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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Do We Even Want Someone to Stop Iran? |
| 2007-03-29 |
| By David Warren There are moments when I seriously wonder whether my own lazy propensity to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is not wiser than the alternative strategy -- namely, to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. I am thinking here of grand strategy, not of the affairs of my own little life, that cannot interest the reader. My topic du jour will be revolutionary Iran, which found new ways to misbehave during the couple of weeks I was down with illness, adding more mud to the underlying quagmire in the Middle East. And the question in my mind is, should we even hope that anyone -- America, Israel, anyone -- will do something to stop the ayatollahs before they make the mess in neighbouring Iraq seem like a moment of springtime leisure? More generally, we have seen the political cost the Bush administration has absorbed, for its outstanding attempt to get ahead of events in the region -- to take arms against that sea of troubles, when the base of political support for any distant military action is invariably fickle. Oscar Wilde said he could resist anything except temptation; we in the West today can endure anything except difficulty. Leafing through my colleague George Jonas's new book, Reflections on Islam, a cherry-pick of his columns from around 9/11/01 forward, I wonder if people like him were right and I was wrong. That is to say, he favoured charging into Iraq and changing the regime, as I did. But unlike me, he favoured charging back out again after the deed was done. An argument Mr Jonas does not dwell upon, should be added in support of his general position. It is that the American military has proved a remarkably efficient instrument in actual warfare. But the American civilian bureaucracy that followed in its train, to perform the task of reconstruction, including most crucially the training of a new Iraqi police force, and performing all the intelligence functions that would be needed against the Islamist underground, was and remains incompetent beyond mere words. Tens of billions of dollars have been sunk, in each of the four years since the Iraq invasion, into operations that have gone too frequently beyond ineptitude, into the dizzying realm of the counter-productive. In the course of which the superb military achievement has been undone. To my view, they could not afford to fail, and they failed. And a key result of that failure, is that now we face the even greater threat of Iran, with no stomach left for the strategic and military measures that will alone cause the ayatollahs to stand down. The utterly mischievous Russians are currently doing more than the boy-scout Americans to face down the Iranian nuclear program. President Putin, whose interests are seldom coincident with our own, has signed onto the United Nations' most recent fey wrist-slapping gesture against Iran, but immeasurably strengthened it, by halting Russian construction of the nuclear reactor at Bushehr (the first of five projected, earning Russia huge hard-currency income). According to some reports, he may even be reconsidering the open sale of sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, and the more covert supply of advanced ballistic-missile technology. We cannot yet know the reason for the Russian volte face, which happened suddenly on March 19th. Conspiracy theorists may imagine it was the result of secret diplomacy with the U.S. (a delayed and disguised payoff for U.S. support of Russian entry into the World Trade Organization). It might only be a dispute over Iranian payments (that was cited to excuse the sudden withdrawal of 2,000 Russian workers). It is unlikely Mr Putin has only now grasped that Iran is very dangerous. The flagrant and outrageous Iranian seizure of 15 Royal Navy personnel on patrol in the Shat al-Arab, well outside Iranian waters (we needn't waste time discussing absurd Iranian claims) is not necessarily connected with anything. The Iranians often pull stunts like that, without fully thinking through their purposes. Rather it should be taken as the latest indication of how unpredictable they are. This is, after all, a country whose president utters public fantasies about nuclear war, in the context of Shia Islamic apocalyptic hallucinations. But even in this comparatively small matter, in which the Iranians have behaved, yet again, in defiance of all norms of international conduct, just what do the British propose to do about it? Prime Minister Blair said yesterday that efforts to obtain the sailors' release will enter a "different phase" if diplomatic negotiations fail. In other words, the British will start yelling louder. What else is possible? It may make no sense for any politician in the West to sink himself, doing what really needs to be done now, to prevent Armageddon farther down the road. It may make more sense to let the catastrophe happen. Whenupon, pretty much everyone will be onside for doing something fairly definitive about Iran. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #3 Alan C I believe your right, if we just keep down-playing everything they do, then it shows they have no power over us. Damn Free Press, fight for freedom... a freedom which allows the press to destroy us? Confliction between order and freedom, is so hard to grasp |
| Posted by: devilstoenail 2007-03-29 12:11 |
| #2 AlanC, I have been reading Warrens body of work since shortly after 9/11 and find he is one of the few sane voices coming from the "attic of North America". An impassioned view of this weeks events would leave me in agreement that the mullahs want this story to lead the evening news, mostly because they can control it. The fuel for keeping this in the news cycle is how much outrage the weak horse west wails over its "precious blue eyed sailors" while they put on the image of "fighting cocks"... all images they have used. The less spotlight we put on the hostages, the less stage they have. Unfortunately they understand how to feed the media bulldog. The suggestion I prefer is for Tony to start refering to them as POW's, and let the "not in power" iranians- a large majority, start asking themselves "...uh, Rezi, when did the mullahs get us into war?" Put the iranians on hold when they call to discussion todays negotiations, and start psyops designed to scare the shit out of the populous. As one ex general said, make iran the "unluckiest place in the world" for the next couple of months. Unfortunately, the media would rather cover the "this is what the iranian minister said this morning, but now he has changed his mind and does not speak for the mullahs this afternoon." |
| Posted by: Capsu 78 2007-03-29 11:25 |
| #1 And exactly what is this bozo suggesting for the 15 sailors? Just let Iran keep them or kill them as they like? Don't want to sweat the small stuff? I sorta agree on the Iraq picture. When we went in we should have: A) Occupied the damn place, created their constitution for them ala McArthur and let them ride it the same way a child rides his first two wheeler, with Dad right there to sieze control if necessary. or B) Go in, kick ass, leave. Rinse and repeat as necessary. That shampoo diplomacy is what I think that the Brits should do now. "Oh, Mr. Nutjob, if our sailors are not home in 48 hrs you lose something big........okay I guess you didn't need that Navy afterall....Or Mr. Nutjob, if our sailors are not home in 48 hours you're going to lose something bigger. Rinse and repeat. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2007-03-29 10:31 |