Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli security officials are “divided” over whether they need permission from the U.S. should Israel decide to attack Iran over its nuclear program. The Israelis fear that if new sanctions on Iran fail, “the Israeli and American positions on Iran could rapidly diverge — and Israel, if it chooses to attack Iran, would have no choice but to do so on its own.”

While top U.S. officials have been reluctant to focus on a military strike against Iran, let alone endorse an Israeli one, Fox News war hawk John Bolton said last night on the network’s business channel that the U.S should actually “be helping Israel if they’re making a decision that they might use military force against Iran.” However, on the O’Reilly Factor, another reliable Fox News armchair warrior Charles Krauthammer actually acknowledged that attacking Iran could prove pointless:

KRAUTHAMMER: Do we have enough intelligence? Do we know where their stuff is hidden? They have spoken about a second uranium enrichment place. Do they have others? And, also, how deeply buried and how hardened are the targets? Because unless we know if we have access with our equipment, our bombs, they may be ineffective. I think they have got to make assessment on the current intelligence which appears to us, at least on the outside, rather weak.

Watch the compilation:

Krauthammer is right. There is a strong possibility that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would be completely “ineffective” at eliminating its program, because, as the New York Times reported in January, “Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers” which has “shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock” and has “obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort.”

Moreover, bombing will most likely incentivize the Iranian leadership to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and accelerate its nuclear program toward weaponization. An attack would not only unify the country around the regime but also, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last year, “cement their determination to have a nuclear program, and also build into the whole country an undying hatred of whoever hits them.” “Even a military attack will only buy us time and send the program deeper and more covert,” Gates has said.

The usual venues are raising alarm about a newly released Department of Defense report on Iranian military power that states that Iran could probably develop and test an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S. by 2015 “with sufficient foreign assistance.” While this is certainly worth paying attention to, there’s a significant aspect of the report that pro-war elements seem intent on ignoring.

The report states on the first page that, “Since the revolution, Iran’s first priority has consistently remained the survival of the regime“:

Iran also seeks to become the strongest and most influential country in the Middle East and to influence world affairs. The theocratic leadership’s ideological goal is to be able to export its theocratic form of government, its version of Shia Islam, and stand up for the “oppressed” according to their religious interpretations of the law. In recent years, Iran’s ideological goals have taken a back seat to pragmatic considerations.

To ensure regime survival, Iran’s security strategy is based first on deterring an attack. [...]

Iran’s military strategy is designed to defend against external or “hard” threats from the United States and Israel. Iran’s principles of military strategy include deterrence, asymmetrical retaliation, and attrition warfare. Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.

This is in keeping with the conclusion of 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (pdf) that “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” How does all of this accord with claims by various conservative “experts” that Iran is controlled by irrational, suicidal mullahs who intend to use a nuclear weapon to destroy Israel/trigger the apocalypse/provoke the return of the Mahdi? Short answer: It doesn’t, and people who continue to make such claims should be vigorously mocked.

Remember that, after he was captured in 2003, Saddam Hussein told a U.S. interrogator that he had “allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction” in order to project strength and deter what he perceived as the most immediate threat against Iraq: Iran. Behavior that was intended primarily to preserve and defend his regime was interpreted by the U.S. and its allies — reasonably or not — as evidence of Saddam’s aggressive intent, and a pretext for hugely destructive and counterproductive preventive war.

This isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t be concerned with Iran’s actions, its ties to terrorist groups, or its nuclear program. Iran has proved to be far more skilled and effective than Saddam was at cultivating influence and creating strategic depth in the region. But hysterical nonsense about “messianic mullahs” only serves to obscure the real challenges posed to U.S. interests by Iran, and increases the likelihood of repeating past strategic blunders.

Yesterday, in a fawning Wall Street Journal profile of Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), it was further clarified that Kyl’s support for a New START treaty was contingent on absolutely massive budget increases to the nuclear weapons complex in order to “modernize” the existing nuclear arsenal. Kyl, as paraphrased by the Journal, deemed that there “were signs that the administration wouldn’t produce a modernization plan for the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal that he could accept” and he stated clearly:

I am not going to be a party to getting a treaty ratified if I’m not sure that there’s commitment on the other side to an adequate [nuclear spending] plan.

Kyl’s misrepresentation of reality is now getting some serious push back from George W. Bush’s very own nuclear security administrator. Linton Brooks, who ran the National Nuclear Security Administration from 2003-2007, directly contradicted Kyl, noting that he “would have killed” for Obama’s nuclear budget, which will, if implemented, amount to a 13 percent increase for nuclear weapons modernization.

Brooks as head of NNSA – the agency that deals with the nuclear labs and oversees the nuclear stockpiles – said at an event held by the Arms Control Association that:

you’ll hear concerns by some that the treaty may or may not be a good idea but you can’t possibly accept it because the U.S. nuclear weapons program is in disarray. And I think the administration’s answer to that is the fiscal 2011 budget with a very substantial increase for my former home, the National Nuclear Security Administration. And I will say flatly, I ran that place for five years and I’d have killed for that budget and that much high-level attention in the administration and I just – nobody in government ever said “my program has too much money” and I doubt that my successor is busy saying that. But he is very happy with his program and I think it does put us on a very firm, firm basis… I don’t think there’s any question this is in our interest and should be ratified.

Brooks’ comments expose Kyl’s transparent partisan motivations on two accounts. First, since funding levels were significantly lower during the Bush administration, Kyl’s new found demands for massive budgetary increases are a transparent effort to complicate or block ratification. One has to ask, why wasn’t Jon Kyl demanding massive budgetary increases under the Bush administration?

Additionally, if Kyl were really concerned about the nuclear infrastructure, instead of wastefully demanding absurd increases, he could be working to lobby members on the relevant committees in the House and Senate to, at the very least, fully fund the Administration’s budget request this year. But Kyl as of yet has chosen to demand a payoff and carp from the sidelines instead of rolling up his sleeves.