Fitzgerald: General Petraeus and the likely effect of attacking the Islamic Republic's nuclear project

A few days ago - on February 3 - this news item appeared:

TAMPA, Florida (Reuters) - A military strike on Iran could have the unintended consequence of stirring nationalist sentiment to the benefit of Tehran's hard-line government, U.S. General David Petraeus told Reuters....

"It's possible (a strike) could be used to play to nationalist tendencies," Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command region, which includes Iran, said in an interview this week. "There is certainly a history, in other countries, of fairly autocratic regimes almost creating incidents that inflame nationalist sentiment. So that could be among the many different, second, third, or even fourth order effects (of a strike)."

Now there are many in the American government who will do, who are doing, what they can to avoid facing up to their responsibility to deal - forcefully, and at long last - with the nuclear project of not Iran, but the Islamic Republic of Iran. They have various ways of preventing action.

One of those ways was the report by some C.I.A. analysts, one of whose conclusions were made still more malevolently misleading by the misinterpretation of what they said, who claimed that the Iranians had stopped work on their nuclear project. In fact, the stopping of that work, if it took place at all, only took place for a very short time just after the invasion of Iraq, when all bets were off as to what those crazy Americans might do next. That report has been shredded this way and that, not least by governments in Europe - such as those of France and Great Britain - whose security services may be better informed, through human intelligence, than those of the Americans. And of course the Israelis, who may be the best informed of all, never accepted the conclusion, not of "the C.I.A." but, rather, of a few "C.I.A. analysts." These are different things.

That's argument number one, which no one can conceivably believe now: that the Islamic Republic of Iran has stopped working on its nuclear project, and there are no signs of its having re-started. Utter nonsense, and seen now as utter nonsense - but time has passed for that "seeing now as utter nonsense" to be widely shared, and in that time, the centrifuges whirr, the scientists confabulate, and the nuclear project marches on in Iran.

The second argument against action is that favored by Secretary Gates. It goes like this: we can't possibly destroy completely Iran's nuclear project, and they will simply start up again what we did manage to destroy, so all we are buying is a few years. And therefore, it's just not worth it.

Let's take that remark, phrase by phrase. First of all, it is instinct with defeatism: we can't "possibly destroy the nuclear project." Is he so sure? How does he know? Does he know exactly where everything is located, and what are the key components, and what are not? Does he know what targets are supposedly not to be hit - are there some? - because "too many civilians" (how many, exactly?) would be hurt?

And when he says that the Iran government would simply start up again, on what basis is this assertion made? When Israel bombed the Osiraq Reactor in 1981, did Saddam Hussein set right to work to rebuild his nuclear project, or was he discouraged and disheartened? Did he not, in fact, abandon the effort for twenty full years, though he was as ruthless and aggressive as a Middle East Muslim ruler could be? Might not the fact of a Western power's willingness to attack have the effect of demonstrating to the Islamic Republic of Iran that further attacks are perfectly possible? And aren't they possible? Is the United States, is Israel, is any combination of Western powers, allowed exactly one attack and then never ever again to try anything further? And what would you be thinking, if you were in the government of the Islamic Republic? Might you be asking yourself if it is worth it, does it make sense, to try to rebuild the program?

The program itself was always based on the assumption that the Iranians, through their natural guile, would be able to bob and weave and make offers and take back offers, and threaten that the gates of hell would open and in the next sentence offer to show everything and to comply with this and with that. And through all of this blague - so solemnly analyzed in the media and the chanceries of the Western world - the Islamic Republic of Iran kept steadily on, building, building, building what it needed to make, in the end, its bombs and also, don't forget, the missiles to deliver them far and then still farther.

No, the C.I.A. analysts were wrong, and are now, by general agreement, understood to have been wrong in their facts, wrong in their analysis, and tendentious in their conclusions.

The Gatesian insistence that any attack will be useless because it will not completely succeed, is wrong in this case. There is no evidence to support it, but mere supposition, based on a deep unwillingness to plan for, and then execute, such an attack. It's merely a case of appeasement being made palatable - palatable in the first place to those who have decided that if "sanctions" do not work, then the only other course is...acceptance of this fantastic development, a development that cannot be allowed, but that is, apparently, going to be allowed.

We have only to look at Pakistan, which like Iran smiled and lied, and promised, as it steadily worked away, basing its efforts on the plans stolen from Western labs by that light-fingered metallurgist, A. Q. Khan (wrongly described as a "nuclear scientist"). Why are we not able to suppress the Taliban? Oh, because of the aid and comfort and refuge offered by Pakistan, which after all was the father of the Taliban; it was in Pakistan that the Taliban was born, and nurtured, and raised up, and then escorted back into Afghanistan by Pakistanis, civilian and military. It was Pakistan that provided diplomatic and other forms of support for the Taliban, and would have continued to do so without any reservations had not the Americans suddenly shown, in the fall of 2001, that they weren't going to tolerate the Taliban anymore. And the government of Pakistan will pretend to fight the Taliban in some places, and in other places really will fight it if the interests of the Pakistani military and of the zamindars are threatened - as in the Swat Valley. But it does not intend to cut off the places of refuge for the Afghan Taliban, and will try to limit the attacks of American forces on the Taliban in Pakistan.

