Here, by way of a preliminary jolt --- intended to jar your mind into thinking about the high-coiled nature of this topic --- are some raw revealing words on Islam, the religious duties of violent jihad it imposes on its followers, and the belief in an endless war against infidels and the world of darkness until Islam triumphs globally, no exceptions anywhere . . . all voiced in the 1980s by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, the pioneer leader of Iran's Islamic Shi-ite revolution back in 1979, and the first Supreme Leader of its clerical-fascist totalitarian regime.

Like his successor after his death in 1989, the Grand Ayatollah Khameini, Khomeini embodied the same political and spiritual position in Iranian life as Hitler did in Nazi Germany: the Fuehrer Prinzip . . . the leader who is above all law, and whose own word on any subject was and is the indisputable final word on it. Almost two decades after his death, Khomeini remains the most influential cleric in Shi-ite Islam since the early Middle Ages.

"Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of other countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.. .. But those who study Islamic Holy \War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. . . . Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those who say this are witless.

"Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]. Does this mean sitting back until [non-Muslims] overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should surrender [to the enemy]?

"Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur'anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight.

"Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim."

In case you think Khomeini's snarling calls to mass-murdering jihadi warfare reflected a transitory view, all fired up, say, by revolutionary ardor, you might want to ponder the words of his successor who still is in power: the Ayatollah Khameini, speaking at Ayatollah Khomeini's Mausoleum, June 4, 2002:

" Let me say to you: these stances [of American administrators on suicide bombings] will not be of any use. This quest for martyrdom is not based on emotions; it is based on belief in Islam and faith in [the] Judgment Day and faith in life after death. Anywhere Islam exists in its true sense, arrogance faces this threat.



PART ONE:
THE BLUNT, DOWN-TO-EARTH ANSWER TO THE TITLE-QUESTION:

In truth, nobody really knows if a nuclear terror state like Iran could be reliably deterred --- whether from ultra-aggressive diplomacy (including blackmail on surrounding countries), or from traditional military adventurism, or from stepped-up efforts by its terrorist surrogate proxies like Hezbollah and its world-wide networks. For that matter, nobody knows whether it might not launch, once armed with enough nuclear weapons, a nuclear preventive strike on Israel . . . even though the use of crude, radioactive suitcase bombs, carried by suicide bombers, seems more probable than a missile strike.

The Chief Reasons for Hugh Uncertainty Here?

Tersely put, there are too many uncertainties and information-gaps that surround the entire topic, and so anything you read on a nuclear-armed Iran, no matter how convincing, is bound to remain speculative at best and needs to be read with a certain degree of skepticism. Three gaps loom significantly here, all of which will be analyzed later on:

1. How far advanced Iranian R&D is to deploying nuclear weapons and missile-delivery systems, even as --- considering that Iran's totalitarian regime is also a terrorist-supporting state --- the production of crude radioactive suitcase bombs, which could be planted by its terrorist groups like Hezbollah, is a likelier, more imminent development.

2. What the actual balance of power is in Iran's political institutions, now that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad --- who seems to represent a resurgent populist and jingoist nationalism and fanatical Shiite death-loving ideology --- is riding high. Before his election last year (2005), there was no doubt whatever that the electoral side of the political system --- highly rigged by the all-powerful mullahs and Supreme Ayatollah who control the political-theocratic institutions like the Guardian Council and Expediency Council, not to mention the legal system, the security systems, and the secret police --- was fully subordinate in all decision-making on public and private matters to the die-hard mullah theocrats.

So is Ahmadinejad one more sock-puppet in their hands, or is he able, as a self-revealing zealot who not only talks about the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi-Savior who will also bring Armageddon and Doomsday to all infidels and apostate Muslims, to force the pace of policy-making in his own direction?

3. The logic of deterrence, no exceptions whatever, postulates that the would-be aggressive target-state's leaders behave rationally, knowing how to weigh the costs and benefits of aggressive action in the face of a promised threat of nuclear or non-nuclear retaliation by the deterring state.

If, however, Ahmadinejad reflects a particularly high-pulsating theocratic ideology --- theocratic, death-loving, and full of conviction that an Apocalyptic Showdown is just over the horizon --- what might this mean for the US, its Arab and European allies, or Israel once Iran achieves a fairly large deployment of nuclear weapons? For that matter, how much of a gulf is there --- if any --- between Ahmadinejad and the key 20 or so highly entrenched mullahs and the Supreme Ayatollah when it comes to such crackling theocratic credos?



But Note: It Doesn't Follow That All Commentaries Are Equally Worthless Speculations

On the contrary, some specialists --- a bakers' dozen at most world-wide --- are bound to reflect greater insight into what a nuclear-armed Iraq might do in foreign, military, and terrorist-sponsoring policies . . . and quite simply because these analysts know a great deal more about those policies and, simultaneously, about nuclear weaponry, deterrence, and, its opposite: compellence or coercive diplomacy. The main thing is to keep this proviso in mind: those specialists who know Iranian politics in as much depth as a totalitarian society permits --- and who, simultaneously, are technically well-versed in nuclear weaponry, the calculus of deterrence, coercive diplomacy (compellence) and arms control --- don't add up to many world-wide: roughly, to repeat, a dozen or so. Overwhelmingly, they are either active or former CIA-specialists --- some now in US academia or research-institutes --- or are specialists at Israeli institutes. And even they, it needs to be emphasized, are still stuck with the problem of the key information-gaps that we'll be setting out later in today's buggy article.

