Another view of Iran
Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek sees Iran as far less a threat than some others do:
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a “residual rationality,” he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad…
Mr. Zakaria may be correct of course. It’s hard to know for sure. However, his case would be strengthened a bit (a) if we did not live in an age characterized by a particular brand of asymmetrical warfare; and (b) if Mr. Ahmadinejad would be a tad less millenarian and paranoid in his rhetoric, as well as less insistent on revolutionary purity.
October 24th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Zakaria’s comments seem sensible except that in detailing the essential harmlessness of Iran he draws attention away from the single area where Iran is dangerous.
I’d suppose the key concern must be that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, whether or not the Iranian leadership care about being residually rational.
It may be that Stalin and Mao, murderous and evil as they were, yet retained the sense that if push came to shove they would not survive a general war nor would they be able to exercise power over the remnant of the peoples they ruled..
I’m not clear that those concerns figure in the minds of Khamenei or Ahmedinajad or would in the minds of their successors..
This situation may not be a zero sum game essentially given the availability to the Iranian leadership of substantial perceived gain or reward in the after-life through doing the will of Allah.
If that assertion is true, does that warrant a pre-emptive strike?.