There is one difference between Iran and Russia: Iran need not utilize a warhead outside of the country to make it effective. The downside of irrational actors on the world stage is that they are not all irrational in the same way or degree and, because of that, conventional and even nuclear deterrence has problems being posited within a fantastical framework of belief. Over at the Hoover Institution, Lee Harris has an extremely insightful work on Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology which examines how the fantastical plays in the decision making areas of the irrational.
While concentrating on AQ, the view is more broadly applicable to any organization that utilizes fantastical views to make irrational decisions: Iran fits this as did the Aum Shinrikyo Death Cult, as do other organizations to one degree or another that utilize fantastical ideas as a basis for real world actions. Deterrance must have meaning within the framework of that ideological system, even if it makes little or no sense in ours. In looking at Jerry Pournelle’s question on containment for Iran I had to look at the suppositions being given and one of the first factors is a capitulation of western liberties to radical Islamic threats of violence as seen by the self-censorship in the west, and by shifts from acculturation to accomodation of Islamic formulations of society in the west done by radicals. While containment is not deterrance, in and of itself, deterrance is used as a form of containment and it is that which is posited as being effective against non-rational actors. For that deterrance to be effective it has to have some basis of acceptance in those areas it is protecting. While barely tenable at the end of the Cold War, deterrance lasted long enough to exhaust the USSR economically so as to weaken rule and encourage not only dissent but active overturning of regimes.
The west and the US does not have that long-term view that was held from 1946-1991 against Iran or, indeed, other irrational actors. Passive deterrance for the long-run, by itself, is not a winning paradigm. Active defense and voicing that effects will be hard and fast for unacceptable activities then cast the US putting a threat system against an irrational actor. If an underlying basis for a belief system postulates that an ‘end time’ with large casualties is acceptable to usher in a ‘new age’ either via a 12th Imam or some hand of Death sweeping over the world, then threats of an active military sort become an accepted value to have as a part of that ideology. In threatening harshness and even mass death, one plays into the thought system of the ideology and reinforces it. If you postulate a single or a few low power nuclear devices inside Iran, the idea of utilizing them against their own population and blaming a threatening western power for the attack becomes not only acceptable but a way to clean the population of unacceptable elements. WMDs are not a strategic chess piece, but have an absolute utilitarian value of getting a mass of large size into one area and destroying it: weapon of mass destruction. The Cold War chess piece concept does not work in that paradigm, and threatening to attack a country without it having stated it will deploy such weapons becomes a grave geopolitical risk: it enhances the internal belief system and then gives rise to the opportunity to turn the threat back in an opportunistic way.
What that means is that asymmetrical retaliation in a military realm is not wholly effective through unconventional means and hard to make palatable in a conventional realm. That then posits that a western non-military asymmetric view must be taken in an area that a non-rational leadership has a weakness. As war is diplomacy by other means, war by other means must feature things that are effective and cannot be negotiated over: which puts diplomacy as a side-light as one does not want to be bargaining with irrational actors.
What sort of weapons can be deployed in this realm? Only the things that a irrational leadership cannot provide: accountable government, individual freedom and liberty, low corruption in government and official realms, equality of justice, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion… the gravest threat to Iran is a Shia Muslim state doing these things and being seen as effective in safeguarding them. A neighboring state would be the perfect place to do this. These are powerful tools in the National Toolkit to confront irrational actors as they typically lack in many of these areas and add in a police state mentality on top of it so that when the real world tries to effect them via local populations it can be quashed. For awhile.
If US foreign policy took the approach of ‘yes, we can wipe out the Iranian capability, but we are more interested in helping people reach to liberty and freedom, and will look to do that by helping to teach and sustain it…’ then there is no saber rattling, just a utilitarian response to an irrational set of actions. The latter, by being an earnest view long held in the US about these things, pits our universal understanding of humanity against the Iranian view of fatalistic Islam against each other. The strongest weapon against Iran is undermining their ideology by demonstrating it to be ineffective in dealing with everyday life and showing how personal liberty can lead to a better life with freedom.
Now when I start seeing educational institutions, religious institutions willing to teach secualr subjects, and US foreign policy based on those things, that will make an extremely credible threat in the one place that will harm Iran the most: Iraq. If Arabs, who are generally not seen as uncorruptable, can do that with a Shia majority population, then what is up with those Persians in Iran?
It would help if we could sustain these values in the west, too… but I am not holding my breath on that.
