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LETHAL AND ELUSIVE:
WHY IRAN’S WEAPONS AND TACTICS MAKE IT UNCONQUERABLE—EVEN WITHOUT NUKES

The United States cannot stop Iran’s rise short of an open-ended, thirty-year policy of containment or a full-scale war. Alliances, unenforceable sanctions, threats—none have worked so far, nor will they.

But even a war against Iran is not a real option. America can’t bomb Iran without starting a war in the Gulf. There aren’t enough soldiers to invade Iran, let alone hold it. And that’s not to mention that a war would break the bank, turning the United States into a country with a Third World economy.

In May 2008, there were rumors the United States was going to bomb Jerusalem Force training camps in Iran to end the Shia insurgency in Iraq. I asked the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence organization, Hamid Gul, what he thought about the rumors. Gul had spent much of his career trying to contain Iran, both in Pakistan, with its 20 percent Shia population, and in Afghanistan.

“You never slap the king; you kill him,” Gul told me.

“You mean the United States has to invade?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Gul replied. “But don’t forget: You can occupy Iran, but you cannot defeat it.”

We both knew that Iran’s military wasn’t the same one Iraq fought to a standstill in the eighties. Over the course of the Iran-Iraq War, and the eighteen-year conflict in Lebanon, Iran learned how to fight a modern guerrilla war. It learned how to defeat a conventional military, taking and holding ground in the name of a nationalistic cause. But more important, Lebanon was a tactical proving ground for Iran, a place where it learned to combine asymmetrical warfare with both advanced and primitive weapons.

The superiority the United States had in weapons, training, and tactics was effective in fighting a Soviet-trained and equipped army like Saddam’s. But that effectiveness is undercut when confronted by small, highly mobile units armed with rockets, car bombs, and advanced improvised explosive devices that can defeat tanks and evade air superiority. An American conflict with Iran would be met with these deadly tactics—the same tactics the Iranians used to beat the Israelis.

Over the last three decades in Lebanon, the Iranians constantly adapted, innovated, and tested new weapons and tactics. Advanced shaped charges, car bombs, precision-guided rockets, ambushes, swarming, decoys, and underground bunkers halted an Israeli advance into Lebanon in 2006. The sheer number of rockets Hezbollah fired into Israel in 2006 blanked out Israel’s defense radar network. And the same tactics lie in wait for the United States should it try to invade Iran. There’s a good argument that Iran’s modernization of guerrilla warfare is a military development as important as the introduction of the machine gun was to World War I, or the tank to World War II.

In April 2008, a Hezbollah official told me, “We studied the United States and Israel. We knew they could not sustain many losses, that the drip-drip of casualties would turn the people against the war and they would leave. And that’s what we will do for the next war.” The United States can send the Marines to Iran’s shores, even push on to Tehran, but what would it do after that? A truck bomb here and there, and America could be losing hundreds of soldiers a week. How long would Americans stand for that—three or four C-17s a week full of caskets coming back home?

Just as the Vietcong melted into the jungle, Iran’s fighters will melt into the population and into caves. And because they have perfected asymmetric guerrilla tactics in their wars in Iraq and Lebanon, they’d make American occupation a living hell. Iranian “resistance” would always be there, bogging us down forever. We could turn Tehran into a pile of rubble, but we never could really defeat Iran in the sense of controlling it.

In the bloody, eight-year Iran-Iraq War, only one side came away with a battle plan for how to win future such wars. And despite the fact that Iraq had the stronger army, its failure to learn the lessons of asymmetrical warfare would ultimately doom it.

The Iran-Iraq War began on September 22, 1980, with a full-scale Iraqi invasion of Iran. As Iraqi air force planes quickly breached Iran’s airspace, Saddam Hussein’s troops crossed the border lightly opposed. In the first days of the war it looked as if Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, not even two years old, would collapse.

Saddam had several motivations for invading Iran. But the event that finally provoked him to give the order was what he considered an attack on his regime, Da’wa’s assassination attempt on Tariq Aziz. Saddam was convinced that Iran was behind it, and that unless he did something about it, he would be next. He also dreamed of seizing Iranian oil, most of which was in ethnic Arab Khuzestan. Khuzestan’s Arabs, he thought, wouldn’t be able to resist the call of Arab nationalism. Finally, he intended to occupy the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, arguably the most strategic delta in the world.

