Here's a few things to consider Dafydd.

First, Aug. 22 and the Iranians announce the signing of a mutual 'protection' treaty with the Russians and Chinese...

The consequences of that would change the entire paradigm of the Middle East.

Second, there is a 'logic' to the eagerness with which some of the Mullah's anticipate Armaggedon.

Arguably and, within the context of their beliefs, their desire for confrontation with the west is entirely rational.

The most extreme of the Mullah's view western civilization as a mortal threat to their concept of Islam. They are perfectly correct in this view.

Western 'culture' is antithetical to the mullah's Islamic fundamentalism. The case can be made that Western culture is 'killing' Islamic 'culture'. Not out of animosity of course but simple incompatibility with the 'primitiveness' of certain aspects of Islam.

Can anyone seriously propose that Islam's repression of women can last as Islam becomes more and more inundated with western values? Especially if democracy spreads through the middle east?

Islam must change if the interaction with the West continues as before. The only hope Islamic fanatics have is for them to eliminate the Wests' culture. Simply put, they would rather die than see Islam change, for them, their personal death is far preferable to the alternative, the end of Islam as they know it.

Dafydd-

It’s not the main topic of your post, of course, but there’s another reason why mutually assured destruction is no longer an effective deterrent: The whole world knows we’ll never pull the trigger!

When the enemy du jour was the Soviet Union, if they lobbed a nuke first, everyone knew we’d lob one back. And vice versa. The immediate, tit for tat response was expected -- and, indeed, accepted. That’s why MAD worked.

The problem today is that all our probable nuclear enemies (like Iran and North Korea) are small, second-rate powers. Underdogs. And their leaders are psychos. Fruitcakes.

So what happens if one of these nutballs sends a nuke our way and obliterates, say, San Francisco. Would we have the cajones to return the favor? No way, Josefina! (See? I’m finally picking up on the Big Lizards way of spicing up the trite.) We know (and so do they) that if we responded by wiping out Teheran or Pyongyang we would be seen by the world -- including the entire left wing here at home -- as genocidal monsters. The whole world would be appalled that we killed so many innocents who had no say in what their psychotic leaders did. (Well, the Iranians actually did elect their psychotic leader, but the intelligentsia would easily dismiss that bagatelle.) And what if we decided to take out another city or two for good measure (or to eliminate additional threats) -- can you say “disproportionate response”?

So MAD as a defense strategy is dead. At least as far as the USA is concerned. Now, if Khamenei hit Tel Aviv with WMD’s, I don’t think Israel would feel nearly as constrained as we. And more power to them! So I think your post is spot on when it comes to Iran vs. Israel.

So come August 22, our only hope may be for the Islamic man on the street to start believing the infamous Danish cartoon that told the martyrs to stop coming to meet Allah, because he’s running out of virgins.

By the way: millenarianism. Does that mean Khamenei used to run a hat shop? ;-)

Excerpted and linked at Old War Dogs.

Dick E:

Actually, I believe that if DPRK or Iran hit us with a nuke, we would without question respond with a nuclear barrage: "world opinion" would be trumped by the opinion of the American voter.

Remember the response after 9/11? There were numerous people saying even after that purely conventional attack that we should nuke Teheran or Kabul or even Mecca. Those who wouldn't escalate that far were still absolutely behind a massive invasion of Afghanistan; Bush had a 90%+ job-approval rating... and the use-of-force authorization vote in Congress had only a single dissenter, as I recall: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-UC Berkeley, 95%).

That means Dennis Kucinic voted for the war; Russell Feingold voted for the war; Teddy Kennedy voted for the war, and on and on.

If San Francisco or any other city were nuked, the percent of Americans demanding that we "return the favor" would be in excess of 90%. Any president who refused to do so would be impeached and removed from office within two or three weeks... and his replacement, sensing ruin, would send the nukes.

Dafydd

Dafydd-

I certainly hope you are right.

More importantly, I hope Khamenei, Kim, et al are not as hopelessly naive as I.

Then again, Khamenei, apparently thinks the heavenly supply of virgins is inexhaustible (i.e. deterrence is a nonstarter).

Let's just hope Israel takes him out before he does his worst.

Have to agree with Dick E. The West does not have the will to launch a counter-strike on the innocents in Tehran.

Another reason MAD is dead - imagine the Iranian Theocrats get a few battlefield nukes of the Russian black market and hand them over to Hezzie suicide-bombers. Nuclear "fingerprint" traces the residue back to Russia, and our intel re Iranian involvement is not a "slam dunk".

