How Not to Contain Iran
 

Recently, James Lindsay and Ray Takeyah – two well-known foreign policy centrists and, at least in the case of Mr. Takeyah, a full-blown Iran expert – took to the establishment pages of Foreign Affairs and the Washington Post op-ed page to (finally) warn against the clear nuclear and hegemonic ambitions of Iran.

Subsequently, Mr. Stephen Walt – the so-called “realist” who became the left-intelligentsia’s poster boy by “exposing” the Jewish lobby – dismissed Mssrs. Lindsay and Takeyah for taking the Iranians too seriously. Apparently, his understanding of Iran is far more incisive and conclusive than these two Washington foreign policy stalwarts, the Europeans, the Israelis and the bulk of the Arab world. Not to mention the words and deeds of the Iranians themselves!

Presumptuous, indeed. Solomonically, Mr. Walt delineates 8 irrefutable reasons why everyone is wrong and he is right. As it is, all 8 are both insubstantial and naïve on the facts and the history.

First: The depiction of a swaggering nuclear Iran seriously overstates their capabilities – They are a primitive military power, spending a paltry $9.5 billion annually.

A facile argument that presumes a conventional engagement with the United States. With a fraction of that budget, Iran has stockpiled Hezbollah (as well as Hamas and assorted other terrorist groups) with the latest in rocketry, anti-tank, anti-ship missiles, IED’s and various inexpensive but lethal arms and equipment, enough to destabilize Lebanon and maintain a constant war footing with Israel. In addition, low cost and unsophisticated Iranian IED’s kill Muslims and Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan with abandon. Iran murders hundreds of innocents from Buenos Aires to Pakistan to Moscow, and supports almost any group willing to oppose America and the West. In this day and age, who (beside Walt) can argue that a rogue regime cannot wreak havoc and destabilize countries without a multi-billion dollar budget?

Second: Because oil is a vital US interest, the Gulf States can without fail count on the US to back them up.

Yet the US is impatient to leave both Iraq and Afghanistan, where our interests are substantial and the risk to our prestige even more so. How come American interests in Persia after the Shah were irrelevant? How come our interests largely ignored oil rich Saddam Hussein for so many years and his decades of subterfuge and murder? If the State Department refutes Israel’s need for support in the face of Iranian threats to its existence – threats to use a nuclear bomb – why should “lesser friends” in the Gulf feel more secure?

Third: Iran’s capacity to subvert or blackmail its neighbors is overstated.

Perhaps it is American’s influence that is actually overstated. Lebanon has effectively become Hezbollah’s vassal; Hezbollah in turn is Iran’s most ardent lackey. Iranian patron Hamas repeatedly and effectively de-rails the Israel-Palestinian peace process, a process the White House zealously claims as a primary cause of anti-Americanism and terrorism. Apart from oppressing its own peoples, Kurds included, Iran is actively seeking to subvert or bring within its orbit most of the Middle East and has been succeeding in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey (not to mention Venezuela). It has significant influence in Dubai and would enjoy greatly the dilution of the Sunni dominance of Saudi Arabia.

Walt further claims a nuclear Iran cannot blackmail it’s neighbors, this being a convenient bogeyman, especially as the United States has not been able to leverage its nuclear arsenal for similar advantage.

Quite the reverse. America has threatened no one with destruction, has not been a primary source of suicide bombers and IED’s, has not been “support central” for the world’s most vicious terrorist organizations. Iran is, by common agreement, the world’s most aggressive, consistent and successful destabilizing force, and has shared nuclear and missile technology with North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria. Walt does not seem perturbed about the hidden nuclear facilities, nor Iran’s already existant missile capacity to reach parts of Europe and all of the Middle East.

Fourth: Fears that Iran will give others nuclear weapons or technology are even more far fetched – there’s no sign Iran’s leaders have a death wish.