Iraqi troops quickly captured the Iranian port city of Khorramshahr, but the Iranians stopped them just short of taking Abadan, Iran’s oil-processing center just 10 kilometers away. And despite Saddam’s hopes, the Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan stayed loyal to Tehran. By December 1980, two months after the invasion, Saddam’s offensive was halted, and by 1981, Iraqi troops were already falling back. In 1982, the Iranians recaptured Khorramshahr.

Saddam tried to sue for peace, but Ayatollah Khomeini thought the Iranians could not only repel the Iraqis but also capture Baghdad, so he ordered the Iranian army to take the offensive. It made only small advances. No one in the Iranian military could convince Khomeini of the futility of the war; he believed that Iraqi Shia, the bulk of Saddam’s army, would not fight—that given the chance, they would side with Shia Iran and not a Sunni Arab regime. At the bottom of it all, though, Khomeini believed God was on Iran’s side, and that Iran would be graced with certain victory if it just kept fighting.

The blood flowed. Iran fell back on World War I trench warfare tactics, throwing waves of infantry against fixed Iraqi positions. Hundreds and thousands of young Iranian men, many without guns, died for no other purpose than to affirm the mullahs’ faith. Iranians answered the call to martyrdom, but rather than fulfilling Khomeini’s dream of getting rid of Saddam, their sacrifices turned into pointless death.

Eight years later, after a generation of Iranians had died, Khomeini finally understood that Iran could not win a conventional war against Iraq. The casualties, between one and two million, were staggering. But Iran did come away with a lesson: It could never again fight a war like that one. The next war—and Iran was certain there would be more—would be different.

In the Iran-Iraq War, Iran recognized that it won more engagements through unconventional tactics and asymmetrical warfare than it did through mass, frontal assaults. But more important, the Lebanon War, waged in the same time frame, had emerged as a paradigm. By 1988, the war in Lebanon was in its sixth year, and Iran couldn’t miss the fact that the Islamic resistance there, just a couple of thousand guerrillas, had taken relatively more ground than the Iranian army had in the entire Iran-Iraq War. Iran’s Lebanese proxies were on to something.

The first thing the Iranians learned from the Lebanon War was that small is better. Large formations in an open terrain are easily detectable from air, either by the Israeli F-16s that made twice-daily passes over Lebanon, by satellites, or by drones with cameras. But Islamic resistance fighters moving in groups of two or three were indistinguishable from farmers. They of course never wore uniforms, so they moved easily among the civilian population. Israeli aerial reconnaissance was virtually worthless.

This lesson was reaffirmed in the 1990–91 Gulf War. Allied precision munitions obliterated Iraq’s conventional army in a matter of days. Western technology advances now made troops in the open fatally vulnerable. Again in 2003, Iran could see for itself that even the thickest armor is vulnerable. Immediately after the war’s end, Revolutionary Guards were in Baghdad inspecting the damage caused by American armor-piercing Hellfire missiles that destroyed Saddam’s T-72 tanks. The lesson: If a piece of equipment is in the open at the start of a war, you might as well consider it lost.

Iran adapted the same technology to build its own advanced anti-tank weapons. Modern antitank missiles borrow their design from shaped charges, which are explosives molded in a way that concentrates the energy of the blast on the smallest point possible, causing a tank’s armor to “spall,” or melt, showering the inside of a crew cab. Iran now has an advanced shaped charge that can penetrate armor steel to the depth of ten times the diameter of the round. So tanks have been forced to add layers of armor, and even explosives or sand to the outside of the armor, to dissipate the shaped charge’s impact. But this in turn weighs down the tanks, making them less maneuverable. And even with the extra armor, an antitank round still can penetrate a tank’s armor at its vulnerable points.

The second thing Iran learned in Lebanon was that Israel can be beaten in a war of attrition. In a full-fledged war, the Arabs might lose ten million men to one million for the Israelis. But can the Israelis afford that? Like the drip-drip of casualties described by the Hezbollah official, this slow attrition, and the associated cost and emotional expense, isn’t something the Israelis can accept forever.

Iran also realized that increasing the size of its army wouldn’t necessarily give it an advantage. Currently Iran has 325,000 men in uniform; 125,000 Revolutionary Guard troops, which are now more or less integrated into the army; and a million reservists. Iran’s army outnumbers any Arab army in the Gulf. But at the same time, Iran understands it’s no match, in conventional terms, for two or three U.S. carrier groups in the Gulf and U.S. strategic bombers, cruise missiles, and tactical nuclear warheads. And Iran also doesn’t spend much money on its army. In 2006, Iran spent 2.5 percent of its GDP on the military—a fraction of the 10 percent Saudi Arabia spends.

