Islamic Republic 101 for Fareed Zakaria -- By: Michael Rubin
By webmaster@nationalreview.com (Michael Rubin)
Fareed Zakaria has a piece in today's Washington Postarguing that deterrence against Iran can work. While I also disagreed with Daniel Pipes' column in National Review Online, a column Fareed uses as a jumping off point, Fareed's counterargument falls flat by ignoring the reality of Iran.
Fareed is right to say that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' displacement of the clerical elite is the most significant development in Iran. Indeed, my colleague Ali Alfoneh should be credited with highlighting this development at a time when conventional-wisdom Iranists were nay-saying. But what Fareed ignores is that the Revolutionary Guards are not the Islamic Republic's only military: They are the ideological and elite counterpart to the Iranian army. The fact of the matter is that however much the Christiane Amanpour's and Fareed Zakaria's of the world talk knowingly about reformers, hardliners, and pragmatists in Iran's political spectrum, neither they nor, for that matter, policymakers inside the U.S. government, have much of an idea about factions within the Revolutionary Guards. Can Fareed say with any confidence that the command-and-control of an Iranian nuclear weapon wouldn't be in the hands of ideologically more radical elements? Or, conversely, that the IRGC, once nuclear capable, might not use nuclear weapons if the protest movement in Iran spun out of control to the point that the regime saw its collapse as inevitable? After all, the core of deterrence is the willingness of the United States to kills hundreds of thousands if not millions of an adversary's civilians after that adversary's first strike. But, if the IRGC concludes that its hours are numbered, might it not launch in pursuit of its ideological aims, knowing that no one in Washington will retaliate against a country which already has had regime change?
Fareed also fails to discuss just what a game-changer a nuclear weapons-capable Iran would be. In effect, we would not be discussing containing just the Islamic Republic, but also, within a decade, an nuclear Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Libya, and Algeria, as each state motivated its rival to achieve similar capability. Does Fareed really believe that the power of deterrence can ensure stability in a region where war is as much a norm as peace?
Lastly, consider this my own rule-of-thumb: It is not in the interest of the United States to allow any nation to master nuclear technology if Washington cannot predict the leadership or even system of government in that country a decade down the line.
As a final aside, Fareed calls Daniel Pipes a neoconservative. While Pipes is certainly a hawk, he is a realist hawk, much like Dick Cheney or John Bolton. The flippant use of neoconservative might be something the Huffington Post engages in, but its misuse should embarrass both Fareed and the Washington Post. |
