Defeatist of the Day

In a morbidly eerie recasting of Chamberlain's 'Peace in our Time' announcement, the Times (of London) is running an opinion today that advates we concede defeat by Iran and attempt to engage them with rewards and trade and other goodies. I'm glad this sort of sentiment isn't yet prevailing today. While the whiff of the late 1930s is almost certainly in the air, we still have some Churchillian-esque backbone left that may avert total catastrophy with appeasement as the vehicle.

The author is the London Times' chief commentator on economic and financial issues. He is also a highly educated mathematician who has been involved in the financial sector for a number of decades. I don't dispute his economic forecasts about the price of oil given the scenarios he describes, but I do absolutely dispute with vigor the scenarios themselves.

The Iranian paradox: to gain victory the West must first concede defeat
Anatole Kaletsky

DEFEAT IS NEVER pleasant, but often it is better to lose than to win. Defeat in the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to Germany and Japan in their thousand years of recorded history. For America, losing in Vietnam was also a blessing in disguise. While defeat seemed to shatter the illusion of an "American century" of global dominance, it was followed by 30 years of almost uninterrupted prosperity, a political renaissance for conservative values and America's total victory over communism in the Cold War.

Such thoughts may not offer much consolation to George Bush, Tony Blair and Ehud Olmert as they contemplate their defeat at the hands of Iran and its Hezbollah allies. But the ordinary citizens of America, Britain and Israel should try to draw some constructive lessons from history, even while their leaders make ever greater fools of themselves with their idle threats against Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Whoa. Wait a second. Defeat at the hands of Iran and Hezbollah? Nothing has been 'lost' here. The issue is certainly not resolved, but to date Hezbollah has not resumed its previous positions and efforts to destory Israel. So far Iran is still politically isolated, contained and viewed increasingly as a rogue pariah. The United Nations is engaged and various other diplomatic efforts are underway to enforce the resolutions passed by the Security Council. So to say civilization was defeated by barbarians, that Rome has been destroyed by the Visigoths, is silly and premature. This is definately not a time to grab the girl in Times Square and give her a full blown kiss, but it surely isn't the last helicopter leaving Saigon either.

Furthermore, our leaders are not making fools of themselves by trying to implement a policy other than outright concession to and appeasement of a religious fanatic who has repeatedly called for genocide and world domination. The fool is the one who attempts to aquiesce in the vain hope that he won't have to deal with Iran if he simply gives Iran what it wants. History is far more replete with examples of failure due to appeasement than of failure due to aggressive defense.

The "international community" is now totally powerless in its nuclear confrontation with Iran, even more so than with North Korea. Pyongyang needs food and fuel to survive and is therefore susceptible to pressure from China. Iran, at the moment flush with oil wealth, needs nothing and is not dependent on anyone.

The sort of economic and diplomatic sanctions being ominously debated by the UN Security Council - curbing investment in Iran's oil industry or banning exports of machinery and luxury goods - would be worse than ineffective. They would actually strengthen the regime of Iran's fanatically anti-American and anti-Israeli President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This is factually incorrect. Iran is highly dependent on gasoline imports, for example. Iran's leaders cannot remain in power if the people's necessities are denied them. The issue isn't of the ability of sanctions to change behavior in regimes, the issue is the ability of the world to obey UN resolutions prohibiting trade with Iran. Sanctions against North Korea work very effectively. The problem is that we aren't willing to starve the people there into submission. We aren't willing to cut off energy supplies and medical supplies. In Iran's case, the sanctions wouldn't need to go nearly that far. Iran is a highly educated society with a high percentage of young people who are not at all religious and not at all happy with the current state of their nation. Denying them gasoline, cell phones, automobiles, chewing gum, jeans, sneakers, etc. etc. will produce a far faster reaction with a much greater intensity then could be achieved in North Korea where the people have absolutely nothing to begin with.

Economic sanctions would help Ahmadinejad by adding to the xenophobic paranoia that always tends to reinforce nationalist extremists, at least in the short term. In the case of Iran, however, there is another, more important, reason why sanctions would be counter-productive. Far from defeating Iran through economic exhaustion, sanctions would make the country, or at least its Government, even richer and more powerful than it is today. This paradox, which has never before arisen in the use of economic sanctions for diplomatic purposes, arises because of the state of the global oil market today.

Oil prices have more than doubled in the past three years because steadily rising demand, especially from China, has run up against the limits of global production capacity. If Iran, which is the world's third-largest oil producer after Russia and Saudi Arabia, had even a small part of its exports removed by sanctions from world markets, the oil price would shoot up to $100 or more. As long as the percentage increase in oil prices was higher than Iran's percentage loss of export volumes, sanctions would result in the Government's total revenues going up, instead of down.

Again, this is only an issue if sanctions aren't enforced. They are pretty tight on North Korea. They have been for quite a while. They were also pretty tight on Libya. Sanctions are a viable punishment for rogue behavior if enforced and adhered to. The reality is that China and Russia won't abide by sanctions even if they claim they are (since they think nothing of lying to just about anyone about anything). THAT is the truth about sanctions. However, that being said, prohibiting the importation of gasoline is something that may be enforceable and may achieve part of the desired effect. After all, the average Iranian doesn't care if China violates the sanctions by selling Iran some missiles now and then. But Joe Iranian DOES care if he can't drive is car to the coffee shop.

Iran also controls the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow strip that separates the country from the Arabian peninsula and which provides a passage for roughly 40 per cent of the world's internationally traded oil. If Iran were to close the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise threaten foreign shipping in response to an attempt to impose economic sanctions, the oil price would jump not just to $100 a barrel but probably to $150 or beyond. As a result, the Iranian Government could quite conceivably double its present revenues after the imposition of sanctions. Thus sanctions would provide President Ahmadinejad with even more money to buy popularity among his domestic voters, and unleash an even greater torrent of oil money to finance Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and anti- American Shia in Iraq.

