I am eagerly anticipating the delivery of Tom Barnett's Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. He is one of the sharpest strategic thinkers around and has a wonderful ability to explain the complex interconnections between the increasingly networked actors that inhabit our international community. In a comment on a David Brooks article from almost two weeks ago, he comments on the conundrum facing Barack Obama concerning Iran and its machinations:
A brilliant Brooks bit on Hamas/Iran
The land-for-peace game is long gone. The new game is Iran + Hezbollah + Hamas creating maximum mayhem and pushing for Israel's destruction.
In truth, IMHO, Iran wouldn't really benefit from Israel's departure. It needs the local devil to mask its regional ambitions vis-à-vis Sunnis and to keep radical Sunnis in the mood for cooperation against the distant devil. Take away Israel and Iran's ambitions are simply naked and vigorously opposed.
By and large I think Tom Barnett has it right but there are reasons for all concerned parties to be wary. His suggestion that this analysis dictates working from the edges (Iran's proxies) in toward the Iranians themselves, which is essentially the approach the United States, its allies, and the Israelis are taking, makes a virtue of necessity. It appears likely that the Israeli ability to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program is limited at best and the political will for the United States to do so is lacking (for many reasons, some good and logical and some opportunistic.) The Middle East is unstable and dangerous enough without risking the kinds of escalation and conflagration that the Iranians could unleash should they be forced to extremis. Limiting their violent proclivities in Iraq while keeping Israel's borders relatively quiet is probably the best that can be hoped for in the near term.
Granting the wisdom of a strategic approach that aims to minimize the amount of death and destruction unleashed at any one time in the Middle East, there remain several assumptions rolled into Barnett's thinking, any one of which could ultimately lead to disaster.
The primary questionable assumption is that the Mullahs of Iran are motivated primarily by the dictates of their national strategic interests rather than by their ideology. Iran's Shia revolutionary religious ideology requires an expansionist policy for several reasons. Khomeini-ism is a millennial religious ideology. Like any millennial ideology it focuses on the end times rather than current events. As we have seen from its allies, Hezbollah and Hamas, their tactics at all times are designed to foster their ideology. They do stupid things certainly and underestimate Israeli resolve; they fail to recognize when their provocations step over an Israeli threshold of tolerance, but all of their tactics are in the service of destroying Israel and facilitating the Caliphate. Misunderstanding signs of moderation as reflecting strategic recalculations, therefore, is a significant error. There are typically two responses to this concern. One is to simply ignore the ideology that motivates the HISH alliance and act as if their behavior is motivated by understandable and predictable strategic imperatives, ie, treat them as if they were like us in their thinking and respond to them as if they are rational actors. The second approach, more nuanced, is to appreciate their essential irrational motivations but, recognizing the limitations of our ability to effect their irrationality, respond to their rational concerns and, once quiet has been achieved and they can focus on their closer-to-home concerns, their ultimate ideological goals will recede in their force and be postponed to some indefinite future which will never arrive.
In the latter approach, which is cognizant of the Iranian millennialism, the assumption is implicitly made that Fatah on the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and perhaps Iran itself, can be tempered once they have the responsibility of power. When revolutionary ideologues must focus on paving streets and providing services for their people, they lose their appetite for expansionary adventurism. This theory held for the American revolutionaries in the 1770s but evidence since that time is spotty at best. It is true that the USSR's revolutionary fervor dissipated by the 1980s, but that gave them 70 years for mischief making in the name of their secular ideology. China followed a similar path but between the two communist powers, upwards of 100,000,000 people died to serve the ideological needs of their rulers. Most importantly, as the heirs of the revolution took power and replaced their ideological purity with the more typical acquisitive ideology of tyrants from time immemorial, the idea of risking all for their beliefs lost power. Contrast with the Islamic ideologues whose power is growing. Not only is there no evidence that the ideology of the Shia radicals is on the wane (and the jury is out on the power of the Sunni radical groups and ideology) but all indications are that there has been no erosion of devotion to the goals of a world wide caliphate among the true believers, who number in the millions. Most importantly, there is no particular evidence that the Mullahs have replaced cynicism for their revolutionary religious devotion. Worse, at the moment, the strategic national interests of Iran exactly coincide with their ideological interests in regards to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
This leads to a conundrum. If Iran gets the bomb, and the attendant Gulf hegemony that they desire, their adventurism will inevitably increase. There will be almost no limits to what they believe they can achieve once they are immune to an American or Israeli response. In such a position, where they believe they are winning, the drive to destroy Israel will be overpowering, especially if they calculate that Israel will be restrained in its response to any attack. It is possible that Iran will then tolerate Israel's continuing existence while maintaining steadily increasing military and political pressure against Israel. This would be a terrible state of affairs for Israel and for its Sunni neighbors but would be a metastable construct in which the risk of a nuclear Armageddon might be considered manageable by those not directly involved.
On the other hand, if we and the Israelis continue to follow the course prescribed by a policy of containment of Iran and the attrition of its allies in Hamas and Hezbollah, once Iran has the bomb, our policy will be accompanied by an exponential rise in risk. If Iran is contained and their economy continues to be attacked (by <$40 barrel oil) the risk of an Iranian uprising against the Mullahs will become real. Without subsidies, the Iranian Mullahs supporters (among the poor and the bazaar classes) will withdraw their support and threaten the regime. While the Russian elites could make the implicit trade of their ideology for their economic well being, the same trade is less available to the Mullahs (and the evidence of continuing support by Ayatollah Khamenie for Ahmadinejad suggests they are not yet willing to make the deal.) If the Mullahs maintain their ideology, and their regime appears lost, and they have the bomb, the appeal of going "all in" for the Apocalypse will be powerful, perhaps too powerful to resist.
In Russian roulette a semi-suicidal fool points a gun at his own head with a 1 in 6 chance of killing himself. We are facing a world in which a quasi-suicidal regime is pointing a gun loaded with a nuclear weapon at its neighbors with an incalculable risk of murder-suicide as a result. It is the kind of conundrum that should give strategic thinkers nightmares.
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