Good article in The American Conservative by Christopher Layne, a professor of international relations at Texas A&M, on Iran. He argues that, one, it’s far from clear how close Iran is to having nukes, two, it’s far from clear that we could actually prevent them from getting them with airstrikes, three, any kind of military engagement with Iran is likely to be very costly to the U.S. and, finally, undesirable though it may be, we can live with a nuclear Iran because even “rogue” states are not immune to the “logic of deterrence.”

The administration’s strategy, he says, has illicitly conflated the threat from terrorist groups, who are very hard to deter, and the threat from rogue states. Even a regime that doesn’t care about it’s own people’s well-being still cares about its own survivial. He makes an instructive comparison with Mao’s China on this score:

The very notion that undeterrable rogue states exist is the second questionable assumption on which the administration’s strategy is based. In an important article in the Winter 2004/2005 issue of International Security, Francis Gavin points out that the post-9/11 era is not the only time that American policymakers have believed that the U.S. faced a lethal threat from a rogue state. During the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, the People’s Republic of China was perceived by Washington in very much the same way as the U.S. perceived Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or, currently, Iran. Under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party imposed harsh repression and killed millions of Chinese citizens, and Beijing—which had entered the Korean War in 1950, menaced Taiwan, gone to war with India in 1962, and seemingly was poised to intervene in Vietnam—was viewed as an aggressor. For Washington, Mao’s China was the epitome of a rogue state, and during the Johnson administration, the United States seriously considered launching a preventive war to destroy China’s embryonic nuclear program.

In many ways, Mao was seen by U.S. policymakers as the Saddam Hussein of his time. Like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has made outrageous comments denying the Holocaust and threatening Israel’s destruction, Mao also indulged in irresponsible rhetoric, even cavalierly embracing the possibility of nuclear war. “If the worse came to worst and half of mankind died,” Mao said, “the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.” Once China became a nuclear power, however, where nuclear weapons were concerned both its rhetoric and its policy quickly became circumspect. In fact, a mere five years after the Johnson administration pondered the possibility of striking China preventively, the U.S. and China were engaged in secret negotiations that, in 1972, culminated in President Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing and Sino-American co-operation to contain the Soviet Union.

The U.S. experience with China illustrates an important point: the reasons states acquire nuclear weapons are primarily to gain security and, secondarily, to enhance their prestige. This certainly was true of China, which believed its security was threatened by the United States and by the Soviet Union. It was also true of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and is true of Iran. As Gavin writes, “In some ways, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ early analysis of China mirrors the Bush administration’s public portrayal of Iraq in the lead-up to the war. Insofar as Iraq was surrounded by potential nuclear adversaries (Iran and Israel) and threatened by regime change by the most powerful country in the world, Saddam Hussein’s desire to develop nuclear weapons may be seen as understandable.” The same can be said for Iran, which is ringed by U.S. conventional forces in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq and in the Persian Gulf, and which is a stated target of the Bush administration’s policy of regime change and democratization. Tehran may be paranoid, but in the United States and Israel, it has real enemies. It is Iran’s fear for its security that drives its quest to obtain nuclear weapons.

Layne also points out that, administration rhetoric about Iranian masses yearning to breathe free notwithstanding, nothing could be more calculated to fan the flames of anti-American nationalism in Iran than U.S. military intervention. The Iranians have neither forgotten nor forgiven the long history of U.S. meddling in Iranian affairs.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that pretty much all these arguments would’ve applied to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq prior to the war, if not more so considering that Hussein’s regime was much further from acquiring nuclear capacity than Iran currently is by all accounts.