'In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. I say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant." 'The Ayatollah Rafsanjani said that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Rafsanjani ---[a former Iranian president, who's regarded as a moderate clerical-fascist these days!] --- also noted that 5 million Jews would die in an Iranian nuclear strike, while a mere 15 million Iranians would perish in an Israeli retaliation as a small "sacrifice" considering the over one billion Muslims worldwide. 'In February of last year [2006], a fatwa was issued in Qom allowing the use of nuclear weapons in war." ' For the Frontpage source, click here.
The series on Iran --- on its nuclear ambitions and what the prospects are likely to be of the US and friendly countries deterring and containing a major terrorist-supporting clerical state once it's armed with nuclear weapons --- continues its casual loafing pace toward the finish line: not quite at tortoise speed, mind you, but not kicking up dust like a skedaddling loose and limber hare either. No matter. Can't be helped. Prof bug busy, you see, on a couple of other writing tasks that have deadlines like billboards flashing madly in front of his eyes.
Today's Overarching Theme
So far, since last summer, the Iranian series has unfolded a good 8 articles . . . all ranging widely, with lots of warning signals posted every so often that writing about a highly secretive regime is bound to be speculative. That was true of the Soviet Union during the cold war; it's no less true of Iran these days. Enter our theme in this 9th article, dealt with, as buggy visitors might recall, in preliminary manner early on in the series and hanging fire ever since: whether, to put it tersely, what we've learned during the cold war about the political and strategic conditions of successful nuclear deterrence and armed containment can apply to a nuclear-armed country like Iran . . . the major state-supporter of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere, with little chance that its nuclear arms programs can be halted by diplomacy or economic sanctions.How the Argument Will Unfold in Three Parts
Part One
As largely a jog to your memory, part one stresses anew a key point made several times earlier in this series: the threats and other problems that a nuclear-armed, terrorist-promoting Iran would create for the US, its allies, and friendly Arab countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have only a little to do with the presence in power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country's current president. Very much the contrary.(i.) How so?
For one thing, Ahmadinejad has been in power for only 20 months, while the threats and nuclear program are by now decades-old. For another, more important thing, the dominant policymaking power in Iran --- both in foreign and domestic matters --- doesn't reside with the elected president and parliament anyway. Largely a façade for the all-powerful clerical institutions put in place since the Iranian revolution of 1979, these electoral institutions can do nothing whatever that the diehard mullahs and ayatollahs who operate in the murky shadows won't allow. Instead, as in Hitler's Germany, the final say on all issues at home and abroad lies in the hands of the Supreme Leader, period. Currently the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, the successor to the fiery, homicidal Ayatollah Khomeini since 1989 --- a fanatical, infidel-hating ultraist, who publicly espoused endless jihadi terrorism and martyrdom against non-Muslims everywhere --- the Supreme Leader may or may not initially consult the tiny Guardian Council of 12 clerics and Islamic legal specialists before he decides something . . . not that it matters much, when you get down to the nitty gritty, what with all 12 of those members chosen either directly or indirectly by the Supreme Leader. To repeat, the Supreme Leader yields nothing to Hitler in his overpowering right --- ordained by the Koran in the Iranian constitution --- to decide and command on any issue he so wants. Consider it the Hitlerian Fuerher Prinzip in radical Islamist garb, right down to propagating Nazi-like racism as part of the regime's core ideology.
(ii.) Come to that, since a strict application of Sharia, Islamic law, denies that there can be any division between public and private life --- always the hallmark of a totalitarian dictatorship --- the Supreme Leader can dictate his will on any moral, religious, cultural, scientific, athletic, or personal matter he wants . . . right down to ordaining what is or isn't proper dress and decorum for women in public, and the penalties that the Mutaween, the religious police, will enforce on the spot. As in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Taliban Afghanistan --- both extremist Islamist states, with their own rigid application of Sharia law --- the Mutaween has been relentlessly zealous in applying the regime's dogmatic totalitarian controls. Small wonder. Its ranks seem to be filled with Islamist fanatics and misogynists. What's more, to ensure full obedience, the clerical-fascists in control of the regime don't just rely on the religious police --- far from it. Like all mind-controlling, ideologically infested police-states, Iran has an array of other legally recognized coercive forces to terrorize recalcitrant citizens and guarantee their conformity: the ordinary police, the political secret police, the para-military Basij with millions of members, the elite Republican Guard, and Ansar-e-Hezbollah . . . the latter the Iranian equivalent, to clarify, of Hitler's Nazi Party, an ultra-extremist Islamist movement that the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini founded. Like true-believing Nazis --- or, possibly, the fanatics of Hitler's more elite SS corps --- the zealous elite-members of Ansar-e-Hezbollah can do practically anything they want to anyone else, convinced that the clerical legalists in charge of administering Sharia will, if need be, endorse their actions.
