This is a great article about just how the West doesn’t really understand the mindset of the leaders of other nations, especially nations in the Middle East. It is dangerous not to know your enemy’s resources and capabilities, but it is more dangerous to not know their mindset. For years, I’ve complained the West tries to manage the Eastern world using Western thoughts, concepts and polices. We worry about offending people, they want to offend. We want peace, they want war. They will be “offended” and vengeful for reasons we simply dismiss as folly, but to them it is very, very real. We work hard not to impose our will on anyone, even those we have conquered, often bending over backwards to the point of absurdity to make them happy, which cannot happen. They not only demand to impose their will, they work hard at planning long term operations in order to gain the control that allows them to impose their will.
Anyone who believes we are not hurtling down the road toward war in the Middle East is a fool. The Washington Post had a recent article outlining how the Iranians were trying to secretly buy chemicals needed for the refining of uranium back in 1989. Their nuclear program goes back decades. They want a bomb, like Saddam did, because it makes them one of the two big dogs in the neighborhood. (The other being Israel.) If they get it, and can deploy it (two different problems) nobody is going to side with Israel when the Muslims attack. That would mean that Israel, as it loses its cities, will destroy hundreds of other cities in the attacking nations. There will be no winners. Oil will skyrocket, we’ll be crippled economically, and it would be generations before certain parts of the Middle East will recover, if ever.
And Iran is okay with that.
Which is where the argument that we can influence the Iranian leadership goes wonky.
U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey caused a minor storm when he pronounced Iran a “rational country.” Is it rational to deny the Holocaust, threaten to eradicate another country, and subject your people to devastating economic sanctions in pursuit of nuclear weapons?
Yes.
To be rational is be able to project cause and effect; act and consequence. It has nothing to do with goals. The United States and most of the civilized world find Iran’s goals anathema, but our disapproval doesn’t matter. The Iranian government will sacrifice a great deal in terms of (other people’s) lives and livelihood to achieve its apocalyptic goals.[1]
The Obama administration took office believing that American policies had pushed Iran into radicalism. The Christian Science Monitor reported recently on the president’s opening gambit:
Obama chose his words with excruciating care in reaching out to Iran publicly and privately. … The new president emphasized he wanted a “new beginning” with a country that called the United States “the Great Satan” and was branded by his predecessor as part of an “axis of evil.”
[This] was intended to change Iran’s mind on the need to acquire nuclear weapons capability. “Obama is still open to an Iranian overture for serious negotiations on its nuclear program,” officials say. … Indeed, that is the ultimate goal of the pressure strategy, they say. “The next step for us is making sure … there is continued space for the Iranian government to take a different path.”
The president and his advisers are not alone in thinking Iran’s interest in nuclear capability is subject to change if a “different path” appears.
Following a 2009 Iranian missile test, proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione said perhaps Iran tested the missile as “a show of strength before they make a concession.” With no concession, he now says:
The conditions for containing Tehran’s efforts may be better today than they have been in years. The recent disclosure of a secret nuclear facility in Iran has led to an apparent agreement to allow in UN weapons inspectors and to ship some uranium out of the country.
Um, nope.
The Islamic radicals want war. They need a war to obtain their goals. To threaten war means nothing to them. To threaten a city under their control means nothing to them. Retaliation is an empty threat because death as a martyr is a wanted outcome. You can’t deal with these people.
But you can kill them. The soldiers and the people who are professionals dealing with the Middle East by and large have come to the conclusion that we are our own worst enemies. Why? Because we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. We have to realize by now there is nothing we can do except punish them into submission. “Them” being the leaders of the radical elements that want to wage war against the West. Killing millions of civilians will not sway them, killing them will. Even Bin Laden eventually came around. His fate was sealed and he knew it, but instead of telling his children to follow him, he wished them to follow another path.
Usama bin Laden wanted his younger children to go to college in the West and live in peace rather than embrace terrorism, according to his brother-in-law.
Zakaria al Sadah said bin Laden, who was killed by US Navy Seals at his compound in the Pakistan city of Abbottabad last May, was adamant that his children “should not follow him down the road to jihad.”
Two of bin Laden’s sons, three-year-old Hussain and five-year-old Zainab, were understood to have been born in the compound, where they lived alongside seven other children.
Sadah, whose sister Amal was the fifth wife of the late al Qaeda leader, told The (London) Sunday Times that bin Laden had regrets about the impact September 11 had on his family.
The attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 killed nearly 3,000 people and made bin Laden the world’s most wanted man.
Yet Sadah said bin Laden was keen for his offspring to immerse themselves in the West.
“He told his own children and grandchildren, ‘Go to Europe and America and get a good education,’” Sadah said.
While bin Laden studied at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, his brothers attended Harvard Law School, the University of Southern California and Tufts University.
Sadah said bin Laden advised his offspring, “You have to study, live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”
There is an old story about how the admiral that planned the raid on Pearl Harbor had wished his nation had found another way because he knew the raid would wake the sleeping giant. Yamamoto had lived in America, studied here and knew the people and the potential. His plan to attack Pearl Harbor and destroy the carrier fleet (thus giving Japan time to take territory and reinforce it) was brilliant. Except Japan missed. And like Bin Laden, the Taliban and terrorists across the world, Yamamoto realized whiffing at a big bad giant leads to serious lethal consequences. Our problem is with our resolve to remain brutal long enough to break the other side. In WWII we were brutal enough, possibly because of the horrific losses we took in the war. Today, if we were losing thousands a day for four years, I’m willing to bet this talk of making peace with radical Islamics would hold no water. But politically, we can lose five or ten or even twenty and the policy makers in Washington will feel free to broker deals with our enemies. Trouble is the other side isn’t serious and is just waiting for us to go back to sleep so they can cause more mischief. We are signaling we want to go home. We want to stop fighting. Too bad, we’ll just be back in a few years to do the same thing again, but possibly in response to the deaths of more than three thousand. At least that is the plan of one Middle East leader.
The revivalist Shi’ite impulse has nothing to do with protecting Iran or regional hegemony. Ahmadinejad says and believes he has been chosen to expand God’s realm, and he isn’t the only one who thinks this is the time. The important thing is not whether God did or didn’t, but that it is, for apocalyptic Shiites, a positive impulse - doing God’s work - not a negative one. “For the glory of God” precludes abandoning the quest and precludes finding merit or friends in the secular, liberal, decadent West. It precludes democracy at home and tolerance abroad. It demands sacrifice.
Nuclear capability - used or held - will make it harder by orders of magnitude to take action against an Iranian regime that sees itself as the rational center of a new world order.
I wonder what a President would do if he was shaken awake one night to be told that part of New York City no longer existed and the best estimates were several million dead. I wonder what this President would do. Would he strike back? Would he try to push it over to the FBI like Clinton did? Would he secretly smile, remembering Rev. Wright’s sermons, and think how all of it was our fault in the first place.
I wonder.
