There were many losers in last week’s Congressional elections,
but it seems pretty clear who was the main winner: President
Ahmadinejad of Iran. His high-risk strategy, unanticipated by
American policy makers, has placed him in a startling position of
power.
His maneuver is one I can personally appreciate, having once
done the same in a similar situation. Back circa 1991, I was
driving east through Indiana, on a trip from Chicago to Michigan to
visit my son in summer camp. A nasty rain began lashing at the
windshield, making for treacherous visibility. We were all inching
along at a pace below the speed limit, hoping these conditions
would not linger very long. Suddenly the two cars ahead of me,
apparently in traversing a slippery patch, both lost control
simultaneously and began to spin wildly across the lanes of the
highway.
In the split-second Fate allots for such decisions, I realized
none of the classic approaches would work. Hitting the brakes on
that wet surface would send me careening in unpredictable
directions. If by a fluke they stopped the car, I was likely to be
struck from behind. Turning the wheel sharply to one side or
another on an interstate highway was merely trading unknown risks
for the known.
So I plowed forward. Straight ahead I went, as if nothing
untoward was happening, as I looked for an opening. Somehow I found
just the right slot between two spinning cars, avoiding each by
millimeters. My course might have been riskiest of all, if
actuarial statistics were calculated, but it gave me a measure of
control to pilot my way through a gap.
When President Bush named three nations in his Axis of Evil
speech, he never intended to attack all three. The idea was to
effect regime change in Iraq and to intimidate Iran and North Korea
into compliance. The leaders of Iran were placed in a quandary, and
initially they kept a low profile. They continued supplying
Hezbollah with arms but otherwise avoided direct confrontation with
the United States.
Upon the accession of Ahmadinejad to the presidency, all this
changed. Whether he is the mastermind or merely the lackey, the
result is the same. He began a strategy of driving right into the
melee. Instead of backing down, he ramps up the rhetoric. In the
past, at least since Sadat’s treaty, no Arab head-of-state had
publicly embraced the slogan of driving Israel into the sea.
(Iranians are not Arabs, but the current configuration in the
Middle East makes that a difference without a distinction.) That
had been the province of hotheads and radicals. If governments
sympathized, they did so discreetly.
By publicly advocating the destruction of Israel, by pushing his
nuclear program full-speed ahead, and by sneering at American
efforts in the Middle East, he has called our bluff in a big way.
But as long as the Bush administration was on offense in Iraq, even
if the military effort showed some cracks, Ahmadinejad was still
bluffing. Now that an opposition-party Congress has been elected on
an antiwar platform, Ahmadinejad holds a winning hand. What does
the United States have in its arsenal that he should fear? Not
military might, surely. Carl Levin’s tanks won’t be showing up on
his border anytime soon.
In case this analysis was in doubt a day or two ago, it has now
been confirmed by the best possible evidence. We learned long ago
that the strongest proof of a real threat is when our appeasement
class comes out of the Brooks Brothers closet. Sure enough, the
last two days have featured a drumbeat of voices favoring a new
rapprochement with Iran. The so-called Iraq Study Group, a
collection of old-guard policy types, are already engaging in their
specialty: bringing the wishy-washy to the nitty-gritty. They are
helpfully pre-leaking the conclusion they will arrive at in two
months: suck up to Iran.
In fact Iran is a far greater enemy of ours than anyone left in
Iraq. If the U.S. military absconded tomorrow from Iraq, the
government might survive or it might collapse in civil war. A few
disgruntled creeps might come to the United States looking to blow
up a building. None of that adds up to a clear and present danger
in the way Iran does. A country developing nuclear weapons with an
openly avowed intention of destroying another country is like
nothing we have faced since World War II.
It was prescient of President Bush to realize back in 2001 that
Iran was part of an axis committed to our destruction. Saying so
out loud had the effect of making them show their hand. Now, five
years later, they are openly daring us to back up our bluster.
Tragically, we face them with an attenuated will and a divided
government.
