Re: Suing each other over Iran :-)

From: Mark Fergerson (nunya_at_biz.ness)
Date: 10/16/04 

Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 23:56:24 -0700

Maleki wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 07:09:13 -0700, Mark Fergerson wrote:

>>Some posts not getting through; retry:
>>
>>Maleki wrote:

<snip MADness details among other things>

>> > Anyway, about similar issues in the middle east, it is
>> > obvious to me that the key to the peace for any country in
>> > that region, including Israel, is a nuclear weapons capable
>> > Iran.

>> This is exactly what Hanson meant, but he satirically assumes anyone
>>who claims not to have them actually does. If this were the case,
>>there'd be a lot less "conventional" violence though because that can be
>>seen as provocation to go nuclear depending on how sane one's leaders
>>are. The word for this in the sixties was "escalation", and that's the
>>truly scary part.
>>
>> I tend to agree with your statement above ASSUMING neither party
>>manages to sneak nukes into the other's territory. That would bypass the
>>detection-launch trigger, you see.

> Ohhohoh :) Then "it is obvious to me" that MAD is already
> defunct.

   Not necessarily. Having a WMD secreted within enemy
territory, but not triggered, is equivalent to a "delivery
system", and ISTM that all parties have the capability to so
emplace them; no need for big hairy boosters. Who announces
first becomes the interesting thing, because the second to
announce has a severe credibility gap. But then,
professional wargamers think it reasonable to take their
word for it just in case. Then the haggling starts in
earnest, with spies gaining greater importance than ambassadors.

>> So far Israel has managed to resist the temptation to use theirs, but
>>that may just be because they have a limited supply and too many
>>potential targets. If they fired pre-emptively on say Saudi Arabia, they
>>know they'd be overrun immediately afterward by everyone else.
>>Conversely, no particular Arab country wants to be first.
>>
>> OTOH your analysis depends on _which_ Arabs acquire WMDs. If they're
>>the extreme fanatics causing so much trouble currently, they just won't
>>care if they die or who else they take with them as long as the hated
>>Jews go down.

> No, Jews aren't hated. Iranians are. Arabs (extremists or
> non-extremists) have Iran as their main issue, not Israel.

   Doesn't look that way from here, but that's hardly
surprising. Thanks for the "ground truth".

   Actually that's irrelevant MADwise if more than two
participants are similarly armed and capable of inserting a
conventional WMD or nuke, because the first to fire will set
off _all_ the others. This ought to be adequately
frightening to long-range thinkers to keep MAD alive so to
speak.

> It's just there's nothing they can do about Iran at the
> moment and therefore some of them busy themselves with the
> tiny issue of Israel. Also Israel and Judaism are two
> separate things. Judaism is an integral part of Islam.

   We've already agreed on this last point before.

   As for "nothing they can do about Iran", well, ISTM it
depends what the extremists might consider an acceptable
outcome.

> Shi'ism on the other hand has "messed with" Islam, so the
> Arabs think. It is actually what Islam was at the outset
> programmed to expand and become, but Arabs tried to arrest
> the development at the fetal stage and exclaimed, "that is
> Islam". That's why they call it "Sonni" Islam, which means
> "traditional" or "original" or "initial" Islam. What it was
> at the outset rather than what it was to be and become. They
> have some point, but so do Shi'ites.

   Hence the labeling by Western media of Sunnis as
"Fundamentalists". I can't wait for some CNN idiot to call
the Shi'ites "Reformed Muslims" or some such. That ought to
make thing even more interesting.

> Arabs' struggle with Israel is not religious in nature, but
> with Iran it is.

   I never thought it was, but it sure is played that way in
the Western media. Damn all media fools anyway.

   ISTM that the Arab/Israel thing is strictly political in
the sense of controlling access to resources. There's no
sensible reason for Israel to have been created where it is
except to limit Arabs' access to the Mediterranean, and I
can see why that's pissed them off for half a century.

   The Arab/Iran struggle you describe is largely religious
indeed, but there's a power politics level to it as well.
When the UAR was created it nearly united all Arabs, but
ISTM the West simply couldn't allow it, and secular states
like Iran were "encouraged" as they say. If the Shah had
been replaced by a theocracy things would be very different.

   That's a very rough summary from _my_ memory of history
classes; got ground truth on that?

>> It is therefore in all Arab nations' (not to mention everyone else's)
>>best interests to restrain the extremists lest they bring on Armageddon.
>>We can assume they know that and are trying to do so behind the scenes
>>so to speak.

> Oh but they're doing more than just restraining themselves.

   Not _themselves_, just their and their neighbors' more
extreme elements. I do not equate all Muslim extremists with
all Sunnis or all Palestinians frinst any more than I might
equate all Crusaders with all Catholics or all Italians.
It's obviously much more complicated.

   OTOH can I safely assume you were speaking to the
simplified media picture of things?

> Let me stress the fact that the main concern must not be a
> nuclear weapons capable Iran, but nuclear capable ARABS. A
> powerful Iran would have no beef with Israel that couldn't
> be remedied by peaceful actions. Israel would be just
> another South Africa for Iran. But if you (the West) insist
> to preserve the status quo for Iran, then you _will_ get,
> soon, Arab states with limited nuclear arsenal at their
> disposal because Arabs' main incentive for acquiring them is
> a weak Iran. Now, in THAT picture you will not have a
> defenceless Iran, neither by choice nor by force. That's
> "obvious to me." And it is obvious to me that in that
> picture it will be Israel at risk, not Iran. Because we can
> defend ourselves against Arabs, nuclear or non-nuclear
> capable Arabs. But can Israel? You can't fool yourself about
> this.

   I'm not trying to so fool myself; my statement above
about the likely result of a pre-emptive strike by Israel
against Saudi Arabia should have clued you.

   But Israel is a single, even historically justifiable
target, and the source of a tank battalion is obvious,
whereas Muslim crazies can base anywhere or on the fly as we
know. If some Sunni group perpetrates and claims credit for
a smuggled nerve gas attack on Tehran, where do you sensibly
aim a counterstrike? How would you like Iran to get into the
kind of "quagmire" America's in with Iraq by shooting at an
apparently likely perpetrator that just happens to be innocent?

> But why the status quo when this can be prevented by
> erradicating the Arabs main drive for having nukes. Let us
> Iranians do our things and you won't have to worry about
> anything as far as Israel and peace in the middle east is
> concerned. You would only have to worry about your
> "suppliers" worries :-)

   The only excuse for maintaining the status quo I can
imagine is that just as Middle East politics are severely
interwoven, with competing elements distributed among many
nations, so political alliances are interlaced all over the
world. That's partly why the issue of WMD "collusion"
between North Korea and Iran came up, you see. Not that I
personally buy any of it, but as I hope I've convinced you,
I'm not quite as susceptible to media-driven hysteria as the
average news consumer.

   For all I care, the entire Middle East ought to be left
mostly alone to work out its own problems. Trouble with that
idea is, what does "mostly" mean in the context of
contradictory treaties and trade agreements between the
locals and the rest of the world? You have Western
Conservatives of one stripe or another wanting to make a
buck on the stresses (regardless of the harm the stresses
bring to the locals), Liberals wanting to "improve the
Peoples' lives" (regardless of what the locals might think
"improve" means), and so on, all competing for air time and
the influence it generates, claiming their individual
agendas have priority because of some 50-year-old piece of
paper. Too much time on their hands, methinks.

   Mark L. Fergerson

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