Rising Stars in the Midwest

Republican Dick DeVos is poised to beat Democrat governor Jennifer Granholm. He is ahead 4-6% in most polls and has the momentum. His lead includes union households, reminiscent of the Reagan Democrats.

Mike Bouchard has won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, getting 60% of the vote, but big wins are nothing new to him. It occurred when he was elected sheriff, and when he previously was elected state senator. He is very popular throughout the state, has a reputation for being tough on crime, and is well-positioned on issues of border security and the GWOT.

Both DeVos and Bouchard are known to be no-nonsense, get-things-done, types; a joint campaign strategy will have a synergetic effect.

Expect to see both rise to national prominence.

Don't ignore the domestic political ramifications. Can anyone doubt that, should a nuke be detonated in Denver or Tel Aviv be vaporized by an airburst, the shrieks and howls from the left about how completely and utterly Bush had failed and how it all would not have happened under a President Kerry or Gore would have done would be deafening and endless?

To imagine how Islam feels right now, imagine that your city is being taken over by...zombies. Now you have three choices. You can die and be zombie food, you can become a zombie yourself, or you can fight like hell using every conceivable weapon and probably die in the process.

Now, there is a logical argument to becoming a zombie. Go with the flow. Hey, at least you will still exist, in some fashion. But you, won't be you. And to most people it would be worse than death.

Western culture, western values, they are eating or converting traditional cultures all over the world. Some will not go quietly into the night. For Islam it really sucks, since, it was supposed to work the other way around. Islam was literally based on the doctrine of kill or convert. It is us who are supposed to be becoming more Islamic.

My prediction - Iran mines the Straight of Hormuz, shutting off the world's oil supply. They will fire chemical weapons at Israel. The Mahdi army in Iraq goes into all out attack. Terrorist strikes all over the world aided by Iranian diplomats. Maybe even Hugo Chavez will also turn down his taps to the U.S.

Don't worry. Iran will lose this thing, and lose very badly, but it will get ugly.

What Iran and their ilk keep forgetting is that the west is still fighting a largely moral war. What happens when we no longer care about harming innocent civilians? What happens when we go all out to win decisively? I'd say the war will be over very quickly once that happens.
The only question is how much will will tolerate before that happens.

People forget that when you waken the sleeping giant, he is usually pissed.

The above hissed in response by: Big D at August 9, 2006 09:59 AM

People, especially People who have tremendous power do tend to go off the deep end. Lord Action's quote about absolute power and corruption in its full context is appropriate here. Wars aren't won by the smartest side. They are lost by the most stupid side.

If Iran is really as stupid as you suggest, we should win. Mu gut feeling is that they may be that stupid.

Sorry to disagree, Dafydd. Ahmadijenad may be living in the '70s -- the "we're not afraid to die" bluff worked with Carter -- but with the possible exception of the Nazis I know of no government in the history of the world whose first and foremost interest was not the collection of next year's taxes. The Gotterdammerungers (left out a couple of umlauts) are a very small minority as a result of natural selection.

P.S. Which is also to say that I disagree with d Brit that the dachisti or new mandarins would ever risk their kleptocracies by going to war with us on behalf of Iran.

The above hissed in response by: nk at August 9, 2006 01:32 PM

"...no government in the history of the world whose first and foremost interest was not the collection of next year's taxes."

Well from the perspective of three tours in Viet Nam. The wartime government of North Viet Nam must have been on a planet that you didn't live on. From what my folks told me about WW II you didn't inhabit the same planet as WW II America.

Making money (collecting taxes) is all very well. First you got to live long enough to spend the $$.

What worries me is that despite (or perhaps because of) being Retired Military, a Viet Nam vet and a Combat vet I really don't like war or violence very much. I really despise the smell of rotting children's bodies. Unfortunately, when your Monki's and other Peace-nicks and Liberals do get riled up enough to fight they become despicably cruel.

I fear that between Peace Democrats and the Iranians general stupidity, the war against Terrorism like WW II will wind up killing hundreds of millions instead of the tens of thousands that a saner policy would kill.

