News

NEW YORK CITY — We are all screwed if Iran gets a nuke. And we may be just as screwed if the United States attacks Iran to keep Tehran from getting that nuke.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing a bit. But that’s the core of the message from America’s top military officer, who reiterated today his canyon-deep reservations about any military solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. Sure, U.S. strikes might set back Tehran’s atomic weapons program — for a while. But the “unintended consequences” of a hit on Iran’s nuclear facilities could easily outweigh the benefits of that delay, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told a forum at Columbia University.

“Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” Mullen said. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

At Columbia, Mullen also pushed back on a New York Times report that the Obama administration essentially had no strategy for dealing with Iran if Tehran got to the threshold of building a nuke – without quite going over.

“What the mainstream of that article talked about… is that we have no policy and that the implication is that we’re not working on it. I assure you, this is as complex a problem as there is in our country. And we have expended extraordinary amounts of time and effort to figure that out — to get that right,” Mullen said. “Thi... >>>