Iran
Another Washington Post article about Iran's machinations as the Ayatollahs try and wind their way through the obstacle course towards nuclear weapons.
There's a train of thought that says we (the democratic west) should just leave Iran alone, because we don't want a war, and with Iraq still rumbling we can't afford one anyway. It's sad, isn't it, how fast people forget what international diplomacy in that part of the world looked like before 9-11? We stay 'stop' to Saddam, and Saddam laughs and does whatever he was doing anyway... until we stay 'stop' again, and he laughs harder, and keeps doing it? If there's no real threat, autocratic regimes, be they Saddam's old one, or Iran's present one, just won't care what anyone says. Thus making it easier for them to gain nuclear weapons, thus actually INCREASING the odds of the war that everyone's trying to prevent.
The Iranian system is very different from Iraq's Baathists in that there are multiple competing centers of power. It's not an absolute dictatorship, and President Ahmedinejad does not have absolute power -- there's a parliament, and the Guardian Council to deal with too. Not all of them agree with Ahmedinejad. This gives the west the kind of leverage within Iran that autocratic regimes usually use against the west -- the ability try and split them politically down the middle, as the anti-democracy forces in Iraq are currently trying, with reasonable success, with America. But you can't do that unless there's a credible threat, and some Iranian factions start wondering what kind of disaster their President is driving them toward.
Here are some questions I don't know the answers to, but would love to. What's up with the Iranian Army? Yeah, there's a lot of Revolutionary Guard, and they're pretty fanatical (we hear) but what about the regular conscripts? Conscripts are drawn from the young population, and the young population is more pro-American than anti-American, and completely anti-Ayatollah. How happy will they be with the notion of being led into war against America? Or the police force, come to that, the majority of whom are regular guys not selected for religious zealotry?
The biggest problem the Bush Administration has is that they haven't pushed Iranian democracy anywhere near hard enough. That's not a failure just on ideological grounds, it's a failure on strategic grounds, because these rifts within Iranian society have not been exacerbated and widened... which means the Iranian leadership aren't anywhere near scared enough of what really ought to scare them far more than American bombs -- their own people.
There's a train of thought that says we (the democratic west) should just leave Iran alone, because we don't want a war, and with Iraq still rumbling we can't afford one anyway. It's sad, isn't it, how fast people forget what international diplomacy in that part of the world looked like before 9-11? We stay 'stop' to Saddam, and Saddam laughs and does whatever he was doing anyway... until we stay 'stop' again, and he laughs harder, and keeps doing it? If there's no real threat, autocratic regimes, be they Saddam's old one, or Iran's present one, just won't care what anyone says. Thus making it easier for them to gain nuclear weapons, thus actually INCREASING the odds of the war that everyone's trying to prevent.
The Iranian system is very different from Iraq's Baathists in that there are multiple competing centers of power. It's not an absolute dictatorship, and President Ahmedinejad does not have absolute power -- there's a parliament, and the Guardian Council to deal with too. Not all of them agree with Ahmedinejad. This gives the west the kind of leverage within Iran that autocratic regimes usually use against the west -- the ability try and split them politically down the middle, as the anti-democracy forces in Iraq are currently trying, with reasonable success, with America. But you can't do that unless there's a credible threat, and some Iranian factions start wondering what kind of disaster their President is driving them toward.
Here are some questions I don't know the answers to, but would love to. What's up with the Iranian Army? Yeah, there's a lot of Revolutionary Guard, and they're pretty fanatical (we hear) but what about the regular conscripts? Conscripts are drawn from the young population, and the young population is more pro-American than anti-American, and completely anti-Ayatollah. How happy will they be with the notion of being led into war against America? Or the police force, come to that, the majority of whom are regular guys not selected for religious zealotry?
The biggest problem the Bush Administration has is that they haven't pushed Iranian democracy anywhere near hard enough. That's not a failure just on ideological grounds, it's a failure on strategic grounds, because these rifts within Iranian society have not been exacerbated and widened... which means the Iranian leadership aren't anywhere near scared enough of what really ought to scare them far more than American bombs -- their own people.
2 Comments:
Hello, Joel. I arrived at your blog through the Brussels Journal and your excellent article about France, its youth and education. I'm an expat Australian, quite a bit older than you (I finished university in 1974), though we seem to share similar views. I like the way you approach politics without the big sonorous moralisms basing what you say on what has actually happened rather than what we wish would happen.
A question. How many others like you are there at university? How do you put up with the leftover radicals of yesteryear that seem to dominate academia? Are you viewed as a right-wing nut? (OK. That's 3 questions, but it's late)
Hi Noolabeulah
I haven't actually been at unversity long enough to get into any ideological fights. Actually the tutors seem pretty good, I have one who's a self-confessed lefty, but even he comes down hard on Marx and communism, and is generally pretty even handed.
The most liberating thing I've ever done, politically, was to become a centrist. I was always a lefty growing up, but 9-11 and some other things recently forced me to reconsider. Now I find I can actually be impartial, I don't hate people just for being on the wrong side of my political divide, and I feel much better about the world in general. I'd recommend centrism to everyone. These things are too important to be left entirely to ideologues of any stripe.
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