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Professor and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald debate the resolution, "The U.S. should strike Iran's nuclear facilities." Taking the affirmative is Dershowitz, an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. He is the author of several books about politics and the law, including The Case for Israel and The Case for Peace. His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump, and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo. In January 2020, he joined President Donald Trump's legal team as Trump was being tried on impeachment charges in the Senate. He is a strong supporter of Israel but self-identifies as both "pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli." Taking the negative is Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer, investigative journalist, and best-selling author. Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America's top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald has won the highest awards in journalism, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the revelations surrounding the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden. This debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein. Timestamps:00:00:00 Introduction00:02:06 Dershowitz's Opening Statement00:19:43 Greenwald's Opening Statement00:37:48 Dershowitz's Rebuttal00:45:27 Greenwald's Rebuttal00:53:56 Q&A01:35:08 Dershowitz's Summation01:40:22 Greenwald's Summation Abbreviated Transcript: Moderator: Now that we've got everyone voting, we can call our debaters to the stage. The United States should strike Iran's nuclear facilities speaking for the affirmative Alan Dershowitz. Alan, please come to the stage. Speaking for the negative, Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, please come to the stage. All right guys, as you know, the timekeeper is in front. We'll be flashing five minute, two minute, and one-minute and 30 seconds cards. Professor Dershowitz prefers to use the 85-year-old prerogative and do it from his chair. Alan, you have 17 and a half minutes to make your case. Please take it away, Alan. Alan Dershowitz: Thank you so much. What a wonderful event. At a time when, as the moderator said, there are too few debates, too many bumper stickers, too many people cheering for one side or the other, having a great debate about a really difficult subject is so important. Parts of me wishes this was not a debate, wishes it was a discussion because there are arguments on both sides of this. Very, very compelling arguments on both sides of this. It's a very, very difficult question anytime a decision is made to take preventive military action that involves cataclysmic consequences and considerations. I want to go over why I think the argument here favors taking such preventive military action, though I understand the consequences. We know, we know the risks of taking preventive military action when it shouldn't have been taken. We can call those false positives. You can call them by whatever word you want to call them, but we know that that happened in Iraq when we went in thinking or believing or proclaiming or claiming that there were nuclear facilities only to find out that there wasn't with very tragic events for so many people, civilians and military. A lot has been written about false positives. A lot has been written about false decisions, poor decisions, to take military intervention in a preventive way, but not enough has been written about or considered about the risks of not taking preventive action when preventive action is necessary and would save lives and would do a great deal of good in the world. History provides lots of examples of failures to act when action might have prevented catastrophic harms. And I'm going to argue that this is one such situation. Perhaps the most telling example of the failure to act was the failure of Great Britain and France to enforce the Versailles Treaty by taking preventive military action to stop the military buildup of Germany following the first World War. A military attack on Germany in 1935 or '36 when its war machine was still weak, might have prevented the second World War with its tens of millions of deaths. Joseph Goebbels, who was the obviously propaganda minister of the Nazi regime, wrote about this in his diaries. I hope you'll pay very close attention to this one paragraph because it's so critical. Here's what he said: "In 1933, a French premier ought to have said, and if I had been the French premier, I would've said," this is Goebbels talking. "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. The man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march. But they didn't do it. They let us slip through the risky zone and we were able to sail around the dangerous reefs. And when we were done and well armed better than they." He then says they started the war. Of course, Germany started the war, but the point is still the same. The rest we know is tragic history. Germany built up its armed forces without countermeasures by its intended enemies and conquered most of Western Europe, killing tens of millions of people. Most of these deaths could almost certainly have been prevented had Great Britain and France engaged in preventive military action before Germany became well armed. But at that moment in history when Great Britain and France could have prevented the horrendous harm known ultimately caused by Nazi Germany, there was no way of knowing in advance predicting the extent of what [Adolf] Hitler will do. History is blind to the future. History only knows the past. Yes, he wrote Mein Kampf, but many conquerors, would-be conquerors, do not follow through on their threats. Recall [Nikita] Khrushchev's threat to bury the United States, yet he backed away from a nuclear confrontation over Cuba. There was no way of predicting with any degree of certainty that Hitler would personally turn his belligerent rhetoric into military invasions of Poland, the Soviet Union, and then obviously the Holocaust. As always, it was a question of cost-benefit probabilities. This was a classic case of a false negative, implicitly predicting that Hitler would not do what he in fact did and failing to take actions in order to prevent it. If France and Great Britain had accurately predicted the actual harms, they would almost certainly have taken preventive action even if the costs were high because it would never have been nearly as high as it turned out to be in the absence of such action. But as I say, history is blind. Had Great Britain and France decided to take preventive military actions in the mid-1930s and done so successfully, no one would ever know what was prevented. And [Winston] Churchill, if he had been the prime minister in the middle '30s, and he would've predicted that Hitler would kill tens of millions of people unless he was stopped, he would've been attacked by the international community, by the world. He would've been disbelieved, even mocked as [British Prime Minister] Clement Attlee was mocked for taking military action against Egypt in 1956. Had Great Britain and France engaged in preventive military action that resulted in say, the deaths of 10,000 Germans and 5,000 British and French soldiers and civilians, the leaders who undertook such a military adventure would've been condemned as war criminals because no one would ever know how many deaths they prevented by the sacrifice of those 15,000 lives. Ignorance of the hypothetical future is often the reason for failure to act in the present. Had Great Britain and France acted, everyone would know about the 15,000 deaths that their actions caused, while no one would know about the tens of millions