Recognizing these inequities, Iran spent the nineties quietly buying advanced weapons from Russia and China—weapons that would level the playing field but not bankrupt Iran. Every time there was an arms show anywhere in the world, Iranian officers from both the army and the Revolutionary Guards would show up to inspect the latest Russian and Chinese arms. The Iranians never bought anything openly, but instead turned to trusted intermediaries in Russia and Eastern Europe to do the purchasing for them. They wanted to avoid a splash in the press, and they often got better deals that way. Still, Iran couldn’t always hide its hand.

For the last ten years the Iranians have had their sights on the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system, which would give Iran an enormous advantage in controlling the Gulf’s airspace. It would prevent a surprise Israeli attack by air, and would make it considerably more costly for the United States to go to war with Iran. The terms of the deal are already set, and now the Russians are just waiting for the right time to let it go through, when Washington is distracted by some unrelated crisis.

In the meantime, the Iranians bought all the weapons they needed to wage an asymmetrical war. In one deal the United States failed to stop, Iran bought highly advanced HMX explosives from Pakistan. In another, it bought a different sophisticated explosive, RDX. Both were ingredients for Iran’s rocket production. Some of Iran’s most sophisticated new equipment came from rogue states like North Korea. One item Iran bought from that country in large quantities was crystalline graphite, used in rocket nozzles. The sale was made quietly so neither the United States nor Israel could stop it.

For many purchases, Iran used false end-user certificates. In one deal, it bought advanced MiG-29 jets from the former Soviet republic of Moldova, handing over end-user certificates that stated the air-planes were going to the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. In return for its help, Moldova got $250–$300 million in Iranian light crude. And the Iranians also secretly bought laser-guided missiles from corrupt Russian officials. Wherever there were cheap, sophisticated weapons for sale, the Iranians were there, ready with money.

Many of the advanced airplane parts the Iranians bought went through Swiss firms—entities that were nothing more than shelf companies, each set up for that particular transaction, often with false Russian destinations provided in the paperwork. One Turkish company took Iranian oil in exchange for Iran’s purchase of equipment for a Russian-manufactured reactor. China, of course, was more than willing to sell its advanced weapons to Iran for oil and oil concessions. In the mid-nineties it started selling C-801b cruise missiles to Iran—the prototype for the missile that knocked out an Israeli frigate during the 34-day war of 2006.

In another quiet deal, Russia sold Iran 500 T-72 battle tanks—25 percent newly produced T-72s, and the remainder T-72M1 tanks, refurbished according to Iran’s specifications. Iran paid $1 million each for the new T-72s, and $315,000 for the refurbished tanks. The high-explosive heat-seeking missiles for the tanks went for $650 a round. Iran couldn’t buy enough SA-16 and SA-18 shoulder-fired missiles, missiles it was prepared to hand out to not only its regular troops but its proxies as well. At $40,000–$60,000 per missile, they were wonderful bargains. Had Iran bought similar equipment from a Western country, it would have paid ten to twenty times these amounts.

Everything from Russia came at fire-sale prices. Through the 1990s, the Russian army was broken and its soldiers starving—and Iran had money. There were few consequences for Moscow in making these deals. Arms were bought and shipped sub rosa, from fictional companies with untraceable post office boxes. They were exported from Russia as “civil aviation” equipment. There was nothing the United States could or would do about it; embargoes don’t work, especially when the seller is an ally on the brink of collapse.

And the flow of advanced weapons to Iran continues today.

On January 6, 2008, five small boats from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards challenged a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy in the Strait of Hormuz. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The United States owned the Gulf, not Iran.

The fast boats raced toward the ships, clearly challenging the Americans. Though Iran’s boats were a fraction of the size of the American ships, those on board remembered the devastating October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which proved that all it takes is one small craft with a bomb to cripple one of the most advanced ships in the U.S. fleet.

This was a mock attack, a not-so-subtle message that Iran hadn’t accepted American suzerainty in the Gulf. But more ominously, it was another warning that the United States didn’t enjoy the military superiority it thought it did.

