Death Wish

Four and one half years ago Saddam Hussein went to war with a vastly superior power to defend a weapons program he didn’t even have. The madness cost him his head and now it appears his next door neighbors have been playing with the same fire. The good news this week is that the American intelligence community has concluded Iran suspended development of nuclear weapons sometime in 2003. The National Intelligence Estimate doesn’t say why, only that it was in response to “international pressure.” Some pundits have pronounced the development a triumph of diplomacy over threat of force, and at the same time point to it as further evidence of unreliability in intelligence estimates. That inconsistency aside, I’m not sure what diplomacy they think has triumphed. The big international news in 2003 was Saddam’s demise coming on the heels of a Taliban collapse in Afghanistan and George Bush’s Axis of Evil remarks in his 2002 State of the Union address. For a time there it looked like the Ayatollahs might be next. That would seem to be the obvious source of international pressure. 2003 also saw another regional pariah suspend his nuclear activities. Libya’s Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi admitted to his own program and agreed to allow the US and Britain to dismantle it under the oversight of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The part I don’t understand is why Iran would risk providing the United States with the same provocation that cost Saddam so dearly. If they were going to suspend development, why not follow Qadhdhafi’s lead and reap the benefits of international reconciliation? Current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sounds a lot like Saddam in his belligerence and appears to be taking his country down the same path. But the clerics who hold the real power in Iran are rational men. Surely they know that the nuclear threats only serve to further isolate them, and present the very real possibility of preemptive western military action. The handwriting was on the wall long before Americans invaded Iraq. The Ottoman Empire has been dismembered and it isn’t going to be restored. No new bellicose anti-western power is going to be allowed to become a hegemon in a region as vital to world economies as the Middle East, nuclear or not. Iran has a lot to gain from being a peaceful neighbor. In the days of the Shah they were one of the more progressive players in the region. They had a pretty good university system and a growing middle class. Many of us remember Ross Perot’s daring rescue of EDS executives from an Iranian prison. Most have probably forgotten what took them there to begin with. They were working to implement a social security system sponsored by the Empress Farah, a lady who had also worked to make Iranian women among the most emancipated in the Muslim world. Not all of that has been undone by the Ayatollahs. Iranians are still relatively well educated, they still have a sizeable middle class, and their women are still pretty independent. Those factors, oil, and a well connected Diaspora position Iran to benefit hugely from the modern growth in world prosperity but all this talk of war and sanctions is bad for business. There was never much chance of war with Iran and the new NIE report makes it less likely than it has been in years. We aren’t going to be on good terms though until, as President Bush insists, they come clean about the nuclear weapons and begin acting as responsible world citizens. I don’t understand what’s keeping them. One shoe appears to be on the floor. They need to let the other one fall.