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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (18990)	2/16/2002 2:31:24 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

My reading of Pollack was that Saddam is rational by his own lights, but those lights are far too aggressive and prone to miscalculation for any comfort. Saddam knows how things play in the local neighborhood, but he doesn't understand non-Arab politics. I got that out of Pollack's article, too, but I'm still a bit uncomfortable with the thesis that Saddam is an irrational lunatic who is not subject to deterrence while at the same time being deterred by Israeli nukes. The inconsistency bothers me. I'm looking for another way to look at him which might make a little more sense. One way is to see him as someone who is so inconsistent that both aspects can be accommodated. The problem is that there is no telling which one got out of bed on any particular day. He seems to be taking lessons from an early '70s guy whose name I've long ago forgotten. I'm sure you'll recall him. He proposed the power of irrationality in the conduct of foreign policy. Nixon was enamored of him. Using this thesis, Nixon instructed Kissinger to tell the North Vietnamese that Nixon was out of control and that he was capable of doing something really dreadful to them if they did not give in to some of Nixon's demands. I don't recall if Nixon prevailed on the points under discussion but we all know the ultimate result. The rationale, in a nutshell, was that a rational player will sometimes use irrational behavior in a manner calculated to achieve his goals. Since the vast majority of foreign policy actors are coolly rational, they will make concessions to the player who is perceived to be irrational in order to avoid undesirable results. The falsely irrational player in this manner wins points he might not otherwise win. Saddam might be playing this game.