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Gates: Strike on Iran would create backlash

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday that any sort of pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would create a disastrous backlash and that only tough economic sanctions will convince the country to abandon a nuclear weapons program, which it insists it is not pursuing but which administration officials say is well underway.

“The only way we can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is for the Iranians themselves to decide that it’s too costly,” Gates said during a Monday meeting with students at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Va., where he went to discuss his controversial 2010 budget proposal. “And that it absolutely detracts from their security rather than enhances it.”

Gates, who has previously advocated for sanctions, said a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, considered a good idea in some circles, would have lasting negative consequences.

“If we or the Israelis or somebody else strike Natanz” — the site of a uranium enrichment plant — “militarily, in my view, it would delay the Iranian program for some period of time, but only delay it, probably only one to three years,” Gates said. “You would unify the nation, you would cement their determination to have a nuclear program, and also build into the whole country an undying hatred of whoever hits them.”

During testimony on April 1 before Congress, Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, said that “the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take pre-emptive military action to derail or delay it.”

In 2005, Benjamin Netanyahu told an Israeli newspaper a pre-emptive strike on Iran is what “Israel has to do.” In a recent interview with the Atlantic Monthly, the prime minister, who is part of the hard-line Likud Party, stopped short of calling for such an attack but called a nuclear Iran an “existential threat” to Israel.

In March, President Barack Obama offered an olive branch to Iran with the “promise of a new beginning” in long-contentious U.S.-Iranian relations. In April, official representatives of the two nations briefly met in The Hague. The administration has offered Iran incentives such as membership in the World Trade Organization if Iran will drop the suspected weapons program.

The president needs the “full range of options,” Gates said. But, he said, as he has previously, “There is a way potentially for Iran to have a civilian nuclear power program without proceeding to highly enriched uranium and weaponization. And I think we need to look at every way we can to increase the cost of that program to them, whether it’s through economic sanctions or other things.”

Negotiating when the per-barrel cost of oil is lower would make achieving that objective easier, Gates said.

Gates said Iran does not like being isolated or under U.N. economic sanctions. And, he added, “I think there also needs to be more discussion of the fact that nuclear weapons could detract from Iran’s national security than contribute to it, particularly if it launches a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”