| The question of Tehran’s goals and intentions need not detain us. Taking an Olympian view, one might note that Iran is, with a few exceptions, simply behaving like a normal powerful state: using its economic power to derive political leverage; supporting some factions and opposing others in regional politics; training, equipping, and advising favored military organizations against their enemies; and so on. Yet explaining Tehran’s behavior as natural realpolitik or, more disingenuously, as a response to the surrounding American menace, does not diminish the reality of the Iranian threat to the United States and its allies. Nor does it account for the fact that the Islamic Republic is not a status quo power and , regardless of how many ordinary Iranians may feel, often seeks to promote an ideology that is, at its root, hostile to the fundamentals that underpin U.S. society. |
The honourable and gallant thought-tankists (FREDERICK W. KAGAN / KIMBERLY KAGAN / DANIELLE PLETKA) stand undetained well away from Olympus, namely at page 59 of 68 of Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan .
The great unexpected thing about this specimen is that KK&P have condescended to take a page out of their humble neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh's playbook, to "leave half their brain tied behind their back, just to make it fair." That is to say, they undertake to set forth the AEI/GOP/DOD case against the evil Qommies without reference to WMD. (With only twenty nuke references, that is, if you are so petty-minded as to actually go rake through the verbiage.)
The immediate occasion of this self-denying strategy can only be the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007. In the middle distance, the embarrassment to Boy and Party and Ideology that involved Saddam Hussein's terror-tipped forty-five-minute specials may count for a little. Yet these are upmarket para-academic gentry, "defence intellectuals," who might be expected to try to frame their pet enemies in a Big Picture and sub specie aeternitatis at any point. As long as the Big Picture does not resemble a view from Mount Olympus, of course. [1]
I have emboldened -- now there's a good aggresionite word! -- what I consider the essence of the matter. The neocomrades themselves may well disagree with me about where their center of dogmatism is located, though: as you see, they have placed the "reality of the threat" ahead of the "fundamental hostility of ideology." KK&P may, perhaps, be distinguished after the manner of the former Kremlinology as moderate, rather than hard-line, AEIdeologues. I detect a definite hint that coexistence with the evil Qommies does not require that the latter stop maintaining in private that almost everything that AEI and militant Republican Party extremism stand for in a world is a crock, merely that the true believers refrain from all efforts to promote such stuff.
But relax!, peace amongst the doctrinaires is not going to break out any time soon. Imagine the reaction down at Rancho Crawford if the mad mullahs were graciously to announce that AEI and GOP and DOD are entitled to entertain their erroneous views -- but only as long as they do not attempt to proselytize.
"Two of a trade will never agree."
Happy days.
____
[1] It may have occurred to KK&P on the literary side that Neocomrade T. Clancy, for instance, can craft better -- more thrillin’ -- doomsday scenarios for the Chicken Little market than they can. St. Adam Smith's "division of labour," don't you know?
St. Adam's "bottom line" concept is also relevant. When they wind their way to the bitter end at last, here is where the three anti-Magi arrive:
| Mobilization. The United States is not now mobilized on any dimension appropriate for the necessary struggle. Our military is too small, our foreign aid programs ill-designed, our intelligence systems dysfunctional [that damn NIE!], and our decision-making apparatus poorly designed and conditioned to take a holistic view of the challenges we face in a key region. Mobilization and reorganization to face the new threat were key components of the Cold War containment strategy. They are no less important or urgent now. |
George F. Kennan wannabes are they.
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