President Obama famously suggested that engagement with our enemies would be his primary approach to dealing with North Korea, Iran, and the usual gang of suspects. The subtext of the new "Realism" in Washington, DC seems to be that since deterrence worked during the cold war with equally implacable, committed, and far more dangerous enemies, deterrence can be a workable doctrine upon which to base American security. There are many eloquent and persuasive voices being raised in favor of accepting the inevitable and establishing a deterrence doctrine in the face of, especially, Iranian nuclear, genocidal ambitions. Tom Barnett has repeatedly suggested that the idea that Iran s run by irrational twelvers welcoming of martyrdom is a fiction designed to scare people and shore up support for hte regime at home. In his view, Iran is behaving as a cautious, aging revolutionary regime aiming to carefully extend its reach without risking the health or wealth of the Mullahcracy. Since there has never been a society that had both a suicidal philosophical core and the capacity to conduct mass murder, we do not have any historical precedents for the Iranian behavior.
My focus is on Iran for two reasons. First, North Korea fits quite well into Tom Barnett's model. It appears that as irrational as Kim can behave at times, his primary interest is safeguarding his regime and his succession. We have seen this before and have managed to deal with the threat. As long as Kim does not believe he or his regime can survive an overt confrontation with the United States (or even with South Korea) he will continue to behave in a bellicose manner while constantly testing where the American threshold lies. President Obama's diffidence toward North Korea suggest that line will be perilously close to an impossible to ignore tripwire, but since we still do not know where Obama draws the line, any conclusions can only be considered premature at this point. In summary I do not see North Korea behaving suicidally under any circumstances. If the regime were to begin to totter, one or another of the Generals would certainly arrange for aid form the Chinese to stabilize the ocutnry and control the threatened chaos. The greatest risk is that North Korea wold sell their technology and weapons to anyone willing to pay for it, as they have done in the past. The threat that the United States, et al, will begin to interdict North Korean ships in order to prevent such spread of dangerous weapons is perceived, correctly by the North, as an act of war, but in reality, there is little that the North can do about it as long as they wish to survive.
On the other hand, Iran presents a different and unique set of problems. Iranian religious beliefs, inseparable from their political ideology, demands that Allah, and their form of Islam, reign supreme. Certainly there have been other supremacist ideologies and few have been initially suicidal (a good case can be made that Nazi Germany, starting from a vantage point of much greater comparative power and wealth than Iran, was driven to commit suicide by their ideology, including their core anti-Semitism.) The problem for the Iranians is that their ideology is integral to their existence.
In my just completed series on The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part III I pointed out that when ideas are deeply held by the Narcissist, admission of error becomes impossible. Being in error is the equivalent of being personally repudiated; self-esteem collapses, shame, despair and rage ensue. This is especially true of ideological and religious ideas, which is why so many wars have been motivated by such. The Iranians adhere to an apocalyptic religious structure that rewards and celebrates martyrdom in all its forms. As long as the possibility of victory for the Islamic revolution exists they will behave like a rational actor on the world stage. The great risk is that we do not know how they will behave once they have begun to fail. MAD worked (just barely) because the Russians were convinced they would win and when their defeat became inevitable, their leadership preferred a life of material comfort to death. Their ideology ultimately was trumped by their personal comforts. There is good reason to question whether the same calculation would render the same answer concerning the Iranians.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who opposes military action against Iran, has written a post disputing the reasoning behind the relatively sanguine approach toward Iran and its intentions championed by Fareed Zakaria. Jeffrey Goldberg cites the story of the 500,000 plastic keys to heaven given to children to hold as they marched through minefields; his conclusion is apt:
Does Zakaria Misinterpret Iranian Intentions?
Zakaria writes that "over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were 'un-Islamic.' The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral."
When ayatollahs start talking about Islamic morality, I run for the exits. Their ideas about what constitute moral acts are not, generally speaking, ours. Here's one obvious example, from the Iran-Iraq war, courtesy of the German writer Matthias Kuntzel:
During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran's forces were no match for Saddam Hussein's professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child's neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.
At one point, however, the earthly gore became a matter of concern. "In the past," wrote the semi-official Iranian daily Ettelaat as the war raged on, "we had child-volunteers: 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds. They went into the minefields. Their eyes saw nothing. Their ears heard nothing. And then, a few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again, there was nothing more to be seen of them. Somewhere, widely scattered in the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone." Such scenes would henceforth be avoided, Ettelaat assured its readers. "Before entering the minefields, the children [now] wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves."
These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war started in order to supplement his beleaguered army.The Basij Mostazafan - or "mobilization of the oppressed" - was essentially a volunteer militia, most of whose members were not yet 18. They went enthusiastically, and by the thousands, to their own destruction. "The young men cleared the mines with their own bodies," one veteran of the Iran-Iraq War recalled in 2002 to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine. "It was sometimes like a race. Even without the commander's orders, everyone wanted to be first."
How do I say this as bluntly as possible? A leadership that could murder its own children in such a horrible way is capable of absolutely anything. Including lying about its nuclear intentions.
Radical Islam as practiced by the Iranians, Palestinians, various Sunni groups including al Qaeda, et al, is a suicidal death cult. Their ideology/religion is inseparable from their self-representations (ie, their self images.) In order for them to survive and thrive, their version of Islam must survive and thrive. If their vision for Islam fails, their lives have no meaning; death is preferable. Should Iran falter and the Mullahs hold on their rule become in doubt, a policy based on their continued rational pursuit of what Westerners believe to be the Iranian national self interest, is a policy that will be ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of an Iran that sees their national interest in an Apocalyptic cataclysm, a final battle between Islam and the infidels. In a world in which there is a non-zero possibility of a decapitating strike (an EMP attack) against the West succeeding, the pressure on the Iranians to strike while they still can will be quite powerful.
Recent Comments