of lives their actions saved. We now talk about the tens of millions of deaths these leaders indirectly caused or at least made possible by not taking preventive military action, but we don't accuse them of actually causing these deaths because inaction that directly led to death is not generally blamed as much as actions that visibly produce a body count. That is the dilemma of invisible false positives in failing to take military action. A preventive attack would not have been cost free. And it was not undertaken because the British and the French did not accurately predict and assess the cost of not acting. The result was catastrophic and preventable. I believe we're at that moment now. If the United States, with or without the support of Israel, or Israel with the support of the United States were to take preventive military action to destroy Iran's capability of creating a nuclear arsenal, deaths would result. People would be killed. When Israel attacked the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in the early 1980s, there were a few deaths, not very many, a few, and we are not sure what it could have prevented. We don't know what Saddam Hussein would've done had he had nuclear weapons. Again, this is clearly in the area of probabilities. I believe, and I think many military analysts believe, that Iran would keep its promise. Remember the former president of Iran, [Akbar] Rafsanjani, who was more liberal than the man who died this morning and more willing to consider making peace, stated back a few years ago that if Iran were to develop a nuclear arsenal and bomb Israel, it would be the end of Israel because Israel is a one-bomb state. All that is needed is for one bomb, one nuclear bomb to land in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and that would be the end of Israel. And he said, and he was wrong about this and I'll explain why in a minute, that Israel would retaliate and perhaps kill 10 million Muslims by bombing Tehran. But Rafsanjani said the trade-off would be worth it because it would mean the end of the Jewish state and Islam would still survive. Can a nation that makes those kinds of claims and predictions be allowed to become nuclear armed? I believe not. And I believe that preventive action must be taken. Let me make another argument that will be very unpopular here tonight, but I'm going to make it. When Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak, [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin was asked to explain why…and he said, "The reason is simple. Because Israel cannot ever take deterrent action after the fact." What did he mean? What he said was that if Iraq were to bomb Israel, Israel would not retaliate by bombing Baghdad. And he said, "Why?" He said, "Because Israeli pilots would refuse to drop nuclear bombs on a civilian area like Baghdad." And he said, "Therefore, Israel does not have the deterrent threat that other countries have. The United States dropped two nuclear bombs obviously. Israel would not. And therefore Israel," he said, "had to use preventive action." He wanted that to become a precedent for all future Israeli governments. We're talking about the United States now, but we're talking about the United States in combination. Obviously with Israel, neither country could probably or both countries would probably do it alone. There are four issues really when one thinks about this decision. One is the righteousness of the decision. I think the decision to bomb Iran's nuclear potential arsenal is a righteous decision. It's the right thing to do. It will save lives based on cost-benefit analysis, particularly if it could be done with minimum civilian casualties. The way the Iraqi nuclear reactor and the Syrian nuclear reactor both were destroyed with minimum civilian casualties, the potential benefits considerably outweigh the potential risks. Having said that, the next is legality. Let me talk about legality. I would ask if it were a smaller audience for a trivial pursuit question, but I'll ask it and then answer it. What is the first country in modern history ever to attack another country's nuclear facilities in a preventive way? You might say the United States, and the answer will surprise you. The answer is Iran. Iran in the early 1980's bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor. Remember, Iran and Iraq were in a war together. Iran bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor before Israel did. It's one of the bases on which Israel made the decision that it could be done. It damaged the facility, but it didn't put it out of business. Israel then put it out of business. When one talks about legality, one talks about precedent. But one also talks about whether or not there's a casus belli, whether or not it would be proper for the United States or Israel to attack, to attack the nuclear reactor in Iran, and the answer is clearly, clearly yes. Iran, we know, killed over 300 marines in Beirut, Lebanon, back in the 1980s. That was a casus belli. The Argentinian Supreme Court just two weeks ago ruled that Iran was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis in the Israeli embassy and the Israeli Community Center in Buenos Aires. Those were attacks by Iran against Israel. And of course we know that Iran sent many, many rockets and missiles, many to Israel just two or three weeks ago. All of them but one were repelled. But nonetheless, that was a casus belli. There is absolutely no doubt legally that Israel and the United States have the complete right to retaliate against what Iran has done. It doesn't have to base it even on prevention, although prevention is a strong basis for it, but it has the right to do it in a retaliatory way as well. So we're now left with the likelihood of success and the ramifications. I am not an expert on military action, so I can't really comment on the likelihood of a success. Israel and the United States would not undertake such an action unless it thought the likelihood of success was very high. And then we finally moved to what is maybe one of the hardest questions, the ramifications. What would happen? The Middle East is aflame. It's aflame more this morning than it was last night with the death of the former president of Iran. We know that Iran has sworn to the destruction of Israel. Of course, it calls the United States the great Satan, and Israel the small Satan. The ramifications are unpredictable. And the ramifications of inaction are unpredictable. I will not sit here and tell you that I am absolutely certain, that I am positive, that it's the right action to take. I will tell you that based on what I know, and I've spoken to many of the leaders of both of our countries, that the risks of inaction in this case, the risks of Iran actually crossing the threshold and developing a nuclear arsenal is so much greater than the risks of North Korea or Pakistan or China or Russia having nuclear weapons. After all, Iran is the greatest transmitter of terrorism around the world. It has as its surrogates, organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, which would never hesitate for one moment to use nuclear bombs against the United States and against Israel. On balance, though, I concede right away, it's a closed question. I am in favor of a surgical, strategic military attack that was designed and could succeed in preventing Iran from crossing the threshold into developing a nuclear arsenal. Thank you. Moderator: Thank you, Alan. Glenn Greenwald will take the podium 17 and a half minutes. Take it away, Glenn. Glenn Greenwald: First of all, let me begin by thanking the Soho Forum and Reason Foundation for this debate. I agree with Professor D…
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