It isn’t just Ahmadinejad. He is not a loose cannon. The Iranian regime speaks with one voice on its nuclear plans, war, and Israel. Here’s General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, speaking at the Palestinian conference, describing part of Iran’s contingency planning, the part in which it would sweek to create chaos in Iraq (via AFP):

“You can start a war but it won’t be you who finishes it”…”The Americans know better than anyone that their troops in the region and in Iraq are vulnerable. I would advise them not to commit such a strategic error,”….”I would advise them to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger one”….. “We have American forces in the region under total surveillance. For the past two years, we have been ready for any scenario, whether sanctions or an attack.”

By the way, Iran views the threat of sanctions pretty much the same way we do, as meaningless, a mosquito bite, or in the words of Ahmadinejad today, of “no importance…She is free to say whatever she wants,” the president replied when asked to respond to comments by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice highlighting part of the UN charter that provides for sanctions backed up by the threat of military action. “We give no importance to her comments,” he said with a broad smile. His broad smile is no doubt made broader by the knowledge that sanctions, whatever their effectiveness, would be blocked by China and Russia at the UN.

One of the assumptions in Teheran’s war planning is that the US no longer understands real war and has no stomach for it: At a Friday prayer sermon in Tehran, senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Janati simply branded the US as a “decaying power” lacking the “stamina” to block Iran’s ambitions.

Lets review the assumptions that Iran is making about the United States in its unapologetic quest for nuclear weapons, and its laughing at sanctions and possible military action:

(a) perhaps other countries would keep the US from doing anything whatsoever about Iran, through the UN or otherwise;
(b) the US would attack Iran with precision and restraint if at all;
(c) whatever tactics Iran would use in response to a US attack — terrorism, oil embargo, chaos in Iraq, use of the MSM — would create a “quagmire” beyond the “stamina” of the US to withstand;
(d) the lack of Iran’s actual warmaking power would be offset by a combination of military self-restraint by America, global and domestic protest at American action, dovish political opposition in the US, the MSM’s amplification of whatever Iran would do to put it on a superior footing to American military action, and perhaps factors unknown.

We can argue about various of the assumptions if you like, but there is one assumption that Iran is making that is incontrovertible: the US will not use overwhelming force to liquidate Iran’s nuclear capability, its military and the command structure.

Iran’s base case appears to be that the US will use pinpricks if it does anything at all. In response Iran will unleash an array of terrorism, economic penalties, and daily doses of US troops getting killed in Iraq and elsewhere, dial up the MSM to video the misery, and wait for the quagmire to demoralize the infidels. Shock and awe might just as well be shuck ‘n’ jive. Everyone in the world understands now how to wage a propaganda war against the US, using the complicit MSM: you can just picture the daily scenes of car bombs and suicide missions against Americans, and Iranian women wailing with broken babies about the cruelty of the US on Fox and CNN. Final score: Quagmire 100, US 2.

Given the warmaking style of the Bush administration, and the totally non-warmaking style of its Democratic oppostion, Iran’s assessment seems pretty correct to us.

UPDATE

Have you not grasped what is most frightening of all in our discussion? This is how Iran behaves and what Iran can do, and how the US is hobbled, before Iran has nuclear weapons. Imagine the boldness of Iran once it can hand off a few weapons to some of its martyrs for deployment in the US.

UPDATE II

Please understand that it is Iran’s intention to remove Israel from the map and create a one-state solution for Palestine. Steven M. Warshawsky discusses this today in the American Thinker, and we continue to quote Iran’s leaders from the AFP article:

“The Zionist regime is an injustice and by its very nature a permanent threat,” Ahmadinejad told the gathering of regime officials, visiting Palestinian militant leaders and foreign sympathizers. “Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is on the road to being eliminated,” said Ahmadinejad, whose regime does not recognise Israel and who drew international condemnation last year when he said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

“If there is serious doubt over the Holocaust, there is no doubt over the catastrophe and Holocaust being faced by the Palestinians,” said the president, who had previously dismissed as a “myth” the killing of an estimated six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II. “I tell the governments who support Zionism to … let the migrants (Jews) return to their countries of origin. If you think you owe them something, give them some of your land,” he said.

Iran’s turbaned supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also accused the United States of seeking to place the entire region under Israeli control. “The plots by the American government against Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon aimed at governing the Middle East with the control of the Zionist regime will not succeed,” Khamenei said.

It seems clear that Iran would prefer to have the Jews moved out of Israel to Europe, America and elsewhere versus destroying the country with nuclear weapons. That way, Palestine will be a bit more habitable than it would be at 9000 degrees. But one way or another, Israel is going. So get used to doing what nuclear Iran commands, or be prepared to do what is required to prevent it.

