WHICH PATH TO PERSIA?

Chapter 3
GOING ALL THE WAY
Invasion
There is little appetite in the United States for
mounting an invasion of Iran. After the frustrations
and costs of the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, few Americans are looking for another fight
in the Middle East. American ground forces are
badly overstretched as it is. Under these circumstances,
an invasion of Iran would require calling
up huge numbers of National Guard and military
reserve personnel and keeping them in service for
several years. After the strains of frequent deployments
to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past eight
years, this might undermine the foundations of
the all-volunteer force.
Nor is it clear that a full-scale invasion is necessary.
The most compelling rationale for this
course of action is the fear that Iran’s leadership
would prove difficult or impossible to deter once
it had acquired a nuclear weapons capability.
Doubts remain, but American, European, and
even Israeli experts have all argued that while Iran
may not be easy to deter, the available evidence
indicates that it probably could be deterred from
the most extreme behavior. This in turn calls into
question whether the costs of an invasion could
be justified. 30
Despite this, only an invasion offers the United
States finality when it comes to its 30-year conflict
with the Islamic Republic. If the goal is to eliminate
all the problems the United States has with
the current Iranian regime, from its pursuit of
nuclear weapons to its efforts to overturn the status
quo in the Middle East by stirring instability
across the region, there is no other strategy that
can assure this objective. Of course, as U.S. experience
in Iraq and Afghanistan has demonstrated,
that certainty comes with the distinct possibility
of creating new risks, threats, and costs that may
be as troublesome or more so than the current
range of problems.
In particular, as American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan
have underscored, the critical question
that the United States would need to address in
the event of an invasion of Iran is how to build
a stable, secure, and at least relatively pro-American
state after toppling the government. While
American missteps in Mesopotamia and Central
Asia have certainly furnished Washington with a
wealth of lessons about how to do better the next
time around, the idea of applying these lessons to
Iran—a country with three times the population
30
For experts making this argument, see, for instance, Yair Ettinger, “Former Mossad Chief Downplays Iranian Threat,” Haaretz, October 18,
2007, available at ; Tim McGirk and Aaron Klein, “Israel’s Debate Over an Iran Strike,”
Time, July 24, 2008; Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004),
pp. 382-386; Barry R. Posen, “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran,” New York Times, February 27, 2006.
T h e S a b a n C e n t e r a t T h e B r o o k i n g s I n s t i t u t i o n 6 3