After reading this very creative James Fallows piece (subscriber only) detailing a mock wargaming exercise concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program, I can understand why some folks might be attracted to the idea of a velvet revolution as a solution to America's Iran problem.

The Atlantic assembled a group consisting of some usual suspects: retired USAF Colonel Sam Gardiner (who penned a typo-laden expose of the Pentagon's GWII psy-ops), Reuel Marc Gerecht (everyone's favorite former spy--sorry, Robert Baer fans), David Kay (of "We were almost all wrong" fame), Kenneth Pollack (author of the new book, Oops I screwed up on Iraq, howsabout Iran?), and a few other guys I'd never heard of.

Playing the role of CENTCOM (and sometimes the CIA), Gardiner gave an extensive PowerPoint presentation (one that would certainly give Edward Tufte fits of apoplexy) to kick off the game.

The article itself is tough to summarize, so I've taken the, ahem, liberty, of excerpting some of the slides for the benefit of our loyal readers here. (The slides, by the way, are also riddled with typos).

The panel operated under the folllowing set of assumptions, taken literally from the slides:
  • Iran is probably three years from a weapon.

    • Unless someone has given help we don’t know.

    • Unless they have been able to make purchases we don’t know.

  • There is the nuclear program we see, and there are the nuclear programs we don’t see.

    • Possibly more than one weapons program.

    • Work is deep underground and may be inside cities.

  • The intelligence dilemma is that we will most likely not know when they have crossed our red lines [points after which Iran's nuclear program will be harder to stop].

And the following key judgments:
  • The regime in Iran is confident and strong. It is unlikely that any internal process will lead to regime change.

  • Iran is deeply and broadly involved in Iraq.

  • Nuclear Program:

    • Iran’s nuclear program is probably one of the leadership’s most important priorities.

    • The Intelligence Community consensus assessment is that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in three years.

    • Iran already has a nuclear weapon delivery capability.

  • The US is probably a major target of Iranian threats of preemption.

One major question was whether Israel was serious about a preemptive aerial strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, and if so, what that would mean. An Israeli strike would probably look something like this:




Fallows notes that "to get to Iran, Israeli planes would have to fly over Saudi Arabia and Jordan, probably a casus belli in itself given current political conditions; or over Turkey, also a problem; or over American-controlled Iraq, which would require (and signal) U.S. approval of the mission." The panel concluded that any Israeli strike is risky (given the distance, the difficulty of the targets, and Israel's limited capabilites), likely to backfire and hurt U.S. interests in the region, and that public threats of such a strike would cause Iran to speed up its program and the Europeans to balk. The recommendation was to ask the Israelis to keep quiet.

Gardiner gave three major options for military action by the United States:

  • Punitive strikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) in retaliation for terrorist operations in Iraq:



    Gardiner described this option as low-risk from a military standpoint, since we know where the units are and can hit them in one night. Of course, this has little to do with eliminating Iran's nuclear program.

  • US airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities (300 targets, 125 of which are WMD-related):



    A strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would take about five days and would again be low-risk, according to Gardiner.

  • Regime change (light option):




  • Regime change (heavy option):



    Both regime change options would be moderately risky from a military perspective, with the proviso that no stability operations would be included. The Pentagon has neither the interest nor the manpower for policing Iran. A major problem would be that necessary preparations such as the expansion of airstrips in nearby Azerbaijan would tip off the Iranians to an impending assault, thus precluding diplomatic options as well as giving Iran the opportunity to launch preemptive strikes in Iraq or elsewhere. Iran could also use its oil weapon.


In the end, the panel concluded that not much could be done, given the constraints imposed by Iraq and the likely unwillingness of our European allies to go along with another adventure. The article was written before Iran and the Euros tentatively agreed to a freeze, but it was also written before China stepped in to protect its new gas partner. So the bottom line is that Iran is going to get its nuclear weapons, so we might as well resign ourselves to that fact and work to make the current regime less hostile:
So this is how the war game turned out: with a finding that the next American President must, through bluff and patience, change the actions of a government whose motives he does not understand well, and over which his influence is limited. "After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers," Sam Gardiner said of his exercise. "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."
Somewhere, I suspect, Michael Ledeen is furiously typing his next column.