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Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran (PDF 1.2MB)

Analysis Paper Number 20
June 2009

Authors:
Kenneth M. Pollack
Daniel L. Byman
Martin Indyk
Suzanne Maloney
Michael E. O’Hanlon
Bruce Riedel
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The Question of a Provocation

As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.

For purposes of this analytic exercise, we assume that a U.S. invasion of Iran is not triggered by an overt, incontrovertible, and unforgivable act of aggression—something on the order of an Iranian-backed 9/11, in which the planes bore Iranian markings and Tehran boasted about its sponsorship.

First, this seems exceptionally unlikely given Iran’s history of avoiding such acts, at least since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Second, were that ever to happen, the circumstances of an invasion would become almost easy—the United States would suddenly have enormous domestic and (perhaps grudging) international support for undertaking an invasion. Indeed, the entire question of “options” would become irrelevant at that point: what American president could refrain from an invasion after the Iranians had just killed several thousand American civilians in an attack in the United States itself?