1. "Not all actors in international politics calculate utility the same way in making decisions. Differences in values, culture, attitudes toward risk-taking, and so on vary greatly. There is no substitute for knowledge of the adversary's mind-set and behavioral style, and this is often difficult to obtain correctly in assessing intentions or prediction responses." -- Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft (3rd ed., Oxford), p 188.

2. "Our revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi," Ahmadinejad said in the speech to Friday Prayers leaders from across the country. Therefore, Iran should become a powerful, developed and model Islamic society. Today, we should define our economic, cultural and political policies based on the policy of Imam Mahdi's return. We should avoid copying the West's policies and systems," he added, newspapers and local news agencies reported."

3. "Most serious criticisms of deterrence theory came from those troubled by doubts about the assumption of policymakers' rationality on which it heavily depends . . . The leading figure in this group was Robert Jervis [a political scientist at Columbia), who found it odd that so many analysts tended to rely on deductive logic while ignoring the emotions and perceptions of decision makers. Participants in international rivalries and conflicts, he warned, seldom have an adequate understanding of each others' perspectives and goals. The receiver-state [targeted by the deterring state], therefore, often misses or misinterprets signals that appear perfectly clear to the deterrer.

"Jervis raised such questions as these: Are the psychological attitudes and decisions processes similar for challengers and defenders of the status quo? Is the defender capable of understanding the challenger's fears that the defender may constitute a security menace? Do both parties view the credibility of threats symmetrically? Can leaders know the intentions of the other side and predict how it will respond? Are both sides equally concerned about their reputation for living up to their commitments? . . . In short, he saw decision makers as burdened with "unmotivated biases" --- beliefs, images, preconceptions, and other cognitive predispositions.

"Yet he did not entirely discount the assumption of deterrence rationality. "The fact that people are not completely rational does not automatically vitiate this approach." -- James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr. Contending Theories of International Relations (Addison Wesley, 5th ed).

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

This, the 3rd article in a series on Iran and nuclear weapons continues our analysis whether a nuclear-armed terror state --- whose political system is an Islamo-fascist state and champion terrorist-supporter, and whose current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, embraces spooky, extravagantly superstitious credos and dogmas --- can be effectively deterred from reckless aggressive behavior in foreign and military policies.

Among other things, as we'll see, Ahmadinejad's cocky, constantly reiterated blowhard certitudes include his fanatical belief in the imminent return of the Messianic Mahdi, Shiite Islam's Hidden-Imam Spook whose near-to-hand reappearance will, he claims with high-pulsating zeal, usher in an apocalyptic showdown between infidels and Muslims and end, with divinely ordained inevitability, in the triumph of purified Islam world-wide . . . this, mind you, despite all the chaos, destruction, and slaughter of unconverted infidels that the blessed, end-of-history, Mahdi-led showdown will entail.

Ahmadinejad himself has not minced any words here. Blowhard egomaniacs seldom do. Not only does he regard himself as the personal servant of the peek-a-boo Mahdi-Savior, but --- as one of the above three quotes indicates --- he believes with the fervor of a flipped-out fanatic that the whole purpose of his gaining the Iranian presidency has been to hasten the Hidden Imam's imminent skyhooting from out of a dank deep well near Qum . . . and also, accordingly, to hasten all the bountiful Allah-sanctioned benefits for true-believing Muslims that will follow from the grisly butchery of billions of infidels and wayward Muslims.



Ahmadinejad, It's True, Has to Share Power: How Much Though?

Whether the entrenched mullahs who have dominated the clerical-fascist regime in Iran since 1979 --- at any rate until Ahmadinejad's populist victory last summer --- share his cocksure chiliastic certitudes was the subject of the 2nd article in this series. As it noted, there are three possibilities about this and the distribution of political power in Iran since the election of July 2005.

  The first possibility is that the tiny group of powerful elite mullahs --- who have beaten back all efforts at reform and openness in the totalitarian system --- don't share those dangerous dogmas and have a stake in avoiding a cataclysmic showdown with America, Israel, and the rest of the infidel world, but can't simultaneously, do much to rein in the charismatic megalomaniac with his predictions of a thrilling, grim-reaper fate for Islam's numerous enemies.

