DETERRENCE AND IRAN
A set of papers from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy entitled “Deterring the Ayatollahs: Complications in Applying Cold War Strategy to Iran“.
Hat tip to Jedburgh of The Small Wars Council.
YOU CAN BLEED THEM WHILE YOU NEGOTIATE WITH THEM
When Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, retired from government service after the end of the first Bush administration, he wrote a memoir , From the Shadows, in which he described the no-nonsense, George Schultz as ” the toughest Secretary of State I ever knew” who ” saw no contradiction” in bleeding the Soviets in one part of the world while negotiating with them in another. Secretary Schultz, whose opinion of the CIA on a 1 to 10 scale hovered in the negative integers, was not nearly as complimentary to Robert Gates in his own, ponderously unreadable, memoirs, but that is a story for another day.
I bring this anecdote of a less complex era up because of the furor over the Bush administration classifying the Pasdaran ( the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) as a terrorist organization in order to take action against those business enterprises that are connected to the Pasdaran. The objections to this move appear to be two-fold: first, that it hypothetically puts American military personnel at risk of maltreatment and, secondly, that it could disrupt negotiations with Iran on a range of bilateral and international issues, most importantly, Iraq.
The critics are incorrect. It is a move a quarter-century overdue.
In the first instance, correctly identifying the Pasdaran as a state sponsor of international terrorism, which as a matter of historical record, it clearly is, does not prevent treating it’s uniformed personnel as POWs in case of an armed conflict between Iran and the United States. The Pasdaran, by contrast, has already tortured two Americans to death – Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley and USMC Colonel William Higgins – at a time of peace between Iran and the United States.
Cry me no river of tears for Pasdaran agents in Iraq being held captive by the U.S. military or who are being whacked in some alleyway by Sunni tribals in our employ. The Iranians knew the risks, from the inception, of the rules they chose to operate under, violating the most basic precepts of international law. It did not have to be that way – even the CIA and the KGB came to a rough modus vivendi during the Cold War that prevented most escalatory incidents – Teheran though has chosen to play rough. Let them enjoy the bed they have made for themselves.
Secondly, until we have an agreement with Iran we do not have any agreement and the regime should be squeezed at every point until we do. I’m all for negotiating in earnest, making the realistic, even generous, concessions that we can easily afford, finding areas of common interest and ( eventually) normalizing relations. We should scrupulously keep our word and demonstrate to the Iranians through actions that we will deliver exactly what we promise. But until that point in time, Teheran should get no favors, no breathing space, no economic freebies of any kind until we come to an arrangement.
The leadership of Iran is a nasty and brutal group. Within that circle, Ahmadinejad represents some of the regime’s worst elements but, as a whole, the Iranians do not seem irrational, simply adversarial. We can cut a deal with them but we should proceed without any illusions.
IRGC STORY LINKS:
STIRRINGS FOR A RETURN TO FISCAL CONSERVATISM
The office of Comptroller-General of the United States , who heads the GAO and serves for a 15 year term, is hardly a political powerhouse inside the beltway and, generally, these appointees labor in bureaucratic obscurity. The current Comptroller-General, David M. Walker, a Clinton-appointee, has been making the rounds giving speeches calling for both transformation of archaic governmental practices and a return to fiscal conservatism in national policy, yet with more optimism than is typical for traditional “green eyeshade” worldviews.
Worth a read ( Hat tip to Fabius Maximus).
CARVILLE ON ROVE
I generally eschew writing about pure partisan politics. Mainly this is because that subject was something that interested me deeply in my teens and early twenties, a time before the last drop of spontaneity and authenticity had been wrung out out of American politics. Today, any well informed person can script the talking points that will come over the TV on the Sunday morning talking head shows, so sterile and homogenized, yet polarized, has public discourse become.
Nevertheless, I found James Carville’s FT.com piece on Karl Rove interesting. The number of living folks who have run a presidential campaign would not fill even a small room but it is a room that would contain both Karl Rove and James Carville. Carville is spinning hard but prior to driving home his selected memes, he does offer up a tribute of sorts to one of the few men who counts as a peer of James Carville:
“Nationally he has pulled off some of the most unexpected and impressive victories of modern political history. (I will not be debating the 2000 election for the purposes of this article, but I also will not be crediting him with it, so let us just move on to the next cycle.)
Mr Rove picked up seats in what was an almost historically impossible context in 2002. Then in 2004, he engineered one of the most remarkable feats in American politics. He got Americans to re-elect a president who they really did not want to re-elect. Even the Republican defeat in 2006 was predictable and well within the range of historical norms so, by this sport’s standard of winning and losing, there is still no black mark on Rove’s record.
If we concluded our analysis in 2007 and confined our judgment merely to Mr Rove’s immediate electoral record, we would have no choice but to judge him a spectacular success. There is no doubt that Mr Rove won elections. He has perhaps one of the most remarkable win-percentages in modern American politics.”
I’ve never been in awe of Karl Rove who took on a mythic (if demonic) and quasi -lightning rod quality in the Left blogosphere and was an understated presence on the Right ( perhaps because he had occasional meetings with top ranking conservative bloggers who were therefore loathe to annoy him). His sense of history always struck me as badly strained and Rove’s ability as a political image-maker and message strategist paled next to that of Reagan consultants like Roger Ailes, Lyn Nofziger, Michael Deaver, Ed Rollins and David Gergen.
But the man knows how to win elections.
ROBB’S COMING URBAN TERROR
New article in The City Journal by John Robb.
John is in the important post-publication stage of proselytizing his work and worldview which he introduces well to City Journal readers. As someone more familiar with Global Guerillas, I especially liked John’s neat summative explanation of networks, tight coupling and cascading effects in a social-political-economic-infrastructural complex system.
Network theory is one of the key concepts for the intelligent public to understand for the 21st century.
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