01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 28, 2006

PITTSBURGH

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO this month, eight Israeli F-16 fighter jets took off from a runway in the Sinai Desert. Their mission: Fly some 600 miles over hostile territory and drop 16 bombs on the Osiraq nuclear reactor, in Iraq.

In tactical terms, the Osiraq operation was successful; all the bombs hit, the dome of the Iraqi reactor was demolished, and the pilots flew home safely. June 7, 1981, was an auspicious debut for the Begin Doctrine (named after Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin), which holds that Israel will not tolerate acquisition of nuclear-weapons capability by its enemies, even in peacetime.

But a working group organized by the University of Pittsburgh's Ridgway Center for International Security Studies has produced research findings that cast the raid in a different light:

The Osiraq light water nuclear reactor was not capable of generating the weapons-grade plutonium needed for an atomic bomb. Destroying the Iraqi facility was a Pyrrhic tactical victory.

Absent bombing, ongoing surveillance of the nuclear reactor by the International Atomic Energy Agency and and France would probably have detected and countered efforts by Iraq to use the reactor for plutonium production.

The Israeli preventive attack ironically served to accelerate Iraq's nuclear-weapons program. Saddam Hussein responded to the destruction of Osiraq by rehabilitating an important nuclear scientist from prison, increasing more than 15-fold the number of research personnel, and moving the entire Iraqi nuclear program underground, where it proved more difficult to monitor and contain.

These findings are drawn from research conducted by Dan Reiter, a professor of political science at Emory University, who is a member of the Ridgway Center working group. For three years, we have directed the working group's research project, which will be published in a volume entitled Hitting First: Preventive Force in U.S. Security Strategy.

In today's debate over the wisdom of preventive attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, advocates of preventive war often cite the 1981 Israeli attack as an example of successful first-strike force. Professor Reiter's findings not only provide important context for judging these claims; they also cast doubt on the general proposition that preventive attacks deserve to be "on the table" of U.S. and Israeli policy options.

The track record of preventive force in neutralizing nuclear-, biological- and chemical-weapons programs is weak. Of the 24 preventive attacks on record, limited strikes have failed to eliminate unconventional weapons, while regime-change operations, such as the 2003 Iraq war, tend to entail massive unanticipated costs.

Further complicating the prospects for preventive military strikes against Iran is that the Iranian leaders have learned the lesson of Osiraq: the need to disperse and bury their nuclear assets, to render them less vulnerable to limited strikes by U.S. and Israeli standoff weapons.

Given these tactical complications, why might the Bush administration and Israel's Olmert administration still be seriously considering limited preventive war against Iran?

One possibility is faith in bombing to trigger regime change on the cheap. A Bush administration adviser told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that White House military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." Such optimism is reminiscent of 2002 predictions that liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.

More likely, U.S. and Israeli first-strike attacks would enable Iran's ruling clerics to consolidate political power and crush dissent by invoking popular memory of Operation TPAJAX, of 1953, in which U.S. and British secret agents conspired to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Support for this theory comes from unexpected quarters. Reza Pahlavi, whose father was installed as the shah of Iran after the 1953 U.S.-U.K. coup, said last March that a military strike against Iran "will rally nationalistic sentiments, which will work to the regime's advantage, and consequently give the theocracy a much longer lease on life."

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent overtures toward Iran offer encouraging signs that the Bush administration is committed to finding ways of resolving the current situation short of war. But on this topic, the White House rarely speaks with one voice. While Secretary Rice extends the olive branch, others, such as U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, renew military threats with the mantra "All options are on the table."

The 25th anniversary of the Osiraq attack offers an opportunity to reflect on the track record of preventive military force in countering unconventional-weapons programs. Before lining up behind the slogan "All options are on the table," perhaps we should be more selective in choosing the Iran-policy instruments to lay out in the first place. History suggests that as a tool for neutralizing suspected nuclear-weapons facilities, the preventive-war option is a non-starter.

Until hard-line politicians and pundits prove otherwise, oblique threats of a preventive attack on Iran have no place in public deliberation.

William W. Keller is director of the University of Pittsburgh's Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies; Gordon R. Mitchell is a University of Pittsburgh associate professor of communication and chairman of the Ridgway Working Group on Pre-emptive and Preventive Military Intervention. They wrote this for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.