. We know Iranian behavior. We know Middle Eastern political dynamics and the behavioral incentive structures that shape them. We know American and Israeli standing across different groups in the international community, and what their respective reactions would likely be to a strike on Iran’s nuclear program. Policymakers need to forecast the costs and anticipated benefits objectively and then assess the resultant ledger against an equally objective definition of security to find the tipping point. Although the preventive war paradox is unavoidable in this case, its worst effects can surely be mitigated. Aspirational? Probably; acts of self-consciousness are hard. But not naive. Israel and its allies simply need to do better than last time. Not every opera is tragic, after all.
Colonel Patrick Sullivan, Ph.D., is the director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. The article was originally posted to the website of the Modern War Institute at West point. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
