The beauty of Modern Liberalism (as opposed to traditional liberalism) is its simplicity and clarity. The most complex situations can be reduced to the most simple terms. This is nowhere on display in such stark terms as in the international arena, most especially in regards to Iran. Modern Liberalism compels one to discover a powerful man, preferably white and American, with bonus points if Jewish, and attribute all odious behaviors to him; it makes it easy to identify the good guys and bad guys and makes policy prescriptions even easier; simply rein in the bad guy(s) and Peace will come.
Maureen Dowd does the honors today in the New York Times.
Dick Cheney’s craziness used to influence foreign policy.
Now it is foreign policy.
He may have lost his buddy in belligerence, Rummy. He may have tapped out the military in Iraq. He may not be able to persuade Congress so easily anymore — except for Hillary — to issue warlike resolutions. He can’t cow Condi into supporting his bullying as he once did, and Bob Gates is doing his best to instill some common sense.
Besides, Cheney is running out of time to wreak global havoc; he’s working for a president who is spending his waning days on the job trying to prevent children from getting health insurance.
But the vice president may have hit on a devious tactic used by his old boss Richard Nixon.
President Nixon and Henry Kissinger liked to use madness as a method. In 1969, Nixon told Kissinger to caution the Soviet ambassador that Nixon was “out of control” on Indochina, and could do something drastic.
Dowd imagines, like so many on the Left, that snark is an adequate substitute for logic and reason.
[She also offers evidence that she doesn't bother to read her colleague, Tom Friedman, who in an op-ed during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq suggested that in the Middle East the best way to avoid war would be to convince the other you are crazier than he is; for Friedman, the Middle East was a place where the most reckless could always win the game of chicken.]
However, beyond the obvious omissions of reason and logic, Dowd also leaves out something even more important when it comes to assessing foreign affairs; ie, the interests of other states in the area. Here is the sum total of her take on Iran:
A top Bush 41 national security official told me shortly after Bush 43 got under way that the younger Bush team’s foreign policy was dangerous because it was so “black and white,” so dependent on “bogymen.”
President Bush has settled on his new bogyman, once more ignoring the obvious choice of Osama. Yesterday, he defended his plans to build a missile defense system in Europe by raising the specter of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Her article is a classic example of "black and white" in its sophomoric prose and omission of any consideration of Iran's strategic interests. It is troubling that this is what passes for sophistication in the pages of what used to be a real newspaper.
The problem for Dowd and her ilk is that any assessment of Iran's strategic interests would leave one with the recognition that there are two major reasons why a clash will be extremely difficult to avoid:
The realists believe that Iran's drive for nuclear weapons derives from the historical desires of Persia to gain hegemony over the Persian Gulf (aka Arabian Gulf) and the more recent iteration of such desires to include control over the Strait of Hormuz. Since a significant fraction of the world's oil (~40%) flows through the Strait, Iran would have a stranglehold on the global economy. As an additional benefit, keeping tensions high in the Middle East supports the price of oil at levels in excess of what the markets would demand. (This is also one of the reasons the Russians are unlikely to help us reign in Iran; they benefit from high oil prices and only a genuine and convincing threat to their interests in Iran will move Putin.)
The realists believe, in the absence of any particular evidence beyond the occasional verbal bone thrown their way by the Iranian spokesmen, that an accommodation can be reached with Iran whereby they cede their nuclear program and accept some, but not all, of their goals. In this conception, Iran would benefit from regaining entree into the world's financial markets, gain investments in their crumbling infrastructure (especially in the petroleum industry) and in return would stop making mischief in Iraq, supporting terrorists, and threatening Israel. Why the Iranians would agree to this when they already believe they are winning and believe that attaining nuclear capabilities will guarantee their future hegemony is left unanswered by those who support this "grand bargain."
The more alarmist view of Iran is that it is a nation in which the Apocalyptic Millenialists have been gaining power. This view received support recently when the so-called moderate, Ali Larejani, resigned as the Iranian Nuclear Negotiator and was replaced by an ally of President Ahmadinejad. Meir Javenanfa, an Iran analyst, posts a sobering article at PajamasMedia, (later picked up by the Jerusalem Post):
Another major victory for messianics
While the world catches its breath after the sudden resignation of Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, questions are being asked about the background and beliefs of his successor, Saeed Jalili. The answers, it turns out, are troubling.
Until today, not much has been known about the 41 year-old gray-haired official. He has a Ph.D from Imam Sadegh University in Teheran. As a soldier during the Iraq-Iran war, he apparently survived a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein's forces.
...
It is ... reported that that (sic) Ahmadinejad has consulted Jalili on a number of key moves - according to one report, Ahmadinejad's infamous 18-page letter to President George W. Bush was, in fact, Jalili's idea.
THE MOST worrying revelation about Jalili's past appeared recently in the Iran Diplomacy Web site. This Teheran-based news agency, in an article titled "Dr Ali Leaves, Dr Saeed Enters" revealed that for most of his career at the Foreign Ministry, Jalili worked closely with Mojtaba Hashemi Samare, a leading messianic and a close ally of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, the most well-known and high-ranking messianic cleric in Iran.
The article talks about how Jalili cooperated with Hashemi Samare in the Inspectorate department of Ministry. It also mentions that for a short time, Jalili also worked with Ahmadinejad.
Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi is a former member of the Hojattieh, a messianic splinter group which was disbanded by Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s because of its extremist views. The sect's goals are to sow chaos - the goal of which is to incite a massive war, presumably necessary to speed up the return of the Shi'ite messiah, known as the Mahdi.
The only dollop of good news in the article should not be comforting to anyone:
Despite this power, the messianics will still find a strong obstacle, in the form of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who, for now, has the last word on Iran's nuclear program.
The increasing presence of messianics and their allies in high ranking positions inside the Iranian government makes it hard to believe that Iran's leadership would ever be ready for a negotiated settlement of the current nuclear crisis.
It does not take much investigation to notice that the realists and the messianics both have the same goal of attaining nuclear capabilities.
Now, it is certainly possible that Maureen Dowd is correct in her exceedingly superficial and simplistic explication; of course, if she is correct, then the threats from the "madman Cheney" should have the effect of "concentrating the minds" of the Iranian pacifists, who in the interest of Peace, would be eager to come to the negotiating table. The alternative, that Cheney, who is paid to be paranoid and look for the worst case scenario, is more right than wrong; if so, then the policy implications suggest that only by making a credible threat can we hope to mobilize world opinion, including the Russians and the Chinese, to support serious and costly sanctions on the Iranians. By convincing the Iranians that we are even crazier than they are, we may have some slim chance of avoiding the worst case.
Mondoreb has his own view of Dowd's piece at Death by 1000 Papercuts. I suppose we would call this European Sophistication:
Dowd: "Madness as Method": More Evil Dick Cheney Evidence
Another day, another New York Times edition, another Maureen Dowd column. Must mean another story about Evil Dick Cheney and His Minions of Mayhem threatening life as we know it. Dowd takes her cue from the EuroPolitical Handbook: crazy Americans are talking actions, not words. How uncouth.]
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