President Bush was on his way to the Gulf; the timing of the incident wasn’t a coincidence. For a start, the Iranians were warning the Gulf Arabs not to join an American coalition against Iran, which was clearly what was on Bush’s mind. In October 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had traveled to the Middle East in an attempt to rally “emerging moderate forces” against “the Iranian threat.” This was the only thing the Bush administration could think to do in response to Iran’s solidifying its control over Iraq.

Iran’s choice of Hormuz for the confrontation also wasn’t a coincidence. The Iranians wanted to remind Bush of the stakes of any confrontation. The only real egress for Gulf oil, Hormuz is the world’s oil spigot. If Iran turns it off, America goes into a depression.

The small-boats incident didn’t come out of nowhere. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the destruction of its army, there’s been increasing euphoria in Tehran that the military balance in the Gulf is finally tipping in Iran’s direction. Iran’s asymmetrical warfare in Lebanon, which was now about to be applied in Iraq, was finally paying off in larger strategic terms. Iran had made an enormous blunder in the eighties, taking on Iraq head-on. But since then, the Iranians had figured out how to win Iraq—and just maybe the rest of the Gulf as well.

Soon the clock would be turned back to 1763, the year the first British warship passed into the Persian Gulf and Iran formally lost control of it. This was when it just became the Gulf, rather than the Persian Gulf, and the Arabs became subjects of the Crown of England. In the eighteenth century, the Iranian Dynasty was weak because it couldn’t fight a modern navy—the British boats could have sunk the Iranian fleet in a day. And today, while the Iranians have no illusions that their navy can sink an American carrier group, they know they can do enough damage to stop the United States from attacking. The tide is turning.

Iran is calculating that the United States will get tired of Iraq, pull out, and let fall the first domino in a Persian reconquest of the Gulf. In December 2007, when Iranian President Ahmadinejad crowed that the National Intelligence Estimate—the document that confirmed Iran had stopped building a nuclear bomb—was a “declaration of surrender,” he had the Gulf in mind. The United States couldn’t beat Iran in the Gulf and it couldn’t stay there forever—and when it left, Iran would fill the void. This is precisely what the Revolutionary Guards have in mind.

The Iranians understand perfectly that the only reason we care about that miserable body of water called the Persian Gulf is that 55 percent of the world’s reserves lie beneath its shores and 17 million barrels of crude oil pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz. Given Iranian military dominance in the Gulf, Iran would be delighted to use oil for political dominance as well. So it definitely was no accident that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chose Hormuz to put down a marker, ruin Bush’s visit to the Gulf, and remind everyone that worse would come if they weren’t careful.

But it wasn’t the politics the U.S. Navy was thinking about when the fast boats challenged its ships on January 6. It was the Iranians’ military tactics.

According to the New York Times, during a classified simulated war game in 2002, the Iranians were able to sink sixteen U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf. Surface-to-sea missiles, the element of surprise, and the tactics in which small, fast, agile boats swarmed the ships were able to defeat the Navy’s sophisticated defensive weapons. The Iranian tactics of approaching at high speeds, from multiple directions, left the bigger ships highly vulnerable.

“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said a retired Marine officer who participated in the war games. “The whole thing was over in maybe 10 minutes.” The American military command was forced to admit that these new Iranian tactics, as simple as they seemed, could seriously challenge our dominance of the Gulf.

“It’s clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mike Mullen said after the January 2008 encounter. “For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we’ve been very focused on that.”

Another officer who participated in the 2002 war game said the idea of a “swarming attack” was taken from nature, where insects and small animals—from ants to wolves—can overwhelm a much larger animal using speed and simultaneous attacks. The banding together of many small fighters to defeat a powerful, looming threat—it’s a perfect metaphor for the Islamic fight against the Western superpower.

Iran’s naval “swarming tactics” follow a trend of using relatively unsophisticated weapons to cause heavy damage. The 9/11 hijackers used ordinary box cutters and civilian airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and attack the Pentagon. The USS Cole was attacked by a small launch. In each case, less was more: simple weaponry was used to inflict massive damage of the sort usually caused by bombers or heavy artillery.

Innovative tactics like these are virtually impossible to defend against, showing once again that while the United States could “conquer” Iran by bombing it into submission, it will never be able to hold Iran.