But the Americans don't dare, apparently, to get tough with Pakistan. Oh, they go out to Karachi and Islamabad. They express, with the decibels possibly mounting, their "displeasure" and their "unhappiness." Then the Pakistanis give the Americans an earful about how "you abandoned us twenty years ago" (utter nonsense). And the Americans, or at least Secretary Gates, forgetting what the Pakistani government actually did in those twenty years (with the Taliban, and with its nuclear project), apparently accepts this uncritically and vows publicly that "we will not abandon you again," when he should be handing them a list of the past half-century of American aid, of all kinds, to Pakistan, and an accompanying list of all the ways that Pakistan has repeatedly deceived and betrayed America, and then turn on his heels, metaphorically, and not stay for an answer.

Why are we worried about offending Pakistan, which will have to be offended if American goals in Afghanistan are to be met? Because Pakistan has nuclear weapons. It was allowed, through American and other Western negligence, to acquire the knowhow, and to be funded with foreign aid that provided the freeing-up of the billions necessary to build those bombs. And that is why the Americans think they have to keep the government and above all the military in Pakistan semi-satisfied, have to keep Pakistan from sinking to its natural level, have to keep it all afloat - for how long? Forever? - with American billions and American solicitousness. All because Pakistan, you see, now has nuclear weapons, and we don't know what might happen to those weapons if the government of Pakistan collapses, and it becomes - that fashionable and not very helpful phrase - a "failed state."

Surely the experience with Pakistan should be so deeply engraved in the minds of American policymakers that they should wish never to have that experience repeated. But here they are, making excuses for not taking action against a regime that, if anything, is ten times more malevolent than the regime in Islamabad, and far more unstable. Iran's variant of Islam is Twelver-Shi'ism, with the Hidden Imam soon to appear, and all of that. Need we go into it? Isn't it enough to call it millenarian, or chiliastic, or use one of those other big words that means they actually look forward to hastening the return of the Hidden Mahdi by bringing death and chaos and destruction everywhere? And is it impossible for rational Western man to understand one simple thing, that some people in this world, believe it or not, are not Western rational men? Cf. Adolf Hitler -- who if he could have, would have allowed the total destruction of Germany, would have brought the whole thing crashing down, and so would those raised up under Nazi rule who were the true-blue fanatics and last-ditch defenders of the regime. A sane foreign policy requires an understanding that not everyone does a cost-benefit analysis. Not everyone in the world is, as the American government now is, Marxist - that is, believing that economic well-being, or the desire for economic well-being, in the end determines human actions. Not in Tehran it doesn't. And not with some others - why, do you know there are people who are right now going around the world blowing themselves up, and considering themselves to be acting in their own self-interest by doing so? Not something that Marx, or Engels, or that other Marxist outpost, the editorial page of the New York Times, would grasp. But we who do not believe that everything in the world is mere epiphenomenon, and economics underlies it all, can better grasp the nature of what Eric Hoffer famously analyzed as "The True Believer."

Now let's go back to General Petraeus. Let's refresh our memories. In Tampa on February 3, he said that a military strike on Iran could have unintended consequences. When you say something could have unintended consequences, who could disagree? Of course, an attack on Iran's nuclear project would be used by the regime to try to obtain support. But I will now claim just the opposite: that the only way to weaken the Islamic Republic of Iran, the monstrous regime that is not going to fall, despite all the hoopla of just a month or two ago, is through an attack on the cherished nuclear project. Now on what basis do I make that claim?

First, the sentimental belief that lots of demonstrators on the streets of Teheran meant that the regime would surely fall is a product of media hype, of deep desire that grades into belief. I don't think that there are many inside Iran today who think that the fall of the regime will come soon, and I think there are those (Abbas Kierostami, for example) who do not think the regime will fall at all, because these, the most worldly of the dissidents, who have seen the world, do not confuse media coverage with the real balance of power in Iran. And if today it's the dissidents in Iran, then the next day it's Haiti, and after Haiti, it's something else. The media are fickle, and the regime in Iran knows that if it behaves with sufficient ruthlessness, it can continue to stand, and to execute, and murder informally as well. It is not soft, not as soft as the Shah's regime was in 1978, when Khomeini's minions started to act up, aided naively by the secular and leftist opposition. We should not confuse what we think should happen with what will happen.

