By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, October 06, 2015
There are several scenarios the Obama administration may
be entertaining as it pursues its diplomacy in the Middle East. It may believe
that the new agreement with Iran will lead to “engagement” with reform-minded
theocrats. The idea is that this will insidiously liberalize the regime,
empower a younger generation of pro-Western reformers, and put the theocracy on
“an arc of history” back into the “family of nations.” Or perhaps an
Obama-inspired second green revolution will overthrow the regime, and we will
see a Euro-socialist Iranian republic renounce nuclear weapons — or at least,
having inherited custodianship of the existing arsenal, oversee it in the
fashion of democratic Israel or France.
Alternatively, the administration may imagine that a
Shiite Axis — Iran, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas — empowered by Putin’s
Russia, will balance the region, either, strategically, convincing the Sunni
monarchies to accept the new balance of power, or, morally, ensuring that
formerly outlaw anti-American radical regimes find parity with the pro-American
conservative and right-wing regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies.
Or, less concretely, the United States may simply wish to abdicate the Middle
East and let the players there all fight it out, reentering when the players
are worn out and defeated.
All these scenarios are probably fantasies. In truth, the
deal will make the world a much more dangerous place. Here are five reasons
why.
I. How to
Negotiate a Bomb
The U.S. has now established an official blueprint on how
to get nuclear weapons without being relegated to pariah status. Iran, unlike
Pakistan and North Korea, is not renegading its way to nuclear weapons, but is
negotiating its pathway with the approval of the West. Yet Iran’s government is
just as unhinged as those of the last two nuclear newcomers, is more centrally
positioned in the Middle East, and has far more financial resources, given its
singular reserves of natural gas and oil. Other would-be nuclear nations will
make the necessary adjustments, asking for similar sorts of American-backed
supposed non-proliferation protocols, as they shadow Iran step by step into
nuclear readiness. The combination of Iran’s transition to nuclear status under
the aegis of the U.S., and the Obama administration’s simultaneous renunciation
of America’s prior Middle East role, amounts to a one-two punch to the Sunni
world, which will assume that neither conventional arsenals nor American
guardianship will deter Iran. Again, the Sunni nations will eventually make the
necessary nuclear adjustments in the manner that worked for Iran. A nuclear
Middle East will be the bastard child of this treaty.
II. The Logic of
Israel
Conventional wisdom assures us that the Iranian nuclear
facilities cannot be completely destroyed militarily. Any attempt to do so
supposedly would fail to eliminate all the hidden and fortified enrichment
plants and would only elicit both an Iranian conventional response and an
asymmetrical terrorist response. Thus, Israel, for example, would not be so
foolish as to try. Perhaps. But conventional wisdom does not always work in the
Middle East in general, and in particular not for Israel, which has no margin
for error, given its size and location. Instead, the impossible may in truth
become the most likely. Israelis remember what the world’s assurances and
civilized veneer got their ancestors the last time a head of state talked about
eliminating Jews.
Israel’s leadership will not assume that even a 90
percent likelihood that Iran either won’t get nuclear weapons or won’t use them
against Israel is good enough to ensure the impossibility of another Holocaust.
Are Jews for the next 20 years supposed to listen to an Iranian general du jour
wink and nod about nuclear weapons as he blusters about the end of the Jewish
state, only to hear the next day that the supposed threat was due to a
mistranslation of the Farsi or that it was an unauthorized outburst from a
minor official — with the cycle of staged nuclear bombast starting again the
next week and the week after that, as the world advises Israelis to watch their
manners and observe proportionality?
I doubt that the descendants of those who went through
the Holocaust are going to sit still permanently under an Iranian nuclear sword
of Damocles and be serially teased about how frayed is the string holding it
above them. Regional Götterdämmerung may seem preferable to certain eventual
strangulation. And the pious assurances of John Kerry sound too much like those
of an earlier generation of State Department blue-blood grandees like John
McCloy and Breckinridge Long in the run-up to World War II — and are just as
empty and in the end would prove just as cruel.
III. A Pitiful,
Helpless Giant
The appearance of U.S. capitulation is already rippling
throughout the world. President Obama has issued at least five deadlines about
nuclear proliferation and then looked the other way as the Iranians have
flouted them. For all the Western braggadocio about the Iran deal, most
observers worldwide will glean from the agreement that a tired West caved on
sanctions, was eager to trade with the Iranians and make money, is afraid to
stand up to the theocracy and its supporters, and sees the deal as part of a
grand recessional from past American prominence. It matters not whether this is
a factual description of U.S. efforts to negotiate with Iran; it matters only
that it is becoming the general global consensus. Evidence of that supposition
includes the abrupt renunciation of the Oslo agreements by the Palestinians,
and Putin’s brazen entry into and bombing in the Middle East and his
sponsorship of a new Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Hezbollah arc that will
eventually threaten the Sunni oil producers.