There are other such tactics:

Evading overhead surveillance and aerial bombardment. The Iranians know about our satellites and have buried their rockets, surface-to-air missiles, and even tanks underground and in caves, planning to pull them out minutes before an engagement. During the 2006 Lebanon War, the Israelis were constantly surprised when rockets were fired from areas they had thought were clear of Hezbollah forces. Iranian Silkworm missiles are buried all along Iran’s shore on the Gulf, ready to be unearthed and fired at tankers or oil facilities to close Gulf shipping routes, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Secure communications. In early 1979, when Iran’s new revolutionary government broke into the Shah’s intercept sites along the Caspian Sea, they were amazed to discover how many Soviet communication channels the Shah’s secret service had been listening in to. It was a lesson the Iranians never forgot.

In the eighties, the Revolutionary Guards took their communications off the air, both on the Iraq front and in Lebanon. When they did talk on the telephone or walkie-talkies, they coded their conversations, making them indecipherable to anyone listening in. They also never discussed their plans in the open, either on the phone or in large meetings. Everything important was discussed face-to-face or conveyed orally or by hand-carried messages.

In the 2006 war, Hezbollah used sophisticated computer codes and electronic drop sites, defeating Israel’s most advanced intercept systems. And today, Hezbollah uses fiber optic cable technology for telephone communications, which can’t be intercepted by Israel or the United States. If Iran ever decided to attack the Gulf’s oil facilities or the United States in Iraq, we wouldn’t know about it until the first shot was fired.

Secrecy. After Imad Mughniyah was assassinated, his family told the press that they’d had no idea he was a senior commander in Hezbollah’s military wing. This level of secrecy has made it nearly impossible to place spies inside Hezbollah. To this day, the United States doesn’t know who Hezbollah’s senior field commanders are.

Hiding in plain sight. Iran learned to disperse its fighting forces throughout the civilian population. Hezbollah, the all-volunteer Basij military force, and the Jerusalem Force are scattered throughout built-up urban areas, rendering our weapons virtually useless unless we’re prepared to inflict massive civilian casualties. Hezbollah picked up wide popular sympathy across the Middle East when Israel bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing civilians. If America was forced to do the same, any chance of spreading a pro-democracy, pro-freedom, populist message would be lost.

Car and truck bombs. Iran turned the car into a weapon as effective as heavy artillery or airpower. There’s not a tank in existence today that can’t be destroyed by a truck bomb. The immediate consequence is that Iranians can stop a conventional army from securing cities or any built-up area with heavy traffic. A couple of years ago, Hezbollah escorted me through its “battlefields”—a tour of charred car hulks and pieces of tanks and armored personnel carriers, all destroyed by car bombs. Even traditional ambushes were initiated by a car bomb to block off the front, followed by an attack at the rear, which boxed the Israelis in. In Baghdad today, the same tactics learned in Lebanon have forced U.S. troops behind blast walls and into heavier and heavier armor, isolating them from the population. Just as the Crusaders were isolated in their castles.

Code-cracking. Hezbollah and Iran learned how to crack Israeli communication codes, perhaps the first time an enemy has been able to do this since Israel’s founding in 1948. “We were able to monitor Israeli communications,” a Hezbollah official has been quoted as saying, “and we used this information to adjust our planning.” It is still not known how Hezbollah was able to make advancements in this normally esoteric side of warfare.

Explosives. The Iranians are ingenious in their ability to disguise and ship explosives around the world. In one incident, a shipment of olives destined for the United States was discovered to have C-4 plastic explosives inside, shaped and painted like olives and sealed in cans.

In another incident in November 1989, Spanish police seized the Cedar, a commercial cargo ship that was carrying nearly a half-ton of C-4 plastic explosives surreptitiously smuggled on board by Hezbollah operatives. Sealed in 193 tin cans along with 258 20-millisecond-delay electronic detonators, the explosives were of French origin and were probably headed for Western Europe, to be either sold or used for future attacks. It is suspected there were another dozen shipments like it, some undoubtedly headed for the United States.

Although Iran has moved away from terrorism, its explosive caches and skills still make it potentially one of the most dangerous terrorist states in the world. This is a capability Iran would not hesitate to unleash if faced with a major war. There are thousands of Hezbollah cadres around the world, many with European passports, ready to carry out acts of terror on Iran’s orders.

Shaped and platter charges. Curiously, it was probably the United States who first convinced Iran of the effectiveness of platter charges. In the early eighties, we taught the Afghan mujahideen to pack their small iron stoves with explosives, with the stove lids acting as projectiles to penetrate light Soviet armor. The Iranians advanced the technology, shaping and milling the projectiles for a vastly more lethal effect. The U.S. military has seen the results of this advancement in both Lebanon and, today, in Iraq. Platter charges, or “explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs), have reportedly put holes in our heavy armor, including Abrams tanks. This was a remarkable battlefield shift; the Abrams tanks were supposed to meet American military needs for decades.

