In Part I of this series, I laid out the thesis that disruptive technologies tend to increase people's anxieties and insecurities and that often, this leads to magical wishes for deliverance, from religion or political ideology especially; in the current times, this is expressed overtly by the Persian Shia belief in the Apocalyptic return of the 12th Imam.
In Part II, I suggested that Iran's rulers have a limited time frame in which to either increase their Oil revenues by conquest or control of the markets (facilitated in either case by their acquisition of nuclear weapons) or lose control of their country; I put a 5 year horizon on the current status quo.
The question I will address today is whether or not the Civilized World will be able to recognize the danger that we all face and mobilize for action before the worst case scenarios eventuate.
There is almost no chance that China or Russia will allow the UN to be an effective force for constraining Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. They have both announced their adamant opposition to sanctions, let alone military force. Neither Russia nor China see Iran as a direct threat to themselves. They have no problem with Iran threatening the Western Europeans, Japanese, and Americans; for reasons that I will address, their insouciance is foolish, but that is unlikely to change any time soon. The upshot is that the Iranians will continue to use the UN to delay and defer, all the while continuing their nuclear program. Once again, any credible threat of force will have to come from the United States, most likely without the UK, or from Israel (which will be blamed on the US in any event.)
The Left in this country, working through their allies in the permanent bureaucracy, the Congress and the MSM, have done a masterful job of hamstringing the Bush administration. The current dominant frame for Iraq is that the United States is caught in a quasi-civil war, with no hope of success. Further, this was an unnecessary war based on lies, or at best slanted ("cooked") intelligence done for Oil or at the behest of various big business interests. The memes are muddled, but effective nonetheless; gaining the support of the American people for an attack on Iran would be more than problematic. I do not mean this to imply that the administration has been blameless; certainly not.
The Bush Administration missteps and the undeniable difficulty of the post war insurgency have also conspired to make prospects of further military action unlikely, but I do not think our trouble in Iraq would otherwise stop us from engaging Iran militarily, since the most likely scenario includes a concerted air assault, rather than a ground invasion.
However, in terms of the necessary national will to wage a successful military campaign, the situation is even worse than it appears.
The Democratic party is planning on pushing for multiple investigations of the Bush administration if they gain control of Congress, with the barely concealed goal of Impeachment. Even without Impeachment, they are going to paralyze the Bush administration via congressional investigation. One result is that Democratic support for an attack on Iran will be almost impossible to arrange, no matter what the provocation, in the absence of a direct Iranian attack. This is all about domestic politics and has nothing to do with the international landscape; unfortunately, the unintended consequences means that Bush will have an extremely difficult, probably impossible, time carrying out a preemptive attack on Iran.
At the same time, Israel's ability to destroy or sufficiently delay Iran's nuclear program is questionable. The logistical difficulties would only be matched by the political dangers. Israel will act if they have no choice and see the alternative as an existential risk, but even if they succeed, the results could be disastrous. Iran would be wounded and enraged; the world wide terrorist networks established over the last 20 years would be unleashed, and the feared nuclear arms race in the Middle East would almost certainly escalate since countries like Saudi Arabia (Sunni) would point to Israel's action to justify getting the weapons they would need to fight their own war for Oil as their supplies start to slip.
There is no easy military solution to the problem of Iran even if the political will existed to address the dangers.
There is one more issue that is rarely discussed in the MSM but which is germane to the consideration of Iran's future actions which might precipitate much greater violence. Marc Schulman offers a post on some of Tehran’s Strategy today, courtesy of Kosmoblog:
The Iranians always saw al Qaeda as an outgrowth of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and therefore, through Shiite and Iranian eyes, never trusted it. Iran certainly didn't want al Qaeda to usurp the position of primary challenger to the West. Under any circumstances, it did not want al Qaeda to flourish. It was caught in a challenge. First, it had to reduce al Qaeda's influence, or concede that the Sunnis had taken the banner from Khomeini's revolution. Second, Iran had to reclaim its place. Third, it had to do this without undermining its geopolitical interests.
Iran has never been averse to using al Qaeda when it suited their own interests, but the rivalry between Shia and Sunni, and between Arab and Persian, goes back centuries, and is appearing in new forms today. In order to cement its bona fides as the premier force of radical Islam in the world, Iran would welcome a survivable military exchange:
In the past, our view was that the Iranians would move carefully in using the nukes to gain leverage against the United States. That is no longer clear. Their focus now seems to be not on their traditional diplomacy, but on a more radical, intra-Islamic diplomacy. That means that they might welcome a (survivable) attack by Israel or the United States. It would burnish Iran’s credentials as the true martyr and fighter of Islam.
I have two caveats with this. One is that the assumption that Iran would only be willing to provoke a survivable attack may be overly optimistic. After all, a previous "moderate" President, president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani made the infamous comment that even if Israel destroyed Iran, it would all be worth it because Iran could destroy Israel completely, yet there would still be many Muslims left alive. This is not a regime that calibrates its rhetoric with too fine a precision.
The second caveat stems from the recognition that once irrationality has become the operative cognitive process, rational predictions and expectations are problematic. Iran is likely to be carried by their own rhetorical excesses, and the pressure from those who believe in everything they say, to do exactly what they have been saying they would do: they could really and truly desire to provoke the Apocalypse!
In a post I wrote last month, The Logic of Conflict, I described how the structure of our mental apparatus makes nuanced thinking one of the first victims of irrationality. This is why once people's emotions have been engaged, it is so difficult to then make compromises; often wars are the end products of a series of increasingly polarized positions taken by the combatants and once the first steps on the road are taken, the end result becomes more and more inevitable as time goes on. At this point, Iran has taken the position it will have Nuclear weapons and the United States has taken the position that they will not have nuclear weapons. I have no confidence that any amount of talking will be able to "square the circle".
Nuclear and biological weapons would be ideal instruments for paving the way for the 12th Imam's return. (Chemical weapons are good for terror attacks but cannot cause mass casualties or propagate themselves the way Nuclear or biological weapons can so I do not include them as likely Apocalypse weapons.)
Here is where the West's inability to deal with disruptive change leads to an irrational paralysis of will.
Much of the population of the collective Western Civilization, under the impact of the anti-Bush assaults of the media and the left, or if you prefer, because of the mendacity and incompetence of the Bush administration (I mention both possibilities because it doesn't matter for my purposes which is correct) currently see the Bush administration as incapable of dealing with Iran. People prefer the "kick the can" strategy of the UN. Ahmadinejad's letter is evidence of how the game is played. The only optimistic point is that as long as the Iranians feel the need to temporize, it suggests they do not yet have nuclear weapons. Once they have nuclear weapons, there will be no stopping them from trumpeting their possession and threatening their use.
For the same reasons an Israeli attack would be a poor choice, a limited air campaign by America would be a poor choice. If we attack Iran, it would need to be a massive campaign to "bomb them back to the stone age", using conventional weapons, I might add.
It is hard to see how such an attack could be conducted in the current climate, which means, again, that the short term is much more dangerous than the long term.
The best chance to deter Iran would be for the International Community to advance sanctions with a credible threat of force if Iran does not abandon their nuclear efforts; sadly the odds of that approach being implemented are so small as to be meaningless, yet every option is worth trying before the end.
In my next post, I will try to show how our disruptive technologies are contributing to our current difficulties and are also conspiring to make the next few years a time of particular uncertainty and danger.
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