How to Deal with Iran

By William Luers, Thomas R. Pickering, Jim Walsh
New York Review of Books

Three of the most pressing national security issues facing the Obama administration—nuclear proliferation, the war in Iraq, and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan—have one element in common: Iran.[1] The Islamic Republic has made startling progress over the past few years in its nuclear program. Setting aside recent, misleading reports that Iran already has enough nuclear fuel to build a weapon, the reality is that Tehran now has five thousand centrifuges for enriching uranium and is steadily moving toward achieving the capability to build nuclear bombs.[2] Having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon is not the same thing as having one, and having a large stock of low-enriched uranium is not the same as having the highly enriched uranium necessary for a bomb. But the Obama administration cannot postpone dealing with the nuclear situation in Iran, as President Bush did.

Iran is closely implicated in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Iran's influence in Iraq is well known. As Michael Massing has reported in these pages:

The SIIC [Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council], the main government party, was founded in Iran and remains so close to Tehran that many Iraqis shun it for having a "Persian taint." Iran is erecting mosques and power plants in the Shiite south and investing heavily in construction and communications in the Kurdish north.[3]

But Iran also has critical interests in Afghanistan, its neighbor to the east, where it has long opposed the Taliban and is concerned to avoid the chaos that would result from the fall of the increasingly threatened Karzai government. The Iranian government places a high priority on defeating al-Qaeda and the Taliban—extremist Sunni groups which it views as direct threats to Iran's Shiites—as well as on reducing Afghanistan's rampant drug trade.

(More here.)