Something else needs to be noted here too: by no stretch of the imagination is prof bug one of those double-barreled specialists.

True, he knows a fair amount about deterrence and compellence as well as arms control --- having been fortunate as a grad student to study with Henry Kissinger and Thomas Schelling, the latter, a Nobel Prize Economist and the most important intellectual influence in our understanding of deterrence, deterrence stability, and arms control.

When it comes to Iran, though, it's a different matter.

Though Prof bug may not be a wholesale ignoramus, he enjoys no in-depth knowledge about its political system, policies, and history. If anything, on these matters, some of the visitors to this site are likely to know more about them than he does. At best, to be more precise, the buggy prof's read a fair number of articles on the subject and helped direct a couple of Ph.D. dissertations by Iranians on their countries' politics and religion. Then too, by way of preparing for this buggy series, he read a few more recent articles and an up-to-date book on the clash between the ancient Persian Empire and the quarreling Greek city-states in the 5th century B.C.E. . . . won decisively by the far tinier, far more divided Greeks thanks to superior morale, naval tactics, and innovations in the use of infantry. (The book is Thomas Holland's Persian Fire , . . . useful, but crammed with way too much superfluous narrative information as opposed to incisive, hard-headed analysis. If anything, read the first couple of chapters and the last one or two, and that's all you need. There are no doubt far better, far more perceptive books on the topic than this . . . perhaps the one by Victor Davis Hanson.)

How Today's Article --- the 1st in a Series of Four Articles on Iran and Nuclear Weapons --- Will Unfold.

In part two, we'll set out some indispensable basics about the nature of deterrence, compellence, and the use of military force in statecraft when the adversarial states have nuclear weapons.

In part three, which will complete today's analysis, we'll probe in a fair amount of depth the three or four major information-gaps about the Iranian clerical-fascist totalitarian mullahs, who have been --- along with Sunni Saudi Arabia --- the two states most responsible for spreading jihadi Islamist terrorism and radical fundamentalism around the world since 1980 or so.

Both states have rivaled one another in vying for the leadership role of these terrorist or terrorist-supporting movements and jihadi ideology on a global scale. Both show traditional Shi-ite and Sunni contempt for one another, aggravated by 1400 years of Arab-Persian hostility . . . capped by the murderous slaughter of the 8 year Iraqi-Iranian war of the 1980s. And both --- especially Iran now that Iraq temporarily on the sidelines --- seek regional dominance and a lavish use of oil-money for both that end and the spread of radically militant Islamist doctrines and terror.

Needless to add, the more oil-money that rolls in to these systematically organized totalitarian states --- which rule by means of a pervasive secret police, a rigid theocratic ideology, the control of all key institutions in the country, and a complete disregard not just for any civil rights but total control over all religious, cultural, and private life --- the more cockily their support for jihadi movements and terrorism has surged and will likely do so.

The only qualification here?

As Saudi-financed al Qaeda and related Sunni-terrorist groups began attacking the prodigal, totalitarian royalist leadership the last three years or so, some members of the Saudi government --- who puff themselves up as "reformers" --- have undoubtedly begun to have second thoughts about their earlier outright financial support of bin Laden's group and the former Taliban mass-murderers. They are also no doubt worried about growing militancy among their long-despised Shi-ite minority, not to mention the Shi-ites in the surrounding Gulf States . . . possibly, at some point, even in Iraq. Even so, there's no sign whatsoever that the Saudi kleptocrats have eased up in spreading their vicious, racist, Jew-hating Wahhabi Islam on a global scale, funding mosques, cultural centers, PR-groups like CAIR in the US, and probably certain terrorist networks . . . the latter if only as bribes to keep the terrorists from striking them.

 

 

PART TWO:
SOME KEY THEORETICAL CLARIFICATION ABOUT DETERRENCE AND COMPELLENCE

Logically, the buggy commentary ought to move straightaway to laying out the three big gaps in information about the Iranian hard-line mullah terrorists in charge of Iranian life, but we can't be fully logical . . . not at this point. To make sense of those gaps and show how they leave all analyses of what a nuclear terror state like Iran might mean, whether in the near- future or much further into the future, some preliminary groundwork needs to be covered first --- in this case, a set of clarifying remarks about the nature of deterrence and compellence in statecraft.

What follows, then, are the barebones basics, which all visitors should read carefully and try to remember. Later on, in the next buggy article, we'll delve more deeply into the logic of deterrence and its relevance to the radical theocratic totalitarians ruling Iraq. .

Nuclear Deterrence Stripped to the Bone

(i.) Both deterrence and compellence in statecraft work by means of a state's leadership projecting credible coercive threats to retaliate with unacceptable damage if the adversarial target state doesn't do what it wants.

Both kinds of threats contrast with the actual use of military force, nuclear or conventional. The two aren't the same. Threats are intended to influence the decision-making calculus of the target state--- Iran in our case --- and induce its leaders to comply with the deterring or compelling state's demands. Threats rely on the promised use of military force --- or, at times, severe economic sanctions backed by blockades, boycotts, and embargos; and military retaliation has to be used if the threats fail to induce the target state to do what the deterring or compelling state wants it to.

(ii.) In turn, deterrence differs from compellence in the way that the defensive use of military force differs from its offensive use.