(iii.) Given this system of power, what follows?
It's self-evident or should be. The terrorist and nuclear threats that the US, its European allies, and friendly countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have to confront derive directly from Iran's institutionalized clerical-fascist system, and not from this or that elected official. As for Ahmadinejad, to the extent his swaggering motor-mouth diplomacy, macabre Holocaust denial, and non-stop Jew-hating racism have made any difference, it's largely in Iran's diplomatic style, not in the substance of those clerical-inspired ambitions, its nuclear arms program, and its energetic, non-stop support of Islamist terror abroad
(iv.) This point deserves to be clarified. To say what we've just said about Ahmadinejad is not to say that he hasn't had any influence on the challenging threats faced by the US and its allies and friends. He has. More specifically, just to hint at this right now, nothing more, Ahmadinejad's crackpot apocalyptic fantasies, his bursting megalomania, and his large following in the country and in the elite Republican Guard --- through whose ranks he rose to prominence --- all combine to complicate the menacing problems we confront of dealing with a nuclear-armed terror-state. Assume the worst happens: Ahmadinejad manages to outmaneuver his adversaries among the diehard mullahs and ayatollahs in charge of Iran for decades, replacing them over time with his cronies in the key power-holding institutions --- the Guardian Council and the office of the Supreme Leader once Khamenei, an old sick man, joins the angels and his virgins --- all the while remaining in the presidential office itself. What then? In such circumstances, no one can be sure that a frenzied leader with a sense of Heaven-ordained destiny and fanatical, religiously inspired beliefs of brain-jolting theocratic nuttiness can be readily deterred and his country contained the way, say, the Soviet Union was during the cold war. The outcome for deterrent success toward clerical-fascist Iran will largely hinge, then, on whether Ahmadinejad and his idolizing chums who share his hallucinatory Mahdi-Messiah and Armageddon-just-around-the-corner hokum prevail or not. What if they don't? Well, even then, Iran will remain a truculently anti-Western, anti-democratic source of racism, terrorism, and threats to countries near and far, at any rate as long as the clerical-fascist regime --- hated by most Iranians --- remains in place. What follows? In effect, two faintly optimistic inferences.
Though clerical-fascist Iran will still loom as a major terrorist threat in the Middle East and elsewhere, at least the shared mind-sets of these entrenched, utterly corrupt, high-living mullahs and ayatollahs are not likely to crackle with swarms of unhinged medieval-infected fantasies that --- if acted on --- would shatter their lavish power and their current orgies of endless money-making in retaliatory knockout blows launched by us, our allies, or Israel.
As a result, the prospects of successful deterrence, containment, and constant pressure by us and others on that dangerous regime --- diplomatic, economic, and military --- will appear more encouraging . . . until, sooner or later, as happened with the Communist Soviet Union, the detested clerical-fascist system in Iran collapses from within by our outside help and resolution.
Part Two
At this point, the argument shifts to look at the specific threats that a nuclear-armed Iran is likely to pose for the US, its western allies, and friendly Muslim countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. Some of the commentary at this point will duplicate what was said in earlier articles in this series, but much of it will be new. One way or another, whoever is the US president in 2009 will have to contend with these Iranian-generated threats. They're not imagined or exaggerated, much as a large part of the political left here and in Europe pretend they are; they're concrete, the real thing, and nuclear weapons will aggravate and multiply their menace. How the next American president will handle them --- assigning priorities, maybe treating the threats as a whole, and the utility of negotiations, counter-threats, and clearly monitored rewards for promised change of behavior by Teheran (if it ever comes to that) --- is another matter, with some room of maneuver here. The same, it goes without saying, is true of using military coercion against the clerical-fascist regime, whether limited or more far-reaching.