As things now stand, you see, the swaggering tub-thumper is too popular to be challenged . . . a soaring, up-to-the-minute hero in the eyes of Iran's uneducated masses badly hurt by Iran's economic shambles, almost half the country living in poverty right now, and for decades at that. More important, he's also popular in key circles of the military, the national militia, the Republican Guards, the secret police, and the religious police . . . or so this initial scenario has it. Then, too, there's apparently significant support for the hot-air zealot among all the low-status, grudge-laden imams and other clerics out in the sticks. What attracts these holy men isn't, note quickly, just Ahmadinejad's weirdo religious hocus-pocus. It's something less spiritual. They've been searching for the main chance for decades now, only for it to never materialize. Sorehead losers at the bottom of the hierarchically structured corruption and power-mania that have marked Iran's political life since the revolution of 1979, they clamor, one-and-all, to join in the orgy of lavish money-making and influence-peddling that have enriched the big-shot mullahs and the Supreme Ayatollah, but passed them by again and again. Is it any wonder that these down-and-out clerics hope --- with almost as much zeal and wild-eyed intensity as they muster in the weekly sermons calling for the death of Israel and the Jews --- that Ahmadinejad wiil be their springboard to soar upward in status and wealth?

The conclusion that follows in this scenario should be self-evident.

Specifically, as long as Ahmadinejad can count on these diverse groups to applaud his radical bombast, his bellicose fist-shaking at Israel, and his repetitive defiance of the US, the major EU powers, Russia, and China, the mullahs-formerly-in-charge can't risk challenging him directly, and so he's free to continue his eschatological lunacies and his rash risk-taking confrontations via Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria with Israel. If, in turn, any showdown between the big-shot mullahs and the madcap populist president occurs in the future, it will materialize only after a major setback in his reckless foreign policies . . . say, a stinging defeat of Hezbollah by Israel in Lebanon and of Hamas in Gaza, followed by Syria's dictatorship distancing itself from its powerful ally in Tehran. A direct war with Israel would be even more disastrous for Ahmadinejad, especially if, in the run-up, Israeli military power had already destroyed Hezbollah's rocket-threat, crushed Hamas' equivalents, and either sidelined Syria or destroyed its rockets and missiles: in which case, Iran's chest-thumping rashness would invariably lead to a very costly destruction of its infrastructure, factories, military bases, port facilities, missile launchers, and scientific labs, with its nuclear ambitions set back a decade or more.

Keep in mind that to undermine Iran's nuclear R&D this way, it's not necessary to attack a hundred or more sites that have been purposefully dispersed by the Iranian clerical-fascist regime.

It's enough to smash a few key sites, then --- with international help --- impose a strong sanction-program that embargoes the replacement of the destroyed technically advanced components . . . something Iranian scientists and engineers themselves are incapable of replacing on their own. Up to now, the technologies for both the nuclear programs and missiles have come from China, Pakistan, Russia, and possibly North Korea. In that case, with sanctions effectively imposed, Iran's nuclear ambitions might not be realized for several decades . . . long before which, most likely, the country's clerical-fascist system will have been overthrown and the non-Persian minorities, roughly 50% of the population, will have broken away from Persian rule.

  A second possibility is that the cock-of-the-walk mullahs and the Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei --- now afflicted with deadly cancer --- do share these weirdo theocratic and millenarian dogmas, at any rate up to a point, and yet they are trying to find ways to curb Ahmadinejad's new independent power base.

Seen from this angle, there's a conflict between them and him, but unlike the first scenario just sketched in, the tensions and resentments are personal, not ideological. The entrenched head-honchos and their adjutants just don't want to share power or the orgy of corruption and loot it entails.