Um, newsflash for the London Times. Iran does NOT control the Straits of Hormuz. The 5th Fleet controls the Straits and has since 1995. Even if Iran was able to temporarily (and somewhat magically) close the straits, rest assured that they would rapidly be reopened. The author is quite correct in that nearly half of the world's oil supply transits the Straits of Hormuz. If it were to be threatened, even the Chinese would send ships to prevent the interruption of the flow of oil.

But if sanctions are doomed to failure, what about military options? As a last resort, couldn't America or Israel stop the nuclear programme by threatening to bomb Iran? Sadly or happily (depending on your worldview), the answer is a very clear "no". Militarily, America and Israel have now shot their bolts in Iraq and Lebanon respectively. They have neither the firepower nor the willpower to do anything to stop Iran's nuclear programme - and even if they did have the capacity to strike Iran's nuclear facilities, they could not afford the risk of destabilising their other Middle Eastern interests even further by taking military action. Moreover, both America and Israel now understand that a bombing campaign that could not be backed by an infantry invasion would only reinforce the existing regime's grip on power.

Again, the Times seems to be disconnected from reality here. Implying that the United States cannot bomb Iran into the stone age at a moment's notice is factually incorrect. Whether we would or not is the question. That we have insufficient ground strength (at current force levels) to mount a full blown invasion and occupation of Iran is probably true. That we don't have the ability to send substantial ground forces into Iran is not true at all. Trust that the United States has plenty of capacity to inflict hell on her enemies from the air, sea and land.

The last argument against a military strike, but by no means the least one, brings us back to the oil issue. If the US or Israel were to bomb Iran's nuclear installations, Iran would have the strongest possible pretext to ramp up the oil price to $150 a barrel or higher by closing or restricting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Thus a military attack on Iran, just like economic sanctions, would increase the Government's capacity to finance global terrorism and curry favour with the Iranian public. It would also cause potentially catastrophic disruption to the world economy when the American public is already turning against the Iraq adventure and Republicans face a potentially disastrous electoral defeat.

I don't doubt that oil would go up. I don't doubt that it would be a tricky and complex socio-political issue to resolve this by force. But the temporary high price of oil is not reason enough to allow Iran to possess the bomb. Internal American politics cannot dictate whether we allow Iran to have a nuclear arsenal. The American public would be incensed if Iran was allowed to build nuclear weapons while the world leadership stood idly by.

What then should America and its allies do in the face of Iran's nuclear defiance? The answer is clear: concede defeat. Iran has won this tussle and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Instead of trying to stop Iran's nuclear programme, the international community must bring Iran back into the civilised world. The only way to do that is to stop issuing empty threats and to start offering Iran real incentives for co-operative behaviour - non-aggression guarantees from America and Israel, removal of the residual US economic sanctions dating back to the 1980s and the prospect of steadily improving treatment in investment and trade. Of course, such a U-turn seems inconceivable while President Bush remains in office. But remember President Nixon's historic opening to China as he was losing the war in Vietnam. To paraphrase Johnson, a politician's mind can be concentrated wonderfully by the knowledge that he is faces defeat.

Try reading this last paragraph without gaping in astonishment. First of all, it is funny that the author extolls the wisdom of LBJ (who ramped UP the Vietnam war that his buddy Kennedy started) and attributes blame for the war's failures to Nixon. Surely there's no bias there. It is also bizarre that the esteemed author believest that Ahmadinejad is interested in non-aggression guarantees and the lifting of residual US sanctions or even in investment and trade. He wants nothing less than to generate chaos and wage religious war in an effort to destroy the world order. He has no interest in participating the existing global structure. He wants to overturn the status quo, not join it.

But quite apart from that, we are to allow a Islamo-fascist extremest regime to possess a nuclear weapon when it has already made clear several times that it will use it against Israel? Give up in our efforts to prevent Iran from triggering a tremendous conflagration in the Middle East as they already have tried to do via Hezbollah? Concede to Iran anything they wish in order to curry favor with the regime and somehow thereby with the people? Guarantee Iran that we will not use force to prevent her leaders from committing genocide, destabilizing the entire region and attempting to conquer her neighbors as her leaders have repeatedly said they wish to do? If this isn't advocating a Munich Pact with Iran, then I surely don't know what it is. This is defeatism in all its glory, folks.

I don't think the solution for Iran is give the enemy what he wants and then hope he doesn't use it against you later. I think the solution is to undermine the enemy at every point possible. Internal Iranian discontent is quite high, even if open dissent is forcibly suppressed. We should be figuring out how to help support and enhance the dissenters and then focus our every dollar we can toward helping them succeed in forcing changes from the inside. The economy there is in shambles and we ought to be figuring out ways to further increase the misery of the Iranian people and at the same time convince them that it is the fault of their leaders. Sanctions alone won't achieve that. It is necessary to wage a war of soft power against Iran. It involves media campaigns, information warfare, financial warfare, harrassment on every front and at all times. We should wage a cold war against Iran. One that involves the gradual undermining of the legitimacy of their government and checks the international adventures of that regime. Oppostion and insurgency should be encouraged everywhere Iran has interests. We need to grab them by the balls and poke them in the eyes. Wherever a mullah goes, he should be scared shitless that the CIA is watching him and may pull the sniper trigger at any moment. The Iranian diaspora must be employed to help in this effort.

I know in my heart that on this side of the Atlantic we have the wherewithal to achieve this. But whither Churchill in Britain? If only he were here to remind his kinsfolk: "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

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