A point which puzzles me. In the thread on Jeffrey Goldberg’s ‘Atlantic’ piece, not only the Colonel, but also F.B. Ali and Phil Girald, suggested that if Israel attacked Iran, the conflict would automatically escalate so that the United States would be drawn in. And all three, obviously, are people whose assessments carry very great weight. However, Lysander suggested -- as he has in earlier threads -- that the sensible strategy for the Iranians would be to attempt to prevent the United States being drawn in, by limiting their response to a withdrawal from the NPT, and that they might well do this.According to Steve Clemons, Ali Larijani once told him that Iranians play chess, and the Americans baseball – and ‘chess beats baseball.’ And reading Goldberg's article, I did find myself wondering on what basis Israeli intelligence believed that the Iranians would necessarily respond to an Israeli strike by ordering Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities – precisely because the clever ‘chess’ move might be to instruct Hezbollah to refrain from attacking, unless attacked.The thrust of the comments of the former Israeli air-force
generals and strategists appeared to be that even if air-force resources were not needed to counter such Hezbollah strikes, Israel could not make repeated sorties against Iran -- and, as the Colonel has repeatedly pointed out, was unlikely greatly to set back the Iranian programme.So could it not make sense for the Iranians, in the wake of a strike by Israel, simply to suggest that the country has definitively proved itself a ‘rogue state’, but that the Islamic Republic was not a ‘rogue state’, and although it had the means to respond, was not going to do so?The Israelis might be happy to set the Middle East aflame and bring the world economy down in ruins, the Iranians could insist, but conscious of its responsibilities not only to its own people and the peoples of the Middle East, but to the world community, the Islamic Republic would not do so – and was counting on President Obama to show similar restraint.Doing this might not only enable Tehran to seize the moral high ground – but also, if the United States could be persuaded not to involve itself in the conflict, leave the Israeli government with the worst of both worlds. By portraying the Iranian nuclear programme as the road to a new Auschwitz, it has courted the risk of gravely exacerbating precisely the flight of the best and brightest which – as Goldberg’s article brings out – is seen by Israeli leaders as the central threat to the survival of the country. If, having portrayed the programme in such apocalyptic terms, the Israeli government demonstrates that it is unable to do anything about it, it could be left with great difficulty explaining to the ‘best and brightest’ why they should stay in the country.Of course, it may be totally naive to think that the Iranians could respond in a restrained way. But this could be for a number of different reasons, which have rather different implications. It could be that the potential escalatory dynamics are such that, even if the Iranians wanted to control these, it is clear in advance that this is not possible -- in if any objective is clearly unachievable, there is no point in trying to achieve it. It could also be that the Iranian leadership do not actually believe they have an interest in containing escalation.But even if American military power may not – as Gwynne Dyer suggests – be adequate permanently to do more than set back the Iranian nuclear programme without the use of nuclear weapons, it can certainly achieve cataclysmic destruction. So if the Iranian leadership do assess that there are no good reasons for them to try to avoid escalation, I would be curious as to what kind of calculations the Iranian leadership would be making: and also, whether they are rational ones.But then, perhaps gut emotion would simply take over in the wake of an Israeli attack, and Larijani’s image of the Iranians as chess players would turn out to be as disconnected from reality as the image of Israeli leaders as tough-minded ‘realist’ strategists has been shown to be. David Habakkuk
