Posted on 01/13/2006 8:00:58 AM PST by TheDon
Sad but true. The longer this goes on, the worse it will get. Something has to be done soon. A nuclear Iran is too dangerous. If they don't use the nukes themselves, they could pass them on to terrorists. If a "coupe" were to happen there, who knows what another regime would have them in their posesssion.
Four years ago, thinking a few muslims could get onto planes, hijack them, and destroy the Twin Towers while killing 3,000 innocent people was folly too.
Guess our versions of "folly" can change with time.
Both countries followed the tips in the "How to fool the IAEA and start a nuclear weapons program" playbook.
"As it turned out, few of Iraq's suppliers--or the IAEA itself--ever bothered to ask a simple question: Why would Iraq, with the second largest oil reserves in the world, want to generate electricity by burning uranium? For its part, Iraq was careful to avoid raising IAEA suspicions; an elaborate strategy was gradually developed to deceive and manipulate the agency."
"One day in late 1971, I was approached by the two men in charge of the IAEC, Moyesser Al-Mallah and Husham Sharif, both of whom were U.S.-educated and old and trusted members of the ruling Ba'ath party. They explained that as long as our objectives were peaceful, the government would provide little support. They said we needed to attract the attention of Saddam Hussein, a fast-rising star in the government, and that we could do so only by adopting a strategic objective--that is, we should propose a bomb program based on first acquiring a civil fuel cycle followed by a full-blown program to build nuclear weapons. "
I said in my post:>>>Thinking Israel would approach an attack on Iran conventionally is, in my opinion, folly<<<
You quoted me as saying: >>>Thinking Israel would approach an attack on Iran, in my opinion, folly!<<<
You left out the words: conventionally is.....changes the whole meaning doesn't it.
Now do we agree.....or not?
So would a great number of its citizens and expats.
The key word was 'conventionally.' Otherwise, the quote has no meaning.
I agree 100% with your assessment on Israel not using conventional methods to deal with Iran, they wouldn't. Again, sorry for the confusion.
No problem....I figure your finger slipped while doing the "copy" function.
At any rate....we live in interesting times!!! Cheers.
Iran is busy building the world's biggest KICK ME sign.
The UN would burn down the world to further their shared ideal of beating down America and American traditions and ideals.
fortunately, we can defend our own.
This is from stratfor geopolitical intelligence from stratfor.com on line for which you can recieve e-mails as a "freebie" but cannot be linked to on the site. Membership is very costly:
Iran's Redefined Strategy
By George Friedman
The Iranians have broken the International Atomic Energy Agency seals on some of their nuclear facilities. They did this very deliberately and publicly to make certain that everyone knew that Tehran was proceeding with its nuclear program. Prior to this, and in parallel, the Iranians began to -- among other things -- systematically bait the Israelis, threatening to wipe them from the face of the earth.
The question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They do not yet have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have now hinted that (a) they plan to build nuclear weapons and have implied, as clearly as possible without saying it, that (b) they plan to use them against Israel. On the surface, these statements appear to be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are many things one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force is not usually one of them. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the Iranians seem to be doing, so we need to sort this out.
There are four possibilities:
1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is insane and wants to be attacked because of a bad childhood.
2. The Iranians are engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver, and this is part of it.
3. The Iranians think they can get nuclear weapons -- and a deterrent to Israel -- before the Israelis attack.
4. The Iranians, actually and rationally, would welcome an Israeli -- or for that matter, American -- air strike.
Let's begin with the insanity issue, just to get it out of the way. One of the ways to avoid thinking seriously about foreign policy is to dismiss as a nutcase anyone who does not behave as you yourself would. As such, he is unpredictable and, while scary, cannot be controlled. You are therefore relieved of the burden of doing anything about him. In foreign policy, it is sometimes useful to appear to be insane, as it is in poker: The less predictable you are, the more power you have -- and insanity is a great tool of unpredictability. Some leaders cultivate an aura of insanity.