And those who talk of how an attack on the nuclear project might lead to a rally-round-the-flag moment should ask themselves how long that moment will last, and how widespread will be? Will not the humiliation of the regime, its chief geopolitical project now lying in expensive ruin, not in the end weaken it in the eyes of everyone inside Iran? What happened when Nasser lost the Six-Day War? Did everyone rally round him, beyond the first week or first month? He was broken. It was the end of his swagger and swank, the end of all that grandiose nonsense. What about Idi Amin after the Israeli attack at Entebbe? Oh, he went on, for another few years, with more of his bemedalled fantasies, making himself the King of this and the Emperor of that. But essentially, that event on July 4, 1976, showed that he could be dealt with, and severely, by the application of military force from a real power, and he did not recover. How about the attack on the Osiraq Reactor? Did all those Kurds and Shi'a who hated Saddam Hussein now rally round him? Oh, I'm sure there were declarations all over the place about Zionist perfidy, and warnings of the terrible retribution that would still be coming, but what happened? No more nuclear project for the next two decades. Imagine if Israel had not attacked, and that Iraq had acquired nuclear weapons, and then - then - marched on Kuwait.

Of course no Iranian dissident, inside Iran certainly, and very likely outside Iran, will openly state that he wishes to see an attack on Iran's nuclear project. Why open yourself to charges that you are a "traitor" to Iran, a traitor to Iranian nationalism, if not to the regime? Iranians, we are told, are famously proud and nationalistic - and we want them to be nationalistic, because Iranian nationalism is certainly a force that works against Islam, if Islam is properly perceived as a vehicle of Arab supremacism. Some may have difficulty recognizing what you and I can see more easily, which is that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons under this regime, or under any regime. Why? Well, in the 1970s Henry Kissinger talked of giving nuclear technology to the Shah. Imagine that the Shah had acquired it, and Iran had had a nuclear arsenal when Khomeini came to power. It might have happened. The American government, being led by a hopeless Carter and a hapless Brzezinski and a quasi-apologist for the new order in Iran, one Gary Sick, would not have recognized Khomeini - did not recognize him - as a problem sufficient to require American intervention to seize such nuclear weapons. And the same thing remains true today. Even if this regime were to fall, and were replaced, say, by a mild-mannered monarchy, with the son of the Shah on the throne and a parliamentary democracy that harkened back to the 1906 Constitution, there would still be the problem of the primitive masses in Iran who do not read Aziz Nafisi, do not watch the films of Kierostami, and for whom Islam is everything. And they will always outnumber the advanced Iranians, and if a Khomeini can replace the Shah, and a Khomenist regime possibly be replaced by the son of the Shah, then the son of the Shah, we also know, could be replaced by a metaphorical "son of Khomeini." So while Iran may be encouraged to have nuclear power plants, with Western aid and Western supervision, it cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.

When General Petraeus says that some regimes have been known to manufacture incidents so as to encourage nationalism, he may be thinking of such things as the Reichstag Fire that the Nazis caused themselves. But while that fire allowed them to instigate still harsher measures of suppression of dissidents, it did not cause any anti-Nazis within Germany to rally to the Nazi banner. When the Germans manufactured an incident at the Polish border, with German troops dressed as Polish soldiers attacking a German radio-station, in order to "justify" the invasion of Poland, there was no change on the part of anti-Nazi Germans anywhere; they remained adamantly anti-Nazi.

The evidence suggests that it is the attainment of nuclear weapons that will cause the Islamic Republic of Iran to be able to suppress the movement for its overthrow. It will be able to show to the Iranian masses: Look what we achieved. The whole world tried to stop us, and we fooled them, we prevented them, we scared them, we tricked them, we delayed them, we did this and we did that. And now Iran is a Nuclear Power. Look on our greatness. Look on your greatness. Look at Iran's greatness. There are tens of millions of people, all over Iran, who will respond to that. These are the people whose sons join the Revolutionary Guards, and go into the army. There are many of them.

But if that project lies in ruins, or partial ruin, and if the regime has nothing to show for it all, all those sanctions, all that economic misery, all those billions and all that human effort spent or squandered on that nuclear project, just how long will the regime last? How long will those in Iran, including the primitive masses, be impressed by the choices made by the regime and those who rule?

General Petraeus is an intelligent man, and he surely is willing to look at history. He should do so. He may be the one who can overcome those who belong to the camp of appeasement, disguised as a plausible realism - the Gatesian "they'll just build it all up again" - if only he would take the time to sit, and think not only about everything under Central Command, but about the entire world. For it is the entire world that faces the menace of Islam, and the many different kinds of weapons that the adherents of Islam use as their instruments of Jihad. He may be able to figure it out. Just.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/02/fitzgerald-general-petraeus-and-the-likely-effect-of-attacking-the-islamic-republics-nuclear-project.html