UPDATE III

Reuel Marc Gerecht has a piece in the Weekly Standard that contains an interesting insight, that the reason Iran has pumped up the volume to 11 on its nuclear plans is to generate a “no go” decision now by the West about bombing, when the US is tied down and Bush polls are low:

The Iranians are making the astute call that if they can get the West to acquiesce now–if they can get the West to believe they really are on the verge of industrial-scale enrichment–then they’re much safer than if they drag this out. America is, so CNN says (and the Iranian English-speaking elite faithfully watch CNN), tied down in Iraq. Politically, President Bush is obviously weak. Down the road, circumstances might not be so propitious. And the Iranian nuclear-weapons program is now technically probably ready to advance. Add it all up, and the current Iranian push, coming from both Rafsanjani, who the Europeans had surreally hoped would stop this program, and Ahmadinejad, is tactically brilliant. Unless Rafsanjani’s and Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric and actions now provoke more intense European resolve (and if this doesn’t do it, nothing will), no sanctions strategy is likely to congeal effectively.

And the Bush administration hasn’t been helping. It has been loath to ramp up the specter of military strikes to reinforce a sanctions-threat in European-Iranian nuclear negotiations. The president would actually be wiser to allow Seymour Hersh’s “wild speculation” in the New Yorker to be seen as acceptable contemplation in his White House.

This analysis seems about right to us. If, despite all their nuclear sabre-rattling, Iran gets a “no go” decision from the US on action against Iran now, why should things change from inaction to action in the future?

We admire the way our enemy plays high-stakes poker, though purely from an aesthetic point of view. It is our opinion that if the Bush Doctrine is to have any meaning whatsoever, Iran is its test case and soon is the time for an overwhelming use of force to neuter Iran as a regional power. We note, however, in reading such mainstream commentators as Powerline, that the likelihood of such action is considered remote. If that is true, the appropriate analogy is this: Hitler has once again invaded the Rhineland, and once again we are doing nothing to stop him.

UPDATE IV

Amir Taheri provides some religious context to Ahmadinejad’s strategy, via Telegraph:

Last Monday, just before he announced that Iran had gatecrashed “the nuclear club”, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours. He was having a khalvat (tête-à-tête) with the Hidden Imam, the 12th and last of the imams of Shiism who went into “grand occultation” in 941.

According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or “nails”, whose presence, hammered into mankind’s existence, prevents the universe from “falling off”. Although the “nails” are not known to common mortals, it is, at times, possible to identify one thanks to his deeds. It is on that basis that some of Ahmad-inejad’s more passionate admirers insist that he is a “nail”, a claim he has not discouraged. For example, he has claimed that last September, as he addressed the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York, the “Hidden Imam drenched the place in a sweet light”.

Last year, it was after another khalvat that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. Now, he boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a “clash of civilisations” in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the “infidel” West, led by the United States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war.

In Ahmadinejad’s analysis, the rising Islamic “superpower” has decisive advantages over the infidel. Islam has four times as many young men of fighting age as the West, with its ageing populations. Hundreds of millions of Muslim “ghazis” (holy raiders) are keen to become martyrs while the infidel youths, loving life and fearing death, hate to fight. Islam also has four-fifths of the world’s oil reserves, and so controls the lifeblood of the infidel. More importantly, the US, the only infidel power still capable of fighting, is hated by most other nations.

According to this analysis, spelled out in commentaries by Ahmadinejad’s strategic guru, Hassan Abassi, known as the “Dr Kissinger of Islam”, President George W Bush is an aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have “run away”. Iran’s current strategy, therefore, is to wait Bush out.

UPDATE V

Mark Steyn informs us on how to play-act at being Ahmadinejad and the West:

You know what’s great fun to do if you’re on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you’re getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, “I’ve got a bomb!” Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, “It’s OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn’t got a bomb.” And then the second marshal would say, “And even if he did have a bomb it’s highly unlikely he’d ever use it.” And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, “Relax, everyone. That’s just a harmless rhetorical flourish.” And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, “Yes, but it’s entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew.”

That’s how it goes with the Iranians. The more they claim they’ve gone nuclear, the more U.S. intelligence experts — oops, where are my quote marks? — the more U.S. intelligence “experts” insist no, no, it won’t be for another 10 years yet. The more they conclusively demonstrate their non-compliance with the IAEA, the more the international community warns sternly that, if it were proved that Iran were in non-compliance, that could have very grave consequences. But, fortunately, no matter how thoroughly the Iranians non-comply it’s never quite non-compliant enough to rise to the level of grave consequences. You can’t blame Ahmadinejad for thinking “our enemies cannot do a damned thing.”

Steyn also notes: A couple of months back, the newspaper Kayhan, owned by Ayatollah Khamenei, ran an editorial called “Our Immortality And The West’s Disability,” the theme of which we discuss above.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 8:18 am and is filed under General, MSM, Religion, War, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.