  The third possibility is that the mullahs are assumed once more to share Ahmadinejad's theocratic mumbo-jumbo with its apocalyptic demonology and Showdown-Forebodings, but fear that his truculent swagger and defiance of outside powers could land Iran in serious economic trouble or even a war that it won't win. Here the differences are tactical, not strategic --- that and Ahmadinejad's reckless swashbuckling style of diplomacy.

Viewed in this light, the corrupt, diehard power-holding mullahs are convinced that sooner or later the swell-headed upstart will soften his diplomacy, tone down the demagogy, and swing around to their way of thinking. It's the sock-puppet scenario.

After all, the mullahs and two Supreme Ayatollahs have turned all the other presidents of Iran since 1979 into their personal vassals, with one exception --- the reform minded Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, who was elected twice starting in 1997, only to find all his efforts at change undermined or sabotaged. In the end, for all his popularity, Khatami had to admit outright failure of all reform efforts. If the top-dog mullahs and their cronies in the key patron-client networks that infest Iranian society --- all engaged, with single-minded devotion, to an orgy of money-grubbing, power-aggrandizement, and mutual back-scratching in an oil-rich country where nearly half the population lives in poverty --- could tame Khatami, why not then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and especially if they and he disagree only on tactics and personal style, not end-goals?

What Are These Shared End-Goals? . . .

. . . that the cock-of-the-walk mullahs hope to achieve sooner or later, always assuming Ahmadinejad's more reckless and impetuous actions can be moderated and not plunge Iran into disaster: severe sanctions, a disastrous war with Israel, an even more disastrous war with the US, or the disintegration of the country's unity as the 50% of the population that is non-Persian breaks away.

Back to the end goals. They're easy to set out: make Iran a regional giant, with influence on everything that happens from Afghanistan through the Persian Gulf and the Middle East . . . taking in the former Soviet Republics just to its north. To that end, arm it with nuclear weapons. In these ways --- thanks to Persian nationalism (no, not Iranian, a good half of Iran's population Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds, and others, all restless, all eager for independence) --- restore the regime's lack of popular support. And ultimately --- or maybe simultaneously --- put Iran at the end of global Islam in its growing conflicts with Hindu India, Russia, Europe, the USA, and probably China at some point.

A Few Sidebar Clarifications, To Be Expanded In a Later Buggy Article in This Series:

Seems preposterous, these goals --- don't they; a small, half-backward country, half of whose population live in poverty, at odds with very powerful states near and far?

(i.) Sure, but then the geniuses in charge of Iran even before the Great Servant-of-the-Mahdi arrived in power last summer are the same ones who fought a totally disastrous war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq less than two decades ago . . . in which wave after wave of poorly trained, poorly armed teen-agers, roped together, were slaughtered in futile attacks over a period of nearly 10 years. Clerical-fascist zealots and totally incompetent generals one and all, these pin-head masterminds believe, apparently, that a nuclear-armed Iran with a few missiles can forge a global alliance as the head of Islam between Shiite terrorist groups and Sunni al Qaeda and its numerous imitators and spin-offs, cow the small Sunni Persian Gulf States, dominate Shiite governed Iraq, forge an alliance with Chavez's Venezuela, monopolize most of the global oil market (with Indonesia into the alliance), browbeat the West Europeans, create a missile-nuclear exchange with North Korea, and neutralize Russia and China even while encouraging jihadi terrorism among their Muslim minorities because it's in their broader interests to see US and Western power thrust out of the Middle East and let demographic changes lead to ever greater alienated Muslim minorities intimidate and force the West European governments into fearful neutrality.

In the process, of course, the clerical and military wizards hope that Hezbollah and Hamas, with Syrian help, will bog down Israel and ward off any Israeli attack on their budding nuclear programs, not to mention the rest of their military bases, their communication and transportation infrastructure, their factories, and their port facilities and two-bit navy. Oh sure! Fat chance!