Well, gee, Linh_My, I am named after a sixteen-year old uncle the Nazis murdered. Along with his brother and father. I excepted the Nazis from my theory. As for the Vietnamese, they are collecting the North's and the South's taxes these days. The North Vietnamese were never suicidal. They followed Patton's dictum to the letter: "No s.o.b. ever won a war by dying for his country. You win a war by making the other poor s.o.b. die for his country." And I thank you for your service. My point was that, even in Iran, the suicidal jerks who are in a hurry to meet Allah are a small minority and that the government is primarily interested in its own survival and perpetuation ("collecting next year's taxes" is a metaphor for "survival and perpetuation" not making money).

That would be the big surprise, the lighting of Jerusalem: The announcement on 22 August by Chin, Russia and Iran, that in light of wicked unfair Americans they are signing a joint protection and aid agreement: Any military attack on Iran wil be considered an attack on China & Russia. And by the way, Shiite Iraq belongs to Iran. And the Zionist entity must be Jew-free post haste.
And, just to be fully disclosed, NK and VZ are part of the deal as well.
And America must leave the Persian Gulf, now that we think about it.
What would we do?

Fenrisulven-

Thanks for your support, but, as I said above, I hope Dafydd is right. Actually, no one really knows which of us is right. And that, as I see it, is the problem.

During the Cold War, it was pretty much universally accepted that neither side would blink if the other side launched a nuclear war. Today there is at least some serious doubt about our reaction if attacked.

Of course, world opinion is far less important to whether we are at risk of a WMD attack than what runs through the fevered brains of Khamenei/Ahmadinejad and Kim. Do they believe the MAD concept still applies? Or do they choose to believe that they could nuke us without having to pay an unacceptable price?

With respect to Iran, MAD may well be irrelevant. If they truly have a death wish, maybe they want to be incinerated to hasten their ultimate, heavenly reward. Or the leaders may think this martyrdom business is OK for the masses but not necessarily for them, so they might choose to believe MAD is dead for reasons like those I outline above. Heck, even if they miscalculate and we really do respond with nukes, if they play their cards right it will just be those masses that get obliterated and therefore hailed as martyrs; the leaders will then be lionized as the ones who incited the infidels to create all those newly minted martyrs. (One wonders whether the surviving Iranians on the street would be quite so accepting of their leaders’ perfidy, but that’s another story.)

Kim, on the other hand, is presumably an atheistic communist with no expectation of an afterlife. Our best hope with him is that he still believes in MAD. Fortunately, he doesn‘t read Big Lizards, where he might start to doubt the MAD scenario because of the inane musings of yours truly. Uh … you don’t read Big Lizards, do you Jong-il, old boy?

The above hissed in response by: nk at August 9, 2006 07:31 PM

Perhaps I misunderstood your point.

My point is that the Government of North Viet Nam made substantial financial sacrifices to win the war. To me, South Viet Nam and America lost the Viet Nam War because we were looking at profit and loss. North Viet Nam won because they were interested in winning the war what ever the cost. I currently spend about half my time in Viet Nam and do have friends who were on the other side. So I can and do talk about the war with people who fought with Vietnamese forces on both sides.

What I find disturbing about the current War on Terrorism, is that from what I can see we are looking at profit and loss. The other side seems to be looking at victory at what ever cost. I consider that American involvement in this war started in 1802 when Pres. Jefferson first sent the Marines in to fight against what we would today call terrorists.

To the extent that you are accurate in your estimation of the motivation of Western governments including America's and inaccurate about the motivation of the terrorists and Iranian Government we are doomed to loose the war unless we change our attitude. I believe that you have judged the West accurately and the Terrorist incorrectly.

We were able to change our attitude in WW II. We were determined to win no matter what the cost. We burned entire cities to the ground with thousand bomber raids. My father flew 25 missions including some of these. We used all of the Atomic Bombs we had available. After the end of WW II we aggressively hunted down and killed the surviving dangerous enemy "true believers."

Again instead of killing a few tens of thousands we killed hundreds of millions because we waited till it was almost too late. I suspect that we are looking at the same scenario today

I may haveunderestimated the shortage of Gotterdammerungers.

Ayatollah Khomeini "Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

Just posted to clear up any misconcenptions. Dick E - there is no doubt that MAD is irrelevent here.

Don't know about your guys, but my vote is for Iranian martrydom.

The following hissed in response by: nk

I may haveunderestimated the shortage of Gotterdammerungers.

The above hissed in response by: nk at August 10, 2006 05:25 AM

That is essentially what I've been saying. You sound like a decent sort of person. The problem is that there are too many people who are not.

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