Wargaming Iran.(on the right)(Column)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 9

IF you can do it, forget Fallujah for just a minute. Think Iran. A productive way to do this is to read James Fallows in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The title of the article is, "Will Iran Be Next?" The subtitle gives away the conclusions, and so will here be suppressed.

Not so the structure of Mr. Fallows's ingenious exploration of the challenge. We all know that "war games" are conducted at many levels. At the most rudimentary level, you and your companion can have agreed to basic rules: You will agree to act as Peerless Leader Kim Jong Il, your partner as president of the United States. Peerless Leader moves aggressively, you counter the move; the colloquy proceeds, and in the end--something happens, as in chess.

Imagine a war game in which there are seven actors, each one of them hugely experienced in government, whether as sometime head of the CIA, national security adviser, secretary of defense--and so on.

The meeting among these gentlemen has the objective of formulating a recommendation to the president on how to cope with the advances in Iran toward aggressive nuclear armament.

The question was asked: "Should Iran be likened to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, in whose possession nuclear weapons would pose an unacceptable threat, or to Pakistan, India, or even North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions the United States regrets but has decided to live with for now?" The immediate answer: The U.S. cannot "tolerate Iran's emergence as a nuclear power."

Here is another postulate in the war game. "At some point, relatively soon, Iran will have an arsenal that no outsiders can destroy, and America will not know in advance when that point has arrived."