At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
Is Zakaria serious?
The threat isn't from a nationalist Iran that looks to its self interests, but from cultish Shia Islamists who simply have the luck to rule Iran at this period of history to use the power of Iran for goals unrelated to Iran narrowly. When Iran's ruling mullahs tell the world that they'd take one for the team and happily sacrifice Iran itself in order to annihilate Israel, in what sense is it relevant to recount Iran's history?
The most direct answer to his question about whether Iran is serious about ruling the Moslem world and dominating the rest of us is to note that this is exactly what al Qaeda wants. Are they nuts? You bet. Did this stop them from hitting us on 9/11? Nope. And if 19 guys with boxcutters can do that much damage to us, what could an Iran of 70 million people, an economy the size of Finland's, and $5 billion in defense spending do? The question isn't whether Iran is about to overturn the international system, as Zakaria falsely states the problem, but whether they believe god wills them to rule and how many will die in their efforts to fulfill that destiny.
And if it isn't "invading" what do you call Iranian efforts to subvert the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain? What do you call their efforts to control Syria and Gaza, and their efforts in the past to bully Kuwait? The aggression is clear enough.
More broadly, the threat of World War III is indeed real if Iran gets the atomic bomb. Even if Iran has but one bomb and wipes out Tel Aviv with it, Israel will hit Iran in response with multiple atomic bombs. How will the Moslem world react? How will Pakistan react if their people feel pressured to respond with the "Islamic bomb" they've long claimed to possess. How will nuclear-armed India react to Pakistan? And how will nuclear-armed China react to India? And how do we react to China?
What if Iran does something really nuts like nuke Israel but saves a few in reserve and announces they will nuke India if Israel retaliates? With little point in retaliating against Iran, already glowing from Israeli nukes, would India hit Pakistan just in case? Perhaps out of fear that Pakistan will seize the chance to hit India? Or out of fear that the Iranian nuclear strike will cripple India so much that India sinks below an undamaged Pakistan in the following decades?
Once nuclear missiles start flying, where does it stop? Do we count on Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, or Americans to think that it would be overreaction to respond to a nuclear attack on their people and thus end a chain reaction?
And if Iran uses multiple atomic bombs, nearly wiping out Israel, will Israel restrict their nuclear response to Iran if the Israelis believe latent Arab hostility will exploit the chaos and destruction to renew the war on hold today only because Israeli strength deters them now? Will Israel strike their avowed enemy Syria, too, to be safe? Or add in Egypt and Saudi Arabia for good measure?
Even if Iran doesn't use their nuclear weapons, but just wants them to protect their terror campaigns or even just to deter us from invading, how long will it be before all those fearful Arab states Zakaria notes get nuclear weapons? Will they use them against Iran? Against one another? Will they lose one that gets picked up by terrorists? Will some hopped up jihadi infiltrate the nuclear arsenal and push the button in even one launch facility?
Is this close enough to risking World War III for Zakaria?
We are dealing with fanatics in Iran. Can they beat us? Unless we go all fetal and just give up, no they can't. We do have the power to crush them. But will we?
And what would the price be if Iran is nuclear armed? Even if we fight this enemy and ultimately crush them, Zakaria misses the point of the damage that they can cause until we win. Is Bin Laden's dream of a caliphate under his rule insane? Sure. Did he kill nearly 3,000 of us on 9/11? Yes. Zakaria seems to be claiming that any threat that can't destroy us utterly just doesn't count.
Zakaria's very question of why we deal with North Korea yet fear what Ahmadinejad would do with atomic weapons is a use of his knowledge to obscure rather than illuminate this critical point.
Why do we worry about an Iran that has not starved millions of its people while we talk to North Korea which has? Let me clue in Dr. Zakaria: Other than a few fans on American college campuses and International ANSWER, Kim Jong-Il has no potential Kimmunist recruits around the globe. Nor does the North Korean elite seem eager to commit suicide to advance Stalinism. Kim's North Korea is containable, in theory.
Ahmadinejad seeks the end of the world, it seems; and can hope to sway a billion Moslems even if 90% are Sunni and not Shia. Ahmadinejad can cause us tremendous problems--and kill perhaps tens of millions of us--by posing as Islam's champion against a West that he blames for Islam's problems.
In regard to this Islamofascism that Zakaria discounts, Christopher Hitchens has the right idea:
This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.
The fanaticism of our jihadi enemies lead them to kill us even as their eagerness to die in order to kill us makes it easier for us to kill them and beat them. This is true whether we are speaking of Sunni Arab or Shia Persian fanatics. But we have to choose to fight them to exploit this weakness.
Oh, and I remember that Bernard Lewis article that Zakaria ridicules as proof that Iran isn't a threat. Zakaria gets this wrong, too. Lewis didn't predict the end of the world on August 22, 2006, he explained the significance of the date and said it is something to watch. I wrote:
Bernard Lewis (via Real Clear Politics) is wondering about Iran, August 22nd, and nukes. He doesn't say it is likely that we would see a nuclear "answer" to our demands--just that it bears watching[.]
Follow the link in the quote from my post to read what Lewis said rather than trust Zakaria's description--or mine.
Zakaria is so sophisticated that he remembers not how Lewis actually wrote about that date, but how Lewis should have written about August 22, 2006 to bolster Zakaria's dismissal of the threat posed by Iran's mullahs.
Zakaria is too sophisticated to worry about the deaths of millions of Americans due to an Iranian atomic weapon as long as in the end we still win that struggle. Zakaria represents well that class of Americans who are so worldly that they affect a sophisticated disdain for the very idea that any threat must compel us to defend ourselves from them.
The question is, what planet is Zakaria on?
