National Security Adviser Susan Rice gave a relatively anodyne speech at AIPAC, except for two crucial points:

The first was her contention that if we insist on full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the U.S. diplomatic coalition negotiating with Iran would fall apart. That’s interesting, considering it was that very coalition that demanded Iran’s cessation of uranium enrichment in no less than six Security Council resolutions dating back to 2006. And remember, that coalition came together initially on the tacit (and perhaps, behind closed doors, explicit) agreement of the U.S. to take the military option off the table so long as further sanctions were in prospect. If you combine this with Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, to the effect that we have to accept Iran’s enrichment capabilities now because the Bush administration failed to stop Iran’s initial development of those capabilities, what the Obama administration is basically saying is that the diplomatic strategy that the U.S. and its partners embraced during the Bush administration has failed, and was always doomed to fail.

I could have told you that in 2006. Actually, I did tell you that in in 2006, in my first article for NR (August 28, 2006 issue) weeks after leaving my position in the Pentagon:

This approach has so far proven remarkably successful not only in isolating Iran from the rest of the international community, but also in isolating any support the Iranians may enjoy in the Council. Unfortunately, the strategy also eliminates what little deterrence there may be against Iran’s nuclear-weapons development. […]
So at the very least, the Security Council progression appears to erect a series of stable and predictable hurdles between us and the legitimate use of force. Therefore, Iran can predict that an attack will not be triggered by the next several steps it takes in developing the WMD. The effect is naturally to make a negotiated settlement in the near term highly unattractive from Iran’s point of view. As Kissinger taught, people who think they have time on their hands don’t negotiate. Iran’s bargaining position can only become stronger the further it proceeds.

That brings us to Rice’s second interesting point, namely that even a decade-long agreement on Iran’s nuclear program would be better than a military option, because the military option would only stop them for some period well short of that, and then they would go full bore for nuclear weapons. If you put this together with other administration statements, the basic position of the administration is that neither the diplomatic nor military option was ever going to stop Iran from gaining the large-scale enrichment indispensable to a nuclear-weapons capability. That is obviously wrong.

The “military option” that Rice is referring to — one that destroys Iran’s facilities and then lets them redevelop the program – is, in her defense, the only one that anyone ever talks about. What is never considered is whether some form of military pressure could ever convince the Iranians to abandon their program so that they don’t redevelop it. That question is merely one of imposing prohibitive costs on the regime, so that it is dissuaded both from continuing its program and from retaliating, and is instead induced to negotiate with the U.S. on terms favorable to us, namely the total verifiable dismantlement of their dual-use nuclear facilities. This military option was ready at hand in 2003 when Iran’s previously secret nuclear-weapons program was first discovered. It waned with every passing year after that, because the more Iran invested in the program, the higher the penalty we would have to impose to compel them to give it up. Hence, the military option would weaken as Iran’s bargaining position strengthened, which is why it was so foolish to leave the military option as a last resort “if diplomacy fails.” Force should have been in the diplomatic mix from the beginning, as was obvious from the beginning.

What makes Rice’s statement really interesting, however, is this: While you commonly hear the (incorrect) assessment that military strikes would not stop Iran’s nuclear program from talking heads and analysts at think tanks, you never hear it from an administration official, for the simple reason that it amounts to admitting that the administration has given up on the use of force, as a matter of policy. So basically, Rice just officially admitted that the military option is not on the table, because the administration doesn’t think it would work.

What a disaster.