These genius-flops who fought Saddam's forces with stone-age strategies live in a world of fantasy and religious dogma. They can deny the Holocaust, they seem to think, with the fervor of neo-Nazis, and they can spew Nazi-like racism about Jews endlessly, and they can gabble openly about extinguishing Israel from the map, and meanwhile the Israelis --- cowed into submission --- will stand by twidling their thumbs and let the clerical-fascist mullahs and the buffoonish tin-pot Hitler who's the president push ahead with their development of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction . . . with Hezbollah and Hamas suicide-terrorists eager to use them against the Evil-Ones.

(ii.) Back here on the planet earth, things are different.

In reality, next to the US, Israel has the most professional and diverse military in the world. For the first time since 1973, Israelis are united; they recognize that they now face enemies again dedicated to exterminating them. Then, too, thanks to its long-standing work in communications, command, control, and information technologies, reinforced since the late 1980s by the arrival of tens of thousands scientists and engineers who had been active in Soviet R&D, Israel's armed forces are impressively advanced in target-acquisition and real-time attacks on any such targets. They are also experts in combined warfare --- the close coordination of air, land, and sea-based forces, made all the more effective and lethal by use of these advanced information and communications technologies. Overall, only Britain's rivals it as a professional force, and even then the British lag way behind the Israelis in anti-missile development and precision-guided weaponry.

For that matter, if the Israelis ever have to mobilize their reserves, their military forces are far more numerous than Britain's, and in the background loom hundreds of nuclear-armed warheads that can be delivered from the ground, air, and seas with pinpoint accuracy.

(iii.) Enter the current war with Hezbollah (July 2006).

Most likely, it's just the initial stage of a longer, wider war to destroy not just Hezbollah's base of power and terror but also to strong-arm Syria and bludgeon while assaulting the terrorist base of Hamas in Gaza and destroying its rockets and major weaponry. To stop with a defeat of Hezbollah without destroying the ability of the Syrian dictatorship, allied with Iran, to re-supply the terrorist movement in the future would be to run counter to sound military logic. Worse, emboldened by an intransigent, terror-state in Iran, a strong and surviving Hezbollah and Hamas would likely acquire chemical and biological weapons thanks to Iranian generosity, and probably --- if Iran ever develops nuclear weapons --- crude suitcase-size radioactive bombs, with all these WMD used in suicide terrorist attacks. And for once, to destroy these weapons' transfers and prepare to deal with Syria and Iran in the future, the population of Israel is politically united for the first time in decades. What's more, for the first time ever, Israelis are aware that the Sunni dictators around the Middle East --- who fear an Iran-dominated Shiite alliance --- will be standing by on the sidelines supplying intelligence to the government in Jerusalem and applauding the destruction of that alliance-in-the-making.

(iv.) As for the US, the clerical fascists in Tehran are making the same mistake that fascists and Nazis in Europe as well as militarists in Japan made in the 1930s: they regard us, and the Israelis, as decadent, weak-willed people who want a comfortable life and have no stomach for prolonged war and the destruction and casualties that they entail . . . not to mention the political divisions within their countries.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And note, it's not just modern militarists and fascists who self-destruct this way. As Victor Hanson, the gifted military historian notes, these fallacies go back to the ancient world and extend forward into the Middle Ages and the early Modern period. In reality, once democratic peoples are aroused --- convinced, in particular, that they face enemies out to destroy and annihilate them -- they are not only extremely powerful compared to their foes, but will, if need be, fight them with a single-minded dedication and ruthlessness that have taken the foes totally by surprise . . . again and again.

Since 1914, the US, Britain, and their democratic allies have destroyed German militarists, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, militarist Japan, and Soviet Communism and its offshoots world-wide except in North Korea, not to mention Saddamite Iran and Taliban Afghanistan. On all the evidence, the surviving Islamo-fascists --- whether secular or fanatically religious and in control of either states or terrorist movements --- will eventually suffer the same fate.

Remember, Speculation about Iran's Politics, Diplomacy, and Nuclear Aims Is Inescapable

As we indicated in the two previous articles, there is invariably lots of information gaps here, and speculation is the inevitable outcome --- even if the quality of the speculation will vary from one specialist to another.

