Krauthammer thinks the nature of Iran and their objectives means that deterrence probably can't be applied to their way of calculating gain versus pain:
This doesn’t mean that the mullahs will necessarily risk terrible carnage to their country in order to destroy Israel irrevocably. But it does mean that the blithe assurance to the contrary — because the Soviets never struck first — is nonsense. The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war.
Scoblete has long disagreed, and denies Krauthammer's take:
Krauthammer argues that because the Iranian regime has underwritten suicide terrorist attacks by its proxies, that it would therefore commit national suicide by launching a nuclear weapon at Israel. That's a gigantic leap. Iran has never used its chemical or biological weapons against anyone. Yet we are supposed to believe that they will, out of the blue, launch a nuclear weapon at someone. Why? This is a state that employs terrorism precisely because it is weak conventionally and doesn't want to risk direct confrontations. That's evidence of ruthless cunning, not suicidal fanaticism.
Let me say up front that while I have respect for some who believe Iran is rational and can be deterred, Scoblete isn't one of them.
First, it isn't as comforting as Scoblete apparently thinks that Iran might "just" be ruthlessly cunning. Such an Iran with the shield of nuclear weapons should be unacceptable even if Iran never uses nuclear weapons.
But what of the idea that Iran uses terrorism only because it is weak and doesn't want to risk direct confrontations? Isn't it kind of significant that Iran is weak and nukeless yet hates Israel so much that it engages in terrorism against a nuclear-armed state with conventional capabilities far superior to Iran's?
Might not an Iran with a nuclear shield be able to weaken sanctions from fear of what Iran can do with terrorism and the shield of nukes? Might not the state of Iran's arsenal be the limiting factor on what Iran does rather than from some rationality that says terrorism is the ideal weapon?
And again, isn't that latter thinking something to prevent rather than something to comfort us?
Let's also not neglect the likelihood that Iran's passing of the nuclear threshold will lead others in the Middle East to go nuclear, too. How's that rationality factor going to hold when Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt all have nuclear weapons with short flight times? If your pucker factor isn't redlining at that thought alone, I'm not sure what will scare you.
But before we get that far, If Iran has more capabilities to attack Israel, I think the Iranians will try to use them. Mere terrorism is just what they do while they can do no more. Before the Iran-Iraq War, Iran used terrorism and subversion as their primary means of fighting Saddam rather than face Iraq's Soviet-supplied military. Yet once Iran demonstrated that its military could face Iraq's military by expelling the Iraqis from Iranian soil in 1982, the Iranians eagerly used their conventional military to try and march on Baghdad to destroy Saddam's regime.
Remember too, during the Iran-Iraq War, Iran justified continuing the war with offensives against Iraq as Iran's attempt to go through Iraq to get at the real enemy--Israel. When Saddam said that Iran was diverting the Moslem world from dealing with Israel (then fighting in Lebanon) the Ayatollah Khomeini denied that, saying ""We shall get to Lebanon, and to Jerusalem, through Iraq." (from an old unpublished manuscript of mine on the Iran-Iraq War)
Iran was not deterred by Iraq's possession (and repeated use) of chemical weapons. Deterrence isn't just about halting the other side from using nuclear weapons. A major component of deterrence was the prevention of conventional attack. Indeed, nuclear deterrence is more about Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)--promising the destruction of the enemy if they destroy us.
Since a Soviet attack on the continental United States was just a murder-suicide pact because of MAD, deterrence in a practical sense was about halting conventional attacks with the threat of escalation to nuclear warfare. That's the deterrence that kept the Red Army from rolling west during the Cold War. That's why we never made the "no first use" pledge regardng nuclear weapons, and why that refusal was a piece of Moscow's propaganda war on us. Russia would have been fine with deterrence that only meant no nuclear war took place and that Russia could use their early Cold War conventional superiority to win a conventional war in Western Europe. Let's not redefine deterrence in order to apply it to Iran today as if it only means preventing the use of nuclear weapons.
Further, how confident is Scoblete that he knows who will have the power to decide whether to use nukes or not? Even if most Iranians are very Persian in their rationality, what if the use of nukes is determined by who is the most ruthlessly pan-Islamist?
Is Scoblete confident that all Iranians who might get their finger on the trigger are rational?
Finally, to expand on an earlier point, Scoblete is really saying that Iran won't risk nuclear war because of theories of mutual assured destruction and not deterrence.
But is a nuclear war between a "one-bomb" state like Israel and the large Iran a scenario where MAD can stay Iran's hand? Is there really a threat of "mutual" destruction?
I tried to calculate whether Iran would believe that the gain of nuclear strike on Israel would outweigh the pain of an Israeli counter-strike, using the Iran-Iraq War as an example.
Given the casualties Iran was willing to endure to kill Iraqis just to get at the Israelis, I have little confidence that we have any idea of what might deter Iranians from using nukes against Israel. Thinking we can understand Iran's motives is the true madness of our age.
