Alex Massie had a similar reaction to Stephen Walt’s post on Iran’s nuclear program:

In the end, too much of his argument is based upon the notion that the United States is Really Crazy, which risks leaving Walt making an argument that is the mirror image of the Mad Mullahs are Mad and Cannot Be Trusted Not to Do Mad Things line that often surfaces when Iran is the topic for discussion.

Quite. The part of Walt’s argument that I found the most troubling was this:

Second, we need to explain to Iran that possessing a known nuclear weapons capability is not without its own costs and risks. Today, if a terrorist group somehow obtained a nuclear weapon and then used it, we would not suspect Iran of having provided it and they would face little risk of retaliation. Why not? Because we know they don’t have any weapons right now. But imagine how we might react a decade hence, if we knew that Iran had built a few nuclear weapons and some terrorist group whose agenda was somewhat similar to Iran’s managed to explode a bomb somewhere in the world, or even on American soil? Under those terrible circumstances, Tehran would have to worry a lot about U.S. retaliation, even if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack.

There are two ways one can take this. One is that Walt has exaggerated the reflexive instinct of our government to blame “rogue” states for acts of terrorism, in which case Tehran has fewer reasons to fear being wrongly blamed for acts it does not commit. The example of Iraq would teach them that states targeted by Washington will be attacked no matter what the state of their weapons program is, so Tehran would not have much confidence that the absence of such a program protects it from being blamed or attacked in response to attacks in which it had no hand. The other main possibility is that Walt has described Washington’s likely response very well, which would mean that Tehran has every incentive to build up an arsenal to defend against the inevitable attack that it will face in the event that some other group or state sets off a nuke.

The problem with convincing other states that your government behaves irrationally is that it removes at least some of their constraints on action. Other states will do things that they would otherwise not do on the assumption that our government is fundamentally paranoid and prone to overreaction. Incidentally, this is why the loose talk of “should we nuke Iran now or nuke them later?” during the 2008 campaign (mostly in the Republican debates) was so dangerous. If the Iranian government believes that there is a serious chance that we would use tactical nukes in an unprovoked war against them, building up a deterrent or creating a contingency plan for retaliation after the fact becomes much more attractive to them than it was. These are not the ideas we should want to be encouraging in the minds of any foreign leaders.

Another problem with trying to instill fear in Iran that it will be blamed for WMD terrorist attacks it does not sponsor is that no state is ever going to give away WMDs to a third party anyway. The scenario is not remotely credible, and no one would be more aware of how absurd the scenario is than members of the government being (falsely) accused of doing this. For one thing, there is the risk that the third party will act independently and be tied to your government, which means that the state will bear the consequences for actions it did not authorize. There is no advantage for the state, which bears all the risk in a conflict that it would surely lose, and no state has ever existed that developed a supremely powerful weapon and then willingly let this weapon out of its control. The idea that deterrence cannot work with “rogue” states because they can hand off their weapons to third parties is simply nonsense, and one would think that the role this argument played in providing a rationalization for the Iraq invasion would make us very wary of employing it in any way.