And prof bug is not one of the few specialists world-wide --- mainly in US or Israeli intelligence services or formerly connected with them --- who are well-versed in 1) Iranian life and politics, 2) military and nuclear matters, and 3) social science techniques of acquiring and analyzing information.

One Last Introductory Point: The Nature of the Threats That a Nuclear-Armed Iran Poses

Despite all the inescapable speculation, remember a key analytical point here that was stressed in the earlier two buggy articles: to gain lots of leverage in Middle Eastern diplomatic and military affairs, the political leaders of a nuclear-armed Iran don't have to use nuclear missiles in a direct, suicidal attack on Israel or American forces in the Middle East . . . all, without exception, extravagantly self-destructive actions, bound to bring about markedly destructive retaliation by countries that have a far greater range of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons at their disposal.

"Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday"

This is the 2nd buggy article in a new series on Iran and nuclear weapons, and more specifically, on whether a nuclear-armed terror state like Iran --- headed by a fist-shaking, apocalyptic spouting president, who publicly boasts that he expects the Shiite messianic Mahdi to reappear imminently in a warlike Judgment Day-scenario for infidels and apostate Muslims --- can be reliably deterred the way, say, the Soviet Union was in the cold war by powerful democratic states and their allies.

The Truth? On This and Related Matters, Speculation Is Inescapable

As the 1st article in the new series showed, it's not easy to be certain in this and related matters --- just the opposite, and for an overwhelming reason: any analysis of Iran's future behavior at home and abroad in a nuclear era encounters some massive information-gaps about the way in which power is currently distributed at the top in the clerical-fascist totalitarian system and whether Ahmadinejad's manic, wildly loony Islamic beliefs and holocaust bombast are shared by the other power-holders in contemporary Iran. The same information-Black Holes hamper any and all predictions as to whether Iran's leaders at the head of a nuclear-armed terror-state, whether in the next few years or decades into the future, could be expected to behave rationally as all deterrence theory postulates . . . something clarified in the previous buggy article.

What follows? Tersely put, all discussion of these matters is bound to be speculative, pure-and-simple; and you need to be wary of what you see published in the print- media or what you hear on TV or the radio.

Note Quickly Though

To say that speculation is inescapable, what with the information gaps we all face about Iran's political leadership these days and into the future, isn't to say all the speculative stuff is equally worthless.

There are, as it happens, possibly a dozen or so specialists world-wide who know a great deal about 1) Iranian life and 2) nuclear deterrence and military matters as well as 3) social science methods of obtaining and handling evidence. Most of them are either in American or Israel intelligence agencies or were formerly associated with them and are now in universities or at research institutes. No matter. Even the active intelligence agents are forced to speculate largely in a vacuum, seeing as how there are few, if any, reliable agents or enticed double-agents in well-placed posts in Iran --- or so it seems.

For them and the rest of us, the chief reason for the big information-gaps about Iran is easy to set out. Not only does Iran remain very much a clerical-fascist totalitarian regime dominated by the Secret Police, Religious Police, and millions of religious zealots eager to spy on their fellow citizens, but --- worse yet --- Iran has lately witnessed a big assault on the little freedom the media and other critics managed to preserve, fitfully and with constant threats of retaliation, since the failed reform movement of the late 1990s was brought to an abrupt halt by the hard-line mullahs. Since then, the few moderate clerics and intellectuals in the country have also been jailed or intimidated into silence. So have the various grass-roots movements to improve civil liberties that were part of the nascent reform movement in the last decade, and intellectual, cultural, and religious life is more rigidly controlled than at any time since the end of the Ayatollah Khomeini era of the 1980s.

In particular, with the election last summer (2005) of President Mahamoud Ahmadinejad --- whose apocalyptic religious fervor knows no bounds --- the Secret Police, the Religious Police, and the volunteer zealot-informers have reinforced the repressive pressures of rigid Islamic law on women, sexual matters, young people, TV and film entertainment, and --- where it can (with only some success) --- the content of the internet available to Iranians.

