Unsurprisingly, Dennis Ross has come up with a harmful and dangerous idea for Iran policy:

Second, it should be prepared to spell out in advance the consequences for all classes of violations of the agreement. For the most egregious, indicating a dash toward weapons-grade production, the use of force should be the result. Such consequences would be far more credible if the administration worked them out with Congress and they were enshrined in legislation — and if those consequences, especially the use of force, were also applied to an Iranian move to develop nuclear weapons after the term of the agreement.

Incorporating these measures in legislation would send a clear signal and demonstrate that the president and Congress are unified on this issue. It would also serve as a deterrent to Iran and reassure the Israelis about the certainty of our action — removing a key source of their fear of the agreement.

Ross seems to be confused about which state needs to be reassured in order to complete the negotiations on the nuclear issue. His proposal is aimed primarily at convincing Israel that any deal reached with Iran will be acceptable to Israelis, but that is impossible when the Israeli government has already made clear that Iran’s retention of any nuclear capability is unacceptable to them. The means Ross would use for this reassurance are genuinely dangerous in that they would automatically commit the U.S. to a course of military action if Iran was believed to be “dashing” towards producing a nuclear weapon. Since the U.S. has been badly mistaken in the past when it comes to assessing other states’ intentions with respect to developing such weapons, there should not be any advance legislation that approves of the use of force to counter this sort of perceived threat. Besides being illegal and unwise, preventive war of this kind is sometimes entirely unnecessary. The threat that the U.S. thinks that it is “preventing” with military action may not exist at all, or even if it does exist military action will normally be the wrong response.

The U.S. should not be making a guarantee to go to war against Iran for having done something that Israel did decades ago, and insisting on this as a way to “reassure” the nuclear-armed Israeli government is beyond bizarre. Ross is calling for the equivalent of the Iraq Liberation Act for handling the nuclear issue with Iran. It would be a horrible mistake that would create an opening for some future opportunistic administration to start a war against Iran on what would most likely be a flimsy pretext based on poor or manipulated intelligence. The more immediate problem is that the passage of any such legislation would be taken as proof on the Iranian side that the U.S. intends to attack sooner or later and that no agreement with Washington should be trusted. Far from making it easier to reach a satisfactory agreement, Ross’ proposal would give the Iranians every reason to abandon the talks.