Shaped charges can be concealed in the doors of cars or in the sides of buildings, or simply buried in the road. There is no certain defense against them. If the Iranians were to introduce EFPs in great numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, our troops would have to retreat to fortified areas and never leave—castles we’d have to resupply by air.

Electronics. When I was in Beirut in the eighties, the United States came across an Iranian explosive “firing train” that showed a sophistication we hadn’t suspected the Iranians had.

“It’s pretty goddamned amazing,” the tech who looked at it told me. “A 567 tone detector . . . in an integrated circuit board that activates a 555 timer IC—only precisely when the relay was open for seven seconds.” Don’t ask. But the point was that at times Iranian technical skills were as advanced as any.

And Iran’s technical sophistication was found in more than just its terrorist devices. Hezbollah learned to thwart Israeli counter-measures such as radio jamming, securing its own communications. Among other things it switched to detonating bombs by light-emitting diodes that are virtually impossible to protect against. With Iran’s advancing technology and tactics, the nature of warfare in the Middle East will never be the same.

Iran’s transformation to an elite asymmetric war machine certainly got Israel’s attention. As the Winograd Commission Report, the official Israeli investigation into the 34-day war of 2006, put it, “A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technological advantages.”

And Iran and Hezbollah are only getting better.

Deterrence credibility. Iran has convinced its enemies that attacking it comes at too high a price. As the rhetoric picked up with the United States in 2007, Iran sent emissaries to all the Gulf states with one simple message: If the United States attacks us, we will destroy your oil facilities.

The Gulf Arabs closely watched the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006. They saw how Israel was unable to protect its cities, how forty-three Israeli civilians were killed, forcing Israel to retreat from Lebanon without achieving any of its stated objectives. What could Iran do to the Arabs, whose military isn’t even a shadow of Israel’s?

What’s particularly odd about Iran’s advancement in conventional military tactics is that the West has largely ignored it, choosing instead to focus almost obsessively on whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons. It’s more evidence that we are miscalculating the nature of the Iranian threat.

Right now, at least, the Iranians don’t need a nuclear bomb. If a war is to be fought in the Gulf, Iraq, or Lebanon, Iran will almost certainly fall back on its asymmetrical tactics and weapons. There are also innumerable drawbacks to rushing the development of a nuclear weapon in today’s global atmosphere—and few benefits.

One reason we’re obsessed with the idea of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons is that we’re once again fighting the last war rather than this one. We remember it was Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons that stopped Iran from taking Basra. We’re worried that the Syrians intend to put chemical warheads on their Scud missiles and fire them at Tel Aviv. We’re blinded by the worst-case scenario, which happens not to be Tehran’s preferred scenario.

That’s not to say Iran has lost complete interest in a nuke. As early as 1989, a year after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran started buying electromagnetic isotope separators from China, installing them in Karaj, a city just west of Tehran. The Chinese Precision Machining Import/Export Company sold Iran a three-axis turntable, which could be converted for grinding explosive lenses for a nuclear triggering device. Iran also bought bomb technology from the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan. These were all signs that Iran planned to secretly build a bomb. The question was: Why?

First, Iran wanted to counter Pakistan’s bomb—the “Sunni” bomb, as it was called—and they also believed Saddam Hussein was building one. Second, Iran wanted to be taken seriously as a major power, in the same way it wanted to control Hormuz and the world’s oil.

But at the same time, the Iranians see a nuclear bomb as nice to have but not crucial to their survival. The Iranians are too smart to risk the gains they’ve made in Iraq and Lebanon by forcing the issue. The National Intelligence Estimate reflected this calculation, offering the estimate that Iran had only suspended its nuclear bomb building, rather than stopping it permanently. The neocons and Bush administration officials challenged the estimate—but to anyone who’d really been paying attention to Iran’s actions in the last six or seven years, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all.

Iran may not yet have nukes, but it has three things that are vastly more important: highly developed asymmetrical fighting skills and weapons; a growing army of hungry, disaffected, street-smart fighters; and an invincible anticolonial message. With that, Iran has set the stage for its push toward empire—a push they’ve already begun. The next target: Turkey.