Three American lapses account for the current Middle East
mess: 1) the failed reset with Putin, coupled with John Kerry’s invitation to
Russia to enter the Syrian red-line fiasco; 2) the dropping of effective
sanctions against Iran and the appearance of caving in to Iranian demands; and
3) the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in late 2011 and the ensuing
vacuum that fueled ISIS.
The ripples of American impotence reach well beyond the
Middle East, as we see with Putin’s inroads into the former subject nations of
the Soviet Union, the sudden rearming of the Japanese, China’s indifference to
warnings about cyber attacks and its new artificial atolls in the Pacific, and
the increasing bluster of the Latin American socialist dictatorships. The world
has been reviewing U.S. behavior via-à-vis Iran and has concluded that the only
mystery is whether America’s enemies are now allowed to do as they please, or
whether, in fact, they are no longer enemies but friends. The result is growing
chaos. The medicine that will eventually be needed to treat this disease will
make the post-Obama years the most dangerous era in American foreign policy
since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
IV. The Collapse
of Iranian Dissent
There is no evidence, either from history or from the
contemporary world, that engagement with an appeasing West infects dictatorial
systems, as their enslaved masses get hooked on freedom and Western consumer
junk, and eventually revolt. More likely the opposite is true. It was a
minority of Germans that voted Hitler into power. Many of the Junkers on the
German General Staff had, by 1938, rightly sized Hitler up as a dangerous nut
whose insane geostrategic gambling was going to get an utterly unprepared Germany
into a global war that it could not win. They were right, but entirely
discredited after Munich. A Western sellout destroyed German clandestine
opposition to Hitler, who boasted of his bullying as the German people basked
in his reflected glory. What sent Hitler permanently into his Führerbunker and
dissipated the once-adoring crowds was not the Munich Agreement, but
Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Hamburg aflame. Carterism did not bring down the
Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet system did — because of the
post-Carter pressures of the Reagan administration’s deterrent rhetoric and
military renaissance. I-Phones and thousands of Chinese students at Berkeley
and Yale have not created a liberated Tiananmen Square–like China or stopped
Chinese cyber warfare.
The nuclear deal with Tehran will undermine Iranian
dissidents. The Iranian economy, flush with cash and new oil revenues, will
uplift the Iranian people, and the theocracy will rightly take the credit,
adding the relish that its policies have both led to better economic times and
rubbed the Great Satan’s snout in the muck. It may be true that Iranian youth
love America, but that admiration was based on our own opposition to Iran’s
eroding and incompetent seventh-century theocracy — not on our later
appeasement and empowerment of the mullahs. The theocracy will gain public
support from its new global status, likely acquisition of nuclear capability,
and rebooted economy; its opponents will lose face, and the world will be the
worse off.
V. Deterrence?
Some believe a nuclear Iran can be deterred like any
other such power. The makeup of the region, however, may argue against that
theory. The modern Middle East has given us Pan-Arabism, the Baath party,
Khomeini, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS. In terms of methodology, it has
given the world the electronic fatwa, the modern foot-soldier version of the
kamikaze suicide bomber, and the apparent right to murder novelists,
cartoonists, and satirists anywhere on the planet. Airline hijackings and the
use of jumbo jets as cruise missiles are also Middle East specialties. What
other region can boast of a rogues’ gallery with the likes of Yasser Arafat,
Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ayatollah
Khomeini, the Assads, Saddam Hussein, and Moammar Qaddafi?
Where else in the modern world are Christians crucified,
beheaded, incinerated, and drowned — as if the very elements are not enough for
the sick homicidal imaginations of ISIS murderers? What Middle East country has
not fought another Middle East country? Egypt, the best of the bunch, in the
postwar era has gassed the Yemenis, invaded Libya, and attacked Israel. Iraq has
invaded Kuwait, attacked Iran, sent missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, and
gone to war with much of the world. Lebanon has been a battleground for every
warring sect and state in the region. Gaza is a wasteland. Syria is fighting
ISIS and itself, while threatening its neighbors. Only in the Middle East does
removing a monster from power often lead to something worse.
This litany is not meant to denigrate the Middle East,
merely to suggest that it is the most violent and unpredictable region of the world,
where three religions intersect amid postmodern petroleum-fed decadence and
premodern elemental poverty — all not far from fat and weak Europe. The idea
that logic and restraint will operate in a nuclear Middle East beyond Israel is
lunacy.
In sum, the region is North Korea cubed, an Islamic
shoot-’em-up Tombstone or Dodge City where punks with nuclear six-guns, not
sober classical deterrence, will make the rules.
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