[lit-ideas] Re: Dutch support killer of van Gogh
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:04:27 -0800
Eric,
For the past several days I have been trying to think the unthinkable, i.e.,
Iran with Nuclear weapons, and the only thing that could make it thinkable
(in my mind) was to either get past the Mullahs (having them ousted which is
easier said than done) to the pro-American younger generation, or reach some
sort of agreement like North and company did with Rafsanjani. The latter is
out of office but he is still very powerful. He may be the richest man in
Iran - from pistachio farming. But I couldn't envision the means.
I think the Nixon in China scenario brilliant. He broached that on
Scarborough Country and got stunned silence from the rest of the panel.
Scarborough pushed everyone for a reaction and they all stammered something
along the lines of, " the tha that mi might work, maybe."
Hitchens' plan might take the immediate heat off, but it would unfortunately
still leave us with Amadinejad and the Mullahs. I don't share Hitchens view
of how pragmatic they are. Khatami tried to get them to compromise and move
in a liberal direction and failed; so we probably aren't going to do any
better. Hitchens scenario would solve the nuclear problem but not the
objectionable weltanschauung. Only the younger generation in office (if
they could get there) could do that.
If we got a nuclear agreement but Iran felt free to continue to support
Hezbollah and other Islamist organizations, we might be worse off than we
are now. That is, they may promise not to bomb us (which they probably
weren't going to do anyway) but for that agreement we may have to look the
other way at their terrorist activities.
However, if the Mullahs felt constrained to curtail their activities,
something Hitchens assumes, that could also work, but I fail to see the
incentive for them. I wonder if Hitchens knows that Khomeini had an
interest in the Ummah. He sought to play down the Shiite/Sunni differences
and tried to reach out to the Sunnis. Also, I wonder if Hitchens is aware
of the Timmerman evidence that Al Quaeda used Iran as a training facility
for the 9/11 attack. It may be harder to move Iran our way than Hitchens
thinks, but I like his idea anyway.
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Eric
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2006 11:16 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Dutch support killer of van Gogh
Lawrence: Christopher Hitchens said Amadinejad is
just a puppet and can be safely ignored (the other
day on MSNBC's Scarborough Country), but if I were
living in Israel I doubt I would be listening to
this fellow with equanimity. I might very well be
hoping my government was planning another Osirik.
Eric: Hitchens has a pragmatic approach to Iran,
which he published on Slate recently. He is
convinced a pre-emptive strike won't do enough.
See what you think of his notions below.
______http://www.slate.com/id/2137560/__________
The most touching remark I heard during my time in
Iran last year was from a woman in the wonderfully
beautiful city of Isfahan. (It is just outside
this cultural treasure house that the mullahs have
chosen to place one of their mountain-dugout
nuclear sites.) In the family home where I was
staying, contempt and hatred for theocracy was a
given, but this was a family friend, moreover
draped in a deep black chador, who stayed on the
edge of the conversation. Finally she broke in to
ask shyly, in faultless English, "Would it be
possible for the Americans to invade just for a
few days, get rid of the mullahs and the weapons,
and then leave?"
My heart went out to her. And I would guess, from
traveling around several Iranian cities, that
there are very many Iranians who are wishful along
just those lines. They dream of some magic trick
that would just make the bearded ones go away,
restore Iran to the international community, and
yet not compromise its cherished national pride
and independence. My guess would also be that, of
the millions who want the mullahs gone, very few
would support an outside military intervention if
it actually occurred. In other words, the most
precious asset that the United States has in the
current crisis-a large pro-American public opinion
in Iran-is apparently not of much use to it in
deciding what to do about the weapons program.
All the war games and simulations that I have seen
have concluded that it isn't possible to disarm
Iran by air strikes. Learning perhaps from what
happened to Saddam's nuclear plant at Osirak, the
authorities have dispersed the program widely and
put a lot of it underground. Nor can the Israelis
be expected to do much by proxy: They would have
to fly over Iraq this time, and it would be even
more obvious than usual that they were acting as
an American surrogate. Professor Edward Luttwak
claims, in the Wall Street Journal, that selective
strikes could still retard or degrade the program,
but this, if true, would only restate the problem
in a different form.
This means that our options are down to three:
reliance on the United Nations/European Union
bargaining table, a "decapitating" military
strike, or Nixon goes to China. The first being
demonstrably useless and somewhat humiliating, and
the second being possibly futile as well as
hazardous, it might be worth giving some thought
to the third of these.
Assume that the Iranians are within measurable
distance of nuclear status. Appearances sometimes
to the contrary, they are not mad-or not
clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein
was and Kim Jong-il is. The recent fuss about the
obliteration of Israel is largely bullshit:
Ayatollah Khomeini's call for this has been
intoned pedantically and routinely ever since he
first uttered it, and it only got attention this
year because of the new phenomenon of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, the scrofulous engineer who acts the
part of civilian president for his clerical
bosses. These people (who once bought weapons from
Israel via Oliver North in order to fight Saddam
Hussein) are cynical and corrupt. They know as
well as you do what would happen if they tried to
nuke Israel or the United States. They want the
bomb as insurance against invasion and as a weapon
of strategic ambiguity to shore up their position
in the region.
But they have a crucial vulnerability on the
inside. The overwhelmingly young population-an
ironic result of the mullahs' attempt to increase
the birth rate after the calamitous war with
Iraq-is fed up with medieval rule. Unlike the
hermetic societies of Baathist Iraq and North
Korea, Iran has been forced to permit a lot of
latitude to its citizens. A huge number of them
have relatives in the West, access to satellite
dishes and cell phones, and regular contact with
neighboring societies. They are appalled at the
way that Turkey, for example, has evolved into a
near-European state while Iran is still stuck in
enforced backwardness and stagnation, competing
only in the rug and pistachio markets. Opinion
polling is a new science in Iran, but several
believable surveys have shown that a huge majority
converges on one point: that it is time to resume
diplomatic relations with the United States. (The
vast American Embassy compound, which I visited,
is for now a stupid museum of propaganda. But when
one mullah recently asked if he could have a piece
of the extensive grounds for a religious school,
he was told by the authorities that the place must
be kept intact.)
So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force
One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The
president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in
return for an equivalent in Washington and the
un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and
announces that sanctions have been a waste of time
and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need
not add that they have also given some clerics
monopoly positions in various black markets; the
populace already knows this.) A new era is
possible, he goes on to say. America and the
Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just
as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban,
and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a
large and talented Iranian community. Let the
exchange of trade and people and ideas begin!
There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write
paragraph, saying that America is not proud of
everything it is has done in the past-most notably
Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam
to invade Iran.
The aging mullahs might claim this as a
capitulation, which would be hard to bear. But how
right would they be? The pressure for a new
constitution and genuine elections is already
building. Within less than a decade, we might be
negotiating with a whole new generation of
Iranians. Iran would have less incentive to
disrupt progress in Iraq (and we should not forget
that it has been generally not unhelpful in
Afghanistan). Eventually, Iran might have a
domestic nuclear program (to which it is fully
entitled and which would decrease its
oil-dependency) and be ready to sign a
nonproliferation agreement with enforceable and
verifiable provisions. American technical help
would be available for this, since it was we who
(in a wonderful moment of Kissingerian "realism")
helped them build the Bushehr reactor in the first
place.
Just a thought.
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