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2 Iran: The wrong options on the
table By Spengler
calculations", deterrence -
the threat of a nuclear counterstrike - will
prevent Iran from using them. Anthony Cordesman of
Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and
International Studies last month circulated rough
estimates of what would happen to Iran if Israel
were to attack with its full nuclear capability.
Eighteen to 28 million Iranians would die, and the
result would be "the end
of Persian civilization". Perhaps 200,000 to
800,000 Israelis also would perish, but Israel
would recover. "The only way to win," Cordesman
concluded, "is not to play." [2]
It is
unlikely that the Bush administration has
reconciled itself to the idea that Iran will
acquire nuclear weapons. Instead, Washington is
hoping to get through the 2008 elections with some
reason to claim success in Iraq, which it cannot
do without Iranian forbearance. In effect, Bush is
gambling that postponing a reckoning with Iran
will not put nuclear weapons in Iran's hands prior
to the election, and that Bush's successor in
office will have sufficient time to prevent an
actual deployment.
Deterrence works only
if the nuclear tripwire is a bright line, and the
parties who possess nuclear weapons can control
the approach to it. That is a dangerously wrong
presumption. An old traders' adage states that the
market always does what hurts the most people
(because most people bet with the trend, and find
themselves on the wrong side of the trade when the
trend reverses). The same logic applies to the
breakdown of deterrence: war always breaks out
when the contending parties have the most to lose
from it.
Iran has invested heavily in
paramilitary (Hezbollah, Hamas) as well as
terrorist capabilities. If terrorists were to
provoke an eventual nuclear exchange in the Middle
East, for example, it would be the second time in
roughly a century that a few extremists with
unofficial state sponsorship set the world aflame.
The first, of course, was the assassination of
Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
Both the
"realists" and the neo-conservative "idealists"
are right about each other: it is as foolish to
attempt to stabilize the Middle East by moving the
existing pieces about on the chessboard as it is
to export democracy. But there is something
especially distasteful about the re-emergence of
Gates, who as a CIA official in the 1980s bitterly
opposed the initiatives with which president
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. I told this story
a year ago [3], but it bears recollection. The US
intelligence establishment as well as the academic
consensus projected their own desire for stability
- the stability of career and social status - onto
the world around them. Reagan correctly saw an
unstable Soviet Union at the brink of economic
ruin and capable of desperate military adventures.
Gates and the "realists" lived on the small change
of diplomatic tradeoffs.
"Why can't the
'realists' make sense of reality, even when it
clamps its jaws firmly upon their posteriors?" I
asked in the same essay. "Why is it that the
king's magicians never seem to be able to read the
fiery script on the wall? Belshazzar's magi could
not read the words Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin; the
king of Babylon had to call in an outside
consultant, namely Daniel. By then it was too
late."
The long, slow, sickening
disintegration of the Muslim Middle East requires
a doggedness, detachment and appreciation for
tragedy that no leader in Washington presently
possesses. The scriptwriters at the Pentagon
debate two versions of a prospective happy ending,
but the ending will not be happy; it will not even
be an ending, for there is no remedy against
civilizational failure. As usual, Americans will
have to learn the hard way.
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