However, people who climb to the leadership of nations containing many millions of people must be highly disciplined, with insight into others and the ability to plan carefully. Lunatics rarely have those characteristics. Certainly, there have been sociopaths -- like Hitler -- but at the same time, he was a very able, insightful, meticulous man. He might have been crazy, but dismissing him because he was crazy -- as many did -- was a massive mistake. Moreover, leaders do not rise alone. They are surrounded by other ambitious people. In the case of Ahmadinejad, he is answerable to others above him (in this case, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), alongside him and below him. He did not get to where he is by being nuts -- and even if we think what he says is insane, it clearly doesn't strike the rest of his audience as insane. Thinking of him as insane is neither helpful nor clarifying.
The Three-Player Game
So what is happening?
First, the Iranians obviously are responding to the Americans. Tehran's position in Iraq is not what the Iranians had hoped it would be. U.S. maneuvers with the Sunnis in Iraq and the behavior of Iraqi Shiite leaders clearly have created a situation in which the outcome will not be the creation of an Iranian satellite state. At best, Iraq will be influenced by Iran or neutral. At worst, it will drift back into opposition to Iran -- which has been Iraq's traditional geopolitical position. This is not satisfactory. Iran's Iraq policy has not failed, but it is not the outcome Tehran dreamt of in 2003.
There is a much larger issue. The United States has managed its position in Iraq -- to the extent that it has been managed -- by manipulating the Sunni-Shiite fault line in the Muslim world. In the same way that Richard Nixon manipulated the Sino-Soviet split, the fundamental fault line in the Communist world, to keep the Soviets contained and off-balance late in the Vietnam War, so the Bush administration has used the primordial fault line in the Islamic world, the Sunni-Shiite split, to manipulate the situation in Iraq.
Washington did this on a broader scale as well. Having enticed Iran with new opportunities -- both for Iran as a nation and as the leading Shiite power in a post-Saddam world -- the administration turned to Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and enticed them into accommodation with the United States by allowing them to consider the consequences of an ascended Iran under canopy of a relationship with the United States. Washington used that vision of Iran to gain leverage in Saudi Arabia. The United States has been moving back and forth between Sunnis and Shia since the invasion of Afghanistan, when it obtained Iranian support for operations in Afghanistan's Shiite regions. Each side was using the other. The United States, however, attained the strategic goal of any three-player game: It became the swing player between Sunnis and Shia.
This was not what the Iranians had hoped for.
Reclaiming the Banner
There is yet another dimension to this. In 1979, when the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran, Iran was the center of revolutionary Islamism. It both stood against the United States and positioned itself as the standard-bearer for radical Islamist youth. It was Iran, through its creation, Hezbollah, that pioneered suicide bombings. It championed the principle of revolutionary Islamism against both collaborationist states like Saudi Arabia and secular revolutionaries like Yasser Arafat. It positioned Shi'ism as the protector of the faith and the hope of the future.
In having to defend against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, and the resulting containment battle, Iran became ensnared in a range of necessary but compromising relationships. Recall, if you will, that the Iran-Contra affair revealed not only that the United States used Israel to send weapons to Iran, but also that Iran accepted weapons from Israel. Iran did what it had to in order to survive, but the complexity of its operations led to serious compromises. By the late 1990s, Iran had lost any pretense of revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world. It had been flanked by the Sunni Wahhabi movement, al Qaeda.
The Iranians always saw al Qaeda as an outgrowth of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and therefore, through Shiite and Iranian eyes, never trusted it. Iran certainly didn't want al Qaeda to usurp the position of primary challenger to the West. Under any circumstances, it did not want al Qaeda to flourish. It was caught in a challenge. First, it had to reduce al Qaeda's influence, or concede that the Sunnis had taken the banner from Khomeini's revolution. Second, Iran had to reclaim its place. Third, it had to do this without undermining its geopolitical interests.
Tehran spent the time from 2003 through 2005 maximizing what it could from the Iraq situation. It also quietly participated in the reduction of al Qaeda's network and global reach. In doing so, it appeared to much of the Islamic world as clever and capable, but not particularly principled. Tehran's clear willingness to collaborate on some level with the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the war on al Qaeda made it appear as collaborationist as it had accused the Kuwaitis or Saudis of being in the past. By the end of 2005, Iran had secured its western frontier as well as it could, had achieved what influence it could in Baghdad, had seen al Qaeda weakened. It was time for the next phase. It had to reclaim its position as the leader of the Islamic revolutionary movement for itself and for Shi'ism.
