Quare Persia Delenda Est
"Why Persia Must Be Destroyed”
Our own Ken McCracken has opined that ”Attacking Iran Is A Really, Really Bad Idea.”
This approaches the level of a tautology. Wars are inherently bad things; innocents are killed, property is destroyed, human suffering is increased. Yet wars are sometimes both necessary and the less evil option.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill
English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)
I will thus grant Ken’s Point: Attacking Iran would indeed be a bad thing. But would it be better or worse in terms of foreseeable consequences than tolerating the status quo?
Iran as terrorism central
While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is correctly viewed as the wellspring of Wahabbism and thus the spread of radical Islam, they are not the primary sponsor of Islamist terrorism. That distinction belongs to Iran.
The Qods Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) are the mullahs primary tool for directing, funding, and equipping Islamist terrorism world wide. They are the paymasters behind Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Mahdi Army, and the Taliban. They have links to virtually every Islamic terrorist organization at some level.
Iran is also a principal supplier of arms and explosives to foreign fighters operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran’s War on the United States
Iran has both technically and actively been making war on the United States for nearly thirty years. The revolution which brought the mad mullahs to power began with the seizure of a United States Embassy and the imprisonment of our mission to Iran. They have remained active against the United States by attacking the Marine Barracks in Beirut Lebanon via their Hezbollah proxies, and continue their hostilities via proxy to this day by arming and supporting various insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ignoring the Problem has not improved the situation
Despite an unending string of provocations, the United States has not waged war against Iran. The closest we have come to directly engaging was a limited naval campaign, and we have otherwise limited ourselves to containment (limited support of Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war), diplomacy and economic sanctions. Demonstrably these lesser measures have not succeeded in altering the behavior of the mad mullahs.
Ramifications of conflict with Iran
Ken listed the downside thus:
The worst-case downside is appallingly bad. It could rally the Iranian population behind that mullahs - a population that right now is very unhappy with their leadership, and somewhat pro-American. That would all be swept away, and even worse, it could rally the majority Sunni muslims behind the minority Shi’ites in Iran in a way no other event possibly could. It would be the polarization of the West versus Islam that Osama bin Laden has long been seeking. It could end the disunity in the Muslim world that thus far has worked to the West’s advantage.
It could rally the Iranian population. But then again Iran’s population is far from heterogeneous. It is not even majority Persian, and only barely majority Shia. The odds are at least as good that a disabling attack would instead result in a shattering of national unity and civil war.
It could indeed cause Shia and Sunni to join in common cause. Or not. Much the same was claimed with regard to invading Iraq. What resulted was an increase in sectarian violence, not its remission.
As regards being a polarizing event, almost certainly not. There is no love to lose between the Arabs and the Persians, and scarcely any more between Shia and Sunni.
Ken further argues that “Anti-Zionism” is the one tie that binds Muslim states. At a rhetorical level, this is certainly true. In practice, it is a rhetorical point. Every Arab nation which has made war upon the state of Israel has drawn back a bleeding stump.
As regards Iran stepping up it’s activities in Iraq, their ability to do so would depend on the resources they have left after the cessation of military operations by the United States. I would argue that an operation closely resembling what I proposed as Operation Carthage would leave Iran with few resources and fewer options when it comes to stirring the pot in Iraq, and everywhere else its Qods force operates.
Ken’s one truly laughable assertion is that Iranian overt military operations would result in anything other than disaster for the Iranians. He seems to have missed the fact that Iran and Iraq engaged in a decade long war which was a bloody stalemate. In the aftermath of that stalemate the United States twice went through the experienced and re-armed Iraqi Army like shit through a goose. Iran has not been able to re-arm to the extent that Iraq was able to and has not consistently trained it’s armed forces in the intervening decades. To suggest they would be as credible a force, or more credible than the Iraqi’s were, is asinine. A conventional war between Iran and the American Forces currently in Iraq and Afghanistan would effectively gut the Iranian ability to wage war, and would likely end with the occupation of Tehran.
Iran’s push for Nuclear Weapons
Glaringly omitted from Ken’s analysis was the driving factor for military operations against Iran; their nuclear weapons program. Israeli intelligence now holds that Iran will have working nuclear weapons by 2009. The nuclear histories of South Africa and Pakistan lend credence to this assessment. The wild card here of course is the Mad Mullahs who actually run Iran. It is no stretch of the imagination to posit a first Iranian nuclear test occurring over Tel Aviv. The consequences of such a use would make all of Ken’s worst case scenarios pale in comparison.
Given a choice between all of Ken’s worst case scenarios, and the specter of the Mad Mullahs armed with nuclear weapons, military action now becomes the far lesser of the potential evils.
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