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Friedman’s Terrible Iran Idea

Friedman is still intent on making preventive war seem acceptable.
tom friedman walking

Unsurprisingly, Thomas Friedman proposes a terrible idea to follow up the nuclear deal:

Congress should pass a resolution authorizing this and future presidents to use force to prevent Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapons state. Iran must know now that the U.S. president is authorized to destroy — without warning or negotiation — any attempt by Tehran to build a bomb.

This is nonsense, but it is extremely dangerous nonsense. First, Friedman assumes that the U.S. has a right to attack Iran for this reason, but as I said earlier this week such an attack on Iran would be unjustifiable and illegal. Even if Iran were doing this (and it is now even less likely to do it than it was a few years ago), the U.S. would be committing blatant aggression by attacking them. To threaten Iran with the possibility of a future attack at this point is extraordinarily foolish. It would feed into the worst fears of Iran’s hard-liners that the negotiations were just a prelude to a later attack, and it would give some future president political cover to start an illegal war.

Threatening to attack Iran in the future would obviously undo whatever progress has been made in establishing better relations between our governments. It would risk throwing away one of the chief benefits of the deal for the U.S., which is the avoidance of another unnecessary war in the region. In the worst case, such a resolution would pave the way for that war. Since an aerial attack would at most set back and not destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it would also not succeed in preventing anything but would instead make the undesired outcome more likely to happen. The deal with Iran has shown that the least costly and most successful option for advancing the cause of nonproliferation can work, but even now Friedman is still intent on making preventive war an acceptable policy option for the U.S.

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