Thus, the selection of the new president was, in retrospect, carefully engineered. After President Mohammed Khatami's term, all moderates were excluded from the electoral process by decree, and the election came down to a struggle between former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- an heir to Khomeini's tradition, but also an heir to the tactical pragmatism of the 1980s and 1990s -- and Ahmadinejad, the clearest descendent of the Khomeini revolution that there was in Iran, and someone who in many ways had avoided the worst taints of compromise.
Ahmadinejad was set loose to reclaim Iran's position in the Muslim world. Since Iran had collaborated with Israel during the 1980s, and since Iranian money in Lebanon had mingled with Israeli money, the first thing he had to do was to reassert Iran's anti-Zionist credentials. He did that by threatening Israel's existence and denying the Holocaust. Whether he believed what he was saying is immaterial. Ahmadinejad used the Holocaust issue to do two things: First, he established himself as intellectually both anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, taking the far flank among Islamic leaders; and second, he signaled a massive breach with Khatami's approach.
Khatami was focused on splitting the Western world by dividing the Americans from the Europeans. In carrying out this policy, he had to manipulate the Europeans. The Europeans were always open to the claim that the Americans were being rigid and were delighted to serve the role of sophisticated mediator. Khatami used the Europeans' vanity brilliantly, sucking them into endless discussions and turning the Iran situation into a problem the Europeans were having with the United States.
But Tehran paid a price for this in the Muslim world. In drawing close to the Europeans, the Iranians simply appeared to be up to their old game of unprincipled realpolitik with people -- Europeans -- who were no better than the Americans. The Europeans were simply Americans who were weaker. Ahmadinejad could not carry out his strategy of flanking the Wahhabis and still continue the minuet with Europe. So he ended Khatami's game with a bang, with a massive diatribe on the Holocaust and by arguing that if there had been one, the Europeans bore the blame. That froze Germany out of any further dealings with Tehran, and even the French had to back off. Iran's stock in the Islamic world started to rise.
The Nuclear Gambit
The second phase was for Iran to very publicly resume -- or very publicly claim to be resuming -- development of a nuclear weapon. This signaled three things:
1. Iran's policy of accommodation with the West was over.
2. Iran intended to get a nuclear weapon in order to become the only real challenge to Israel and, not incidentally, a regional power that Sunni states would have to deal with.
3. Iran was prepared to take risks that no other Muslim actor was prepared to take. Al Qaeda was a piker.
The fundamental fact is that Ahmadinejad knows that, except in the case of extreme luck, Iran will not be able to get nuclear weapons. First, building a nuclear device is not the same thing as building a nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon must be sufficiently small, robust and reliable to deliver to a target. A nuclear device has to sit there and go boom. The key technologies here are not the ones that build a device but the ones that turn a device into a weapon -- and then there is the delivery system to worry about: range, reliability, payload, accuracy. Iran has a way to go.
A lot of countries don't want an Iranian bomb. Israel is one. The United States is another. Throw Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most of the 'Stans into this, and there are not a lot of supporters for an Iranian bomb. However, there are only two countries that can do something about it. The Israelis don't want to get the grief, but they are the ones who cannot avoid action because they are the most vulnerable if Iran should develop a weapon. The United States doesn't want Israel to strike at Iran, as that would massively complicate the U.S. situation in the region, but it doesn't want to carry out the strike itself either.
This, by the way, is a good place to pause and explain to readers who will write in wondering why the United States will tolerate an Israeli nuclear force but not an Iranian one. The answer is simple. Israel will probably not blow up New York. That's why the United States doesn't mind Israel having nukes and does mind Iran having them. Is that fair? This is power politics, not sharing time in preschool. End of digression.
Intra-Islamic Diplomacy
If the Iranians are seen as getting too close to a weapon, either the United States or Israel will take them out, and there is an outside chance that the facilities could not be taken out with a high degree of assurance unless nukes are used. In the past, our view was that the Iranians would move carefully in using the nukes to gain leverage against the United States. That is no longer clear. Their focus now seems to be not on their traditional diplomacy, but on a more radical, intra-Islamic diplomacy. That means that they might welcome a (survivable) attack by Israel or the United States. It would burnish Iran's credentials as the true martyr and fighter of Islam.
Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be reaching out to the Sunnis on a number of levels. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a radical Shiite group in Iraq with ties to Iran, visited Saudi Arabia recently. There are contacts between radical Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon as well. The Iranians appear to be engaged in an attempt to create the kind of coalition in the Muslim world that al Qaeda failed to create. From Tehran's point of view, if they get a deliverable nuclear device, that's great -- but if they are attacked by Israel or the United States, that's not a bad outcome either.
In short, the diplomacy that Iran practiced from the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war until after the U.S. invasion of Iraq appears to be ended. Iran is making a play for ownership of revolutionary Islamism on behalf of itself and the Shia. Thus, Tehran will continue to make provocative moves, while hoping to avoid counterstrikes. On the other hand, if there are counterstrikes, the Iranians will probably be able to live with that as well.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
If Iran gets nukes it will use them on Israel. Israel will, of course, respond, making most of the Middle East uninhabitable for decades. Middle East oil will be unavailable. The world economy will crash, with most of the world plunged back to 19th century living. North America will be dropepd back 100 years with small pockets still having current technology (mostly military assets). The Stock Market will evaporate. Asia will suffer radiation deaths in the tens of millions with hunderds of millions sickened. The Americas will also be hit but to a lesser extent."
I would disagree with you damage assessment but do agree nothing good will come out of Iran having the bomb.
"Is that you Nostradamus? :)"
Did you see the TV show in 1979 or 1980 about Nostradamus? I think Orsen Wells hosted it. The part about Iran is chillingly accurate.
"To go after Iran at this time, the US will have to get on a full war footing with a military draft. We will need many more troops. The Middle East isn't the only region with tyrants looking for opportunities to engage in mischief."
Ummm... Pardon me, but don't we have 130,000 combat troops in Iraq as we speak? What about re-deploying the 100,000 to the Iranian theatre from places such as Germany, Eastern Europe Japan, etc? What about the M1's Abrahms, tons of aircraft, and a carrier battlefleet? 230,000 of the best trained troops using advanced combined arms tacticts and weaponry vs what? 70,000 Elite Iranian Republican Guards? Ok, I'll assume their entire military does not run like Iraq. My guess is that we will have them defeated within 120 days with the mad mullahs on the run like osama or dead.
"Iran is busy building the world's biggest KICK ME sign."
LOL AWARD OF THE DAY!
I'm guessing it would be closer to 12 days.
As for redeploying US military personnel from Iraq to Iran, you need to consider that those troops are providing security for the Iraqis, remove them and it is very likely Iraq will have a civil war. Certainly the terrorists and Baathists would be quite encouraged to take advantage of the situation. It would quickly degenerate into a, dare I say it, quagmire.
We have occupied Iraq, and we would have to occupy Iran. With that many troops tied down, one wonders who would take advantage of the opportunity to engage in a bit of mischief. Perhaps the Chicoms would see their opportunity for the takeover of Taiwan?
That's why I'm glad the adults are in charge of the executive branch. They have access to a great deal more info and analysis than we do. I, for one, hope they are making wise decisions. Only time will tell.
As for the European troops being redeployed, I think that is a great idea. Apparently, we are keeping them there for some reason which I have yet to fathom.
"I'm guessing it would be closer to 12 days.
As for redeploying US military personnel from Iraq to Iran, you need to consider that those troops are providing security for the Iraqis, remove them and it is very likely Iraq will have a civil war. Certainly the terrorists and Baathists would be quite encouraged to take advantage of the situation. It would quickly degenerate into a, dare I say it, quagmire.
We have occupied Iraq, and we would have to occupy Iran. With that many troops tied down, one wonders who would take advantage of the opportunity to engage in a bit of mischief. Perhaps the Chicoms would see their opportunity for the takeover of Taiwan?
That's why I'm glad the adults are in charge of the executive branch. They have access to a great deal more info and analysis than we do. I, for one, hope they are making wise decisions. Only time will tell.
As for the European troops being redeployed, I think that is a great idea. Apparently, we are keeping them there for some reason which I have yet to fathom."
I agree with your points. The Sunni insurgency is funded by Iran. If the leadership falls quickly enough, wondering if they could forment the chaos you mention in Iraq with our troops gone.
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