Proof that Iran cannot be contained through mutually assured destruction
The Obama administration believes that it doesn't matter whether Iran gets nuclear weapons because they can be contained through the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
I've always believed they're wrong. Now, I have proof.
Unlike North Korea whose territorial claims are limited to the Korean Peninsula, the Ayatollahs' territorial claims – featuring prominently in their school textbooks, weekly sermons and daily subversive and terroristic operations - transcend Iran, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and the Muslim World. Unlike North Korea which is deterred by MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), the apocalyptic Ayatollahs are not deterred - but energized - by MAD. For example, The Qur'an and Life (Grade 12, p. 125) prepares children for the apocalyptic war against the US, and Defense Readiness (Grade 11, p. 11) praises the 500,000 children who were sent to clear the minefields during the war against Iraq.
Would they really teach their kids that sort of thing if they weren't ready to follow through on it?
(1)... For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”
It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.
The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.
(2) The nature of the grievance.
The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.
(3) The nature of the target.
America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.
In U.S.-Soviet deterrence, both sides knew that a nuclear war would destroy them mutually. The mullahs have thought the unthinkable to a different conclusion. They know about the Israeli arsenal. They also know, as Rafsanjani said, that in any exchange Israel would be destroyed instantly and forever, whereas the ummah — the Muslim world of 1.8 billion people whose redemption is the ultimate purpose of the Iranian revolution — would survive damaged but almost entirely intact.
This doesn’t mean that the mullahs will necessarily risk terrible carnage to their country in order to destroy Israel irrevocably. But it does mean that the blithe assurance to the contrary — because the Soviets never struck first — is nonsense. The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war.
Fareed Zakaria papers over mass murder to avoid acting on Iran nukes
Here's Fareed Zakaria insisting that there is a comparison between Iran and the Soviet Union.
Let's go to the videotape.
Sorry, but Zakaria is dead wrong. The Soviet Union was not apocalyptic. It was not seeking to bring about the arrival of a Messiah via 'martyrdom.' Iran is not the Soviet Union.
And to argue that Iranians haven't carried out suicide attacks (they have supported them - and this week they might have meant to attempt them, at least in Thailand) is absurd.
Touting the theory of mutually assured destruction, which prevented the U.S. and the Soviet Union from annihilating one another with nuclear weapons, Zakaria suggested that Iran could be deterred from using nuclear weapons. He quoted Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, as saying that deterrence “is less disastrous than preventive war.” Rose is a former National Security Council official in the Clinton Administration and a prominent official of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Zakaria said that “While the Iranian regime is often called crazy, it has done much less to merit the term than did a regime such as Mao’s China. Over the past decade, there have been thousands of suicide bombings by Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Pakistanis, but not been a single suicide attack by an Iranian.”
This is deceptive to the point of dishonesty. Why would he go back in history to the time of Mao’s China, but only examine suicide bombings over the last ten years?
The answer is that the facts about Iranian suicide bombings do suggest a craziness on the part of the regime. The strange formulation of “over the past decade” enabled him to ignore the fact that, on October 23, 1983, Iran ordered and carried out the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American military personnel. An Iranian drove the car bomb into the barracks.
I think this is the dumbest piece I've seen on Iran yet.
A close look at the history of the nuclear age shows that countries with nuclear weapons are neither more likely to make coercive threats nor more likely to succeed in blackmailing their adversaries. Nuclear powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union certainly made numerous threats after they acquired nuclear weapons. But so did Libya, Serbia, Turkey, Iraq, Venezuela, and dozens of other countries that did not possess the bomb. Nuclear weapons are not a prerequisite for engaging in military blackmail.
No, they're not. But what country did the United States threaten to wipe out with its nuclear weapons? When did the Soviet Union become apocalyptic? When did it ever say that it was willing to allow half its population to die in order to wipe out the United States or any other country?
The United States and the Soviet Union kept each other at bay for more than thirty years through the concept of mutually assured destruction. Given that each country was led by rational actors, and that each country had a second-strike capability that was capable of annihilating the other, the two were able to deter each other from using nuclear weapons.
Who will deter Iran, which has threatened time and again to wipe out Israel, which is led by people who have an apocalyptic vision of a 12th imam descending from Heaven at the end of a nuclear war, and which has said that losing half its population is an acceptable price for wiping out Israel?
Many hardliners say Iran’s ideological fervor makes it unique. US officials voiced similar concerns about Mao’s China in the early 1960s. But nuclear weapons did not embolden China. Iran today is certainly different from China in the 1960s, but policymakers would do well to remember that apocalyptic fears about nuclear proliferation are not new.
China was not suicidal and didn't have a culture that glorified suicide and death.
The only way to write a piece like these authors wrote is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the nature and words of the Iranian regime.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
