The fight we cannot win, but hopefully one we won't lose quickly

ARTICLE: "With Threat of Sanctions, Iran Protects Some Assets," by Nazila Fathi and Andrew F. Kramer, New York Times, 21 January 2006, p. A5.

ARTICLE: "Oil Markets Are Jittery Over Possibility of Sanctions Against Iran," by Jad Mouawad, New York Times, 20 January 2006, p. C1.

ARTICLE: "Chirac Hints at Nuclear Reply To State-Supported Terrorism: Putting would-be attackers on notice that they could face dire consequences," by Ariane Bernard, New York Times, 20 January 2006, p. A8.

ARTICLE: "U.S. Aims to Avoid Angering Iran's Public," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 20 January 2006, p. A8.

ARTICLE: "U.S. Envoy Attempts to Hold Sway in Iraq: Shiite Muscle Flexing May Erode Khalilzad's Influence as White House Crafts Exit Plan," Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2006, p. A4.

ARTICLE: "Pakistan's Push in Border Areas Is Said to Falter," by Carlotta Gall and Mohammad Khan, New York Times, 22 January 2006, pulled from web.

ARTICLE: "In Afghanistan, Heroin Trade Soars Despite U.S. Aid: A Threat to Fragile Democracy, The Drug Spreads Death On its Route to Europe; Just Three Euros for a Shot," by Philip Shishkin and David Crawford, Wall Street Journal, 18 January 2006, p. A1.

OP-ED: "Baluchistan," by Frederic Grare and Georges Perkovich, Wall Street Journal16 January 2006, p. A15.

ARTICLE: "Bin Laden Issues New Threat of Attack Against U.S.: Officials Wonder if al Qaeda Is Able to Follow Through Laying Out Terms of a Truce," by Jay Solomon and Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal, 20 January 2006, p. A1.

OP-ED: "The west has picked a fight with Iran that it cannot win: Washington's kneejerk belligerence ignores Tehran's influence and the need for suble engagement," Guardian, 20 January 2006, pulled from web.

OP-ED: "The Iran Charade, Part II," by Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 18 January 2006, pulled from web.

OP-ED: "We Should Strike Iran, but Not With Bombs," by Ivo Daalder and Philip Gordon, Washington Post, 22 January 2006, pulled from web.

Iran's clearly hunkering down, hoping to weather any sanctions by surviving on its soaring oil revenue (it's 40-50 billion dollars a year surfeit is like a magnificent, China-sized FDI flow, except it creates almost nothing in its wake). And yes, such disconnecting does signal danger, all right.

Markets are a bit jittery. I got that question from Kudlow last week and I pooh-poohed it without enough thought. The markets respond to current events--six months in advance. So when markets get jittery over Iran, they are expressing uncertainty over how to discount where this whole showdown is going. Over time, my response was right (rising demand in the East drives prices far more), but I should have listened to Kudlow's question better and offered a more pertinent answer, which is, markets need to be informed as to the likely pace of our response.

The Rice State Department is doing that quite nicely, thank you, showing a serious desire to use so-called "smart sanctions" that don't just punish the average citizen while enriching the elites. But we all know that even the smartest sanctions (meaning, most discretely targeted) tend to fail unless the whole world is watching--and complying. And that is unlikely here. Still, it's great to see State exerting a calming influence over this drive to sanction, which is already drawing in presidential candidates like Evan Bayh.

But smart money sees a lot of trouble with this approach, and with good reason.

First, there's my oft-stated concern (yes, I consider myself, "smart money"!) that we're focusing in the wrong direction by picking Iran's fight over the far more logical one with North Korea, where the dangers of screwing globalization by alienating serious big money like China, South Korea and Japan, far outweigh the potential loss of 4b barrels a day with Iran in a global oil market of 80-plus b barrels a day production. Kim's just far worse, far more unstable, and has the potential to do so much more damage where it counts--the Core. Iran's shenangigans, by comparison, are the same old, same old in a Gap region where we've come to expect failure.

But that is why a lot of smart money is distressed over this new focus on Iran--that sense that we're screwing the pooch in a region where so much change seemed and still seems possible thanks to the Big Bang we laid on it by toppling Saddam's regime. So that by rushing into this fight with Iran (Notice all the similarities with Iraq, right down to the ex-pat group seemingly to supply all our intel? You just wait until this process wakes up the sleeping giant called the Iranian ex-pat population centered in electoral vote-rich California!), we’re wasting time and energy on a player who’s going to play us far more than we can manipulate “him,” given the current correlation of forces (Iran’s oil money, strong and growing economic connectivity with India, Russia, China).

There is keeping the ball rolling and there is pissing in the wind. If you don’t care about getting your socks wet, then you try to do both, but there comes a time for a better sense of sequencing.

Our leverage in Iraq is experiencing a rapid half-life, the further we move in this constitutional process.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is not doing well, and a shared border with Iran on the subject of Baluchistan reminds us that destabilizing Iran may create more harm than good for other regional players we are desperately trying to work right now (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan). Afghanistan is also slipping backwards. You can get all myopic on the bomb all you want, but remember this: the Salafi jihadist movement is exclusively Sunni, so Iran is far more the detour than Iraq could ever be construed to be.

Yes, Osama is sounding more desperate. I spoke about this yo-yo-ing in BFA: he will alternate fantastic threats with calls for détente. Cheney is right: no compromises whatsoever with the radical Salafi jihadists. They have no place in our shared future. But he’s wrong on Iran. It is a country that will not go away or junk its role as leader of the Shiites in the region, but that doesn’t put it in the same category as al Qaeda and it never will.