Remember, finally --- as the previous buggy article noted --- prof bug is decidedly not one of these bakers' dozen specialists; very much the contrary.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
RECALL THE SPECIFIC INFORMATION BLACK-HOLES TOUCHED ON IN THE PREVIOUS ARTICLE

Four of them loom as particularly critical, only the 2nd of which is the subject of today's analysis . . . taken up and dealt with at length in Part Two. Meanwhile, try to recall the other two that will be treated here briefly in a fast, top-skimming manner; nothing else until the next articles in the buggy series.

1. What Do We Really Know
about Iran's Progress in Nuclear Weaponry?

How far advanced Iranian R&D is to deploying nuclear weapons and missile-delivery systems remains a mystery, regarding which there is little or no reliable information. We're also in the dark about any plans to produce crude radioactive suitcase bombs, which could be planted by its terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and then denied strenuously by Tehran that its agents had any role here. All of these matters are speculative. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been monitoring the alleged peaceful use of nuclear energy --- acquired by Iran after its government had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty --- has been totally surprised by the discoveries of the last year on enrichment and centrifuge R&D. Is its surprise really surprising for us? Wasn't the IAEA also monitoring the "peaceful" R&D of North Korea's nuclear development from the early 1990s on until recently . . . with no more success than it has had so far with Iran in detecting the weapons programs?

Then there's the question of negotiations with Iran's leaders on its nuclear weapons programs, coupled with some mix of promised rewards for stopping and threatened economic sanctions for not. Despite what you read in some quarters, why would a country --- which finds India and Pakistan (friendly to the US) armed with nuclear weapons, an unreliable friend like nuclear armed Russia near its borders, and US allies on its western borders (Turkey and Iraq) --- bring to a halt the regime's campaign, backed by billions of dollars worth of expenditure (in a country where nearly half the population lives in poverty), to develop a nuclear force? Especially since its leaders clearly believe it will give them great prestige and influence in Muslim circles world-wide, except for the Sunni leaders in the Gulf States that also either border or are near to Iran? And the topper itself here is that the nuclear program is the hallmark of the loud jingoist drumbeat, full of truculent defiance of outsiders, that the regime has been banging for a year now . . . much to the jubiliant applause of the Iranian masses.

But this is only speculation on prof bug's part. So it is for anyone else.

2. Who Holds Power?

What's the actual balance of power 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 in public display, not just in Iran, but world-wide?

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? The fact is, nobody knows except a few high-place mullahs and other policymakers in Iran.

Trying to make sense of the answers to this two-sided question, speculative as they are bound to be, is what --- remember --- Part Two will deal with today. Keep in mind though: aside from Ahmadinejad and a few of the higher big-shot mullahs holding power for two decades or more now, nobody really knows, and all the claims you might read that the system is riddled with factions, many of them favorable to reining in the hotheaded ideologue and his associates --- all in an effort to reach global agreements with the US and others on Iran's nuclear force and role in the Middle East and Persian Gulf area --- has no sure foothold on hard evidence whatsoever. Period.



3. Deterrence vs. Raw Theocratic Mumbo-Jumbo Ideology

The logic of deterrence, as the previous buggy article showed, postulates that the would-be aggressive leaders of the state being targeted by deterrence threats will behave rationally . . . this, irrespective of any fanatical ideology, whether secular or theocratic. Faced with a credible threat of retaliation for aggression, nuclear or non-nuclear --- but especially the former ---even the most fervent true-believing ideologues will behave like political leaders anywhere else: they will know how to how to weigh the costs and benefits of aggressive action, including the probability of winning the resulting war if they ignore the threat and do what the deterring state is seeking to prevent . . . or so the theory lays down, with no exceptions.

Reality vs. Theory

All this is strictly theoretical. The behavior of states isn't fully encouraging here --- just the contrary. There's a long literature on deterrence breakdowns in the cold war period when a variety of US adversaries in the Third World --- usually aligned with the Soviet Union or China (or China itself) --- ignored American threats, believed they could control the resulting escalation of any crisis, and were willing, if need be, to risk or endure war with American forces if that resulted.