Komeini himself claimed Israel was a one-bomb country, implying Iran could absorb losses that Israel could not. Furthermore the devastation caused by an electromagnetic nuclear detonation above a Western capital would wreak far more damage that one over Teheran, a relatively unsophisticated city. Ahmadinejad and his ilk believe in the return of the 12th Imam, the initiating requirement of which is a cataclysm violent enough to usher in this Madji, their messiah. Clearly, Walt is uninformed on this issue – he cannot grasp that many of these fanatics live for death, for the next world, for their 72 virgins. The extremism evident in their apocalyptic and genocidal declarations, and in their terroristic support in every major Muslim war, shows a frightening knowledge of all levels of the terrorist supply chain, including most likely dirty bombs and other WMD’s.

Fifth: The current US containment strategies in the Gulf are adequate. To target further “subversive activity” merely risks an unnecessary war (especially as the US and Israel themselves already conduct targeted assassinations).

Here Walt’s informational prowess puts even the most anti-American governments to shame – even they have not yet risen to accusing the US of targeted killings in the Gulf. Walt further proclaims the insanity of responding to a single shipment of mortars to Hezbollah, as though that is the problem and not the world’s largest concentration of rockets, some 40,000. Walt cites America’s refusal to respond to the USSR’s subversion as a smashing success culminating in the latter’s dissolution. There is no evidence that the USSR supplied the quivalent of thousands of IED’s to terrorist group’s arrayed against America’s troops or similar rockets to Hamas and other terrorists groups that started the Gaza War. Except in its early, most belligerent moments, when did the USSR threaten to annihilate the US, claim that Americans were the cancer of the world, that the Holocaust did not exist, and that a Communist Caliphate was due to overrun the world?

Walt’s analogies do not hold water, nor do his wild imaginings without any basis in fact.

Sixth: A hair-trigger containment will give Iran an obvious incentive to acquire a nuclear deterrent. The West’s penchance for publicizing its fear of Iran going nuclear only convinces Iran’s leaders to go ahead and acquire these weapons.

Is that so? Walt thus implies that if we disarmed unilaterally and expressed total confidence that Ahmadinejad’s lunatic ravings were merely incoherent and meaningless melodrama, then Iran would accept the bomb to be of little value and give up their decade long race to nuclear hegemony. Unfortunately, Iran seems well capable of generating its own policy, both Jihadist and expansionary, without Walt’s expertise. It desires Shia domination, unrivalled Middle East influence and the destruction of Israel, quite apart from Walt’s facile meanderings on American provocations. For some reason Walt determines that the United States (and its little Satan Israel) is the focus of all the world’s events, without which the tyrants of the world would build nurseries and take up gardening. Oh – were it so! One cannot forget the surreal images of the Polish cavalry, after refusing to take cognicence of Nazi propaganda and prepare for the oncoming onslaught, attacking the German Panzers in 1939 – of course they were obliterated and Poland fell in 16 days.

Seventh: Take regime change and preventative war off the table and accept Iran’s enrichment program on condition it ratifies the NPT protocol.

Projective naivety informs Walt’s fantasies as he proposes negotiations as the end game, as though Obama has not already shown such a commitment, as though there is even a scintilla of proof that Iran’s promises and agreements can be relied on.

As though the victims are the problem and genocidal behavior merely a Pavlovian reaction that will evaporate once we in the West pay penance for our sins and absolve fundamentalists and dictators of their ultimate responsibilities.

Finally: Liberals and moderates have been dragged rightward, reinforcing the neoconservative view of an alarming Iran; with 9/11 opening the door to pro-war positions that have proven disastrous.

Thus from Walt’s “peace at all costs” view, this latter day Chamberlain (who in his day seemed positively moderate by comparison) would view the removal of Saddam and the freeing of the Iraqi people as a disaster. Likewise the removal of the stone age Taliban regime.

To take Ahmadinejad’s viciousness at face value is, according to Walt, irresponsible and provocative. Rather we should beat our swords into plowshares and sacrifice them at Iran’s alter, as a peace offering which no doubt would surely eventuate into tranquility for all of mankind. To saintly Walt, he has seen the enemy and it is us.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/05/how_not_to_contain_iran

Published on Leslie's Blog
Published on Slant Right
Published on News Blaze