We are told we can’t trust Iran because it’s not a status quo power, but I ask you, Where are the successes of exporting Shiite revolution over the past 25 years? Not a single one. That dream is far more bankrupt now than the Soviet dream of socialist revolution was when we made peace with that “devil” in the early 1970s, setting in motion the connectivity process that eventually killed that regime from within (not Star Wars, but the “hard” dollars that infected that fake economic system and created a two-tiered economy that progressively starved the command economy of capital and talent; Nixon killed the USSR, not Reagan—if you ever remember anything from my blog, remember that!).

We killed the socialist revolution when we got the global HQ of that movement to sign a deal with its worst enemy, and we do the same with Iran. The “carrots” we’ve offered Iran up to now aren’t nearly enough (some opening of economic ties and diplomatic recognition), because Tehran doesn’t reach for the bomb to acquire those but to get a sense of safety from U.S. invasion, which we cannot successfully pull off. And I say that from participating in several such wargames over the years. Yes, we can physically destroy the place, but we are years and years from the force that will effectively generate lasting regime change there—to include our ability to tap a sufficient quorum of Core powers to participate.

People and experts are blithely arguing the military capacity angle and they’re speaking only the language of Leviathan. The Leviathan’s tasks in Iran aren’t really that much worse than they were in Iraq. It’s the SysAdmin’s likely task list that’s astronomical in comparison, and that’s where the current tie-down of assets in Iraq and Afghanistan is a killer.

And no, letting Israel half-ass it on our behalf isn’t the answer either, because we get suboptimal Leviathan performance and still no SysAdmin follow-up worth discussing.

That has always been my point on Iran: we made our choices in the region with Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq. Seeing the reality of those choices in how we proceed with Iran is the missing link right now—on both right and left. There are simply operational realities going on right now with our ground forces that make most of the discussion of the pre-emption option with Iran rather fantastic—as in, a lot of “experts” are blowing smoke out their asses and seem so confident doing so because they have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to such operational realities.

Ahmadinejad knows just enough, which is why we’ve picked a fight we cannot win—for years. Our choices are this: 1) the ineffective and potentially disastrous use of force that may easily set back everything we’ve sought to accomplished to date in the region (wasting all that sacrifice) and 2) the slow strangle that gets us an isolated Iran that owns the bomb and has three key friends in its corner whom we cannot ignore: India, Russia, China.

As Jenkins says, “Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man.”

Iran is close to 80 million people, putting it several folds above Iraq the postwar management problem.

With Iraq, you basically dealt with Saddam, but with Iran, we face a divided leadership of the government, parliament, the mullahs, and the expediency council (the mediator) and “experts” group that selects the ayatollah (which will go through an election of sorts relatively soon). The parliament goes up for a vote in 2008 and Ahmadinejad will be up for re-election in 2009, and those dates give me some pause.

Why? I am growing more partial to the notion that the slow strangle with “smart” (which mean, quite frankly, limited and especially ineffectual here) sanctions isn’t so bad. Everyone on our side can act “tough” and the decision-making locus remains with Rice, not Rumsfeld, who’s got more important things to lock in during his remaining years. Meanwhile, as my mentor Hank Gaffney argues, we slowly but surely work the issue with India, Russia, and China. We won’t move them much at all, but the practice of getting them to think and act responsibly in the Middle East is worth the price of this admission, much like we use the 6-party talks on North Korea to slowly build the notion of the utility of an East Asian NATO down the road.

I am not backing off my arguments on Iran whatsoever. I’m just trying to be patient, which is the sine qua non of being a good grand strategist. You can have the answer, but you need to have the players who are ready for this answer to make sense, and we don’t have those players right now, either on our side or theirs. By the end of this decade there is an entirely new crew all around, with the 4th generation of leaders in China working the hand-off to the 5th. We’re post-Bush, post-Chirac, post-Ahmadinejad (I fully expect), and we’ve now got years of Old Core-New Core dialogue on what the Persian Gulf should look like. That is a lot of positive diplomatic capital to build in the meantime, and that’s the best pathway for now given the intransigence this situation faces from Iran, the U.S., Russia et al.

Remember, my calls on Iran have always encompassed a time frame of about 5 years (by 2010), so resolution here is not the ball-busting showstopper some want to make it out to be.

Because, again, my preference is to deal North Korea in the meantime, not Iran. I think we need to raise the confidence and trust level with New Core powers there first before we can hope to get the cooperation we need from them in the Middle East.

Daalder and Gordon are essentially right: we need the process of sanctions to slowly but surely help Tehran’s many elements see the wisdom of rapprochment on this issue, not confrontation. But more important, in my mind, is teaching both the New Core pillars and ourselves—the Old Core West—that Core-wide cooperation on severe security issues in the Gap is not only possible under the best of circumstances, but something worth building in a systematic manner across all such cases and potential scenarios.

I believe in my vision completely, but I remain realistic enough to know—again—that having the answer is one thing, and having it at the right time is another (something I wrote early in PNM). When the time is not right, you make the time right, you don’t just force the answer despite the poorly receptive environment.

And you do so patiently.

In this regard, I grow more optimistic over time with Rice’s leadership. She has the chance, in these three years, to make up for a lot of mistakes she allowed to happen on her watch as National Security Adviser.

I wasn’t kidding during Katrina when I said the Bush post-presidency has already begun. The question right now with this administration is not what it will accomplish between now and the end of its term, but what it will lock in and what it will set up for the next one. The lock-ins, as I have argued in Esquire in the Rumsfeld piece and will argue in “The Monks of War” piece upcoming, are mostly internal. The set ups are mostly external, and they mostly involve bringing the New Core up to speed on what needs to be done in coming years, because any attempt on our part to proceed without them will fail, causing more harm than good.

Iran ends up being, along with North Korea, the strategic issues where both Old Core and New Core will learn the wisdom of needing each other more than needing quick solutions to the problems that bedevil us both.