The crucial piece of the puzzle

I must admit that I never expected to include in my blog articles from

Ha’aretz, but credit must be given where credit is due.  One paragraph (see in red)  in Ari Shavit’s remarkable article explains more about the present situation than anything I have recently read. ( For the blog entry on Bernard Lewis see Older Posts at the end) 

 

 If Israel strikes Iran, it'll be because Obama didn’t stop it

Ari Shavit

By Ari Shavit

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dealt primarily with three things over the past three years: Iran, Iran, and Iran.

In the first instance, Netanyahu was busy making sure Iran was on top of the international agenda. While our prime minister won't say so out loud, he is deeply scornful of his predecessors for spending so much time on the Palestinian issue while neglecting the Iranian issue.

Netanyahu has indeed succeeded in reversing the order, and has made the centrifuges at Natanz the primary concern of the Western world. With the generous help of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and various Arab leaders, he has succeeded in convincing the international community that the Iranian issue is of utmost importance. In Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington, everyone is now addressing what Netanyahu has been dealing with for a decade. And the diplomatic world is now holding its breath: Will Israel attack or not attack? Will Iran go nuclear or not go nuclear? Will an Israeli-Iranian war inflame the whole Middle East?

In the second instance, Netanyahu made sure that the Iranian threat would top the national agenda. Ten years ago we were still arguing about peace. Five years ago we were arguing about dividing the land - about a permanent settlement, an interim settlement, disengagement, convergence, and the like.

But today the only diplomatic-security issue that people talk about at their Friday night get-togethers is the Iranian issue. Nothing good is happening in the Middle East. As long as the shadow of the Shi'ite bomb casts a pall over all of us, there won't be any diplomatic breakthrough.

In the third instance, Netanyahu was busy building up Israel's abilities to face the Iranian threat. Netanyahu thinks that until he took office, Israel hadn't been preparing properly to confront Iran's cement-lined bunkers. Both Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert felt comfortable believing that the "invisible hand" would resolve the problem. But the invisible hand did no such thing.

Yes, Iranian scientists were assassinated and Iranian centrifuges exploded, but at any given moment Iran had more fissionable material than the previous moment. One red line was crossed, and then another, and another. Thus, our prime minister's primary preoccupation over the past few years has been sharpening the Israeli sword. He has made the whole world truly worried that the sword might be unsheathed.

A few years ago Netanyahu held an in-depth discussion with Middle East expert Bernard Lewis. At the end of the talk he was convinced that if the ayatollahs obtained nuclear weapons, they would use them. Since that day, Netanyahu seems convinced that we are living out a rerun of the 1930s.

He hasn't forgotten for a moment that two leaders he happens to admire, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, didn't lift a finger to save European Jewry during the Holocaust. He is convinced that U.S. President Barack Obama won't lift a finger to save Israeli Jewry. Thus he believes solely in the Israeli sword, seeing it as a deep expression and the last defense of the Zionist revolution.

As of now, the military option is proving to be a diplomatic success. It managed to shake the international community out of its apathy and made a definitive contribution to the tightening of the diplomatic and economic siege on Iran.

But the time for playing diplomatic games with the military option is drawing to a close. There's a limit to how many times one can cry wolf. There's a point at which a "hold-me-back" policy exhausts itself. And that's a very dangerous point, because suddenly the military option turns into a real option.

The Netanyahu-Obama meeting in two weeks will be definitive. If the U.S. president wants to prevent a disaster, he must give Netanyahu iron-clad guarantees that the United States will stop Iran in any way necessary and at any price, after the 2012 elections. If Obama doesn't do this, he will obligate Netanyahu to act before the 2012 elections. 

The moral responsibility for what may happen does not lie with the heirs of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. The moral responsibility will be borne by the man sitting in the chair that was once Franklin Roosevelt's

William Hague: Iran risks nuclear Cold War --------- What about a real nuclear war, Mr. Hague?

From The Daily Telegraph:  

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the Foreign Secretary says that Iran is threatening to spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East which could be more dangerous than the original East-West Cold War as there are not the same “safety mechanisms” in place.

“It is a crisis coming down the tracks,” he said. “Because they are clearly continuing their nuclear weapons programme … If they obtain nuclear weapons capability, then I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons.

“And so, the most serious round of nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons were invented would have begun with all the destabilising effects in the Middle East. And the threat of a new cold war in the Middle East without necessarily all the safety mechanisms … That would be a disaster in world affairs.”

Mr Hague repeatedly stressed that “all options must remain on the table” when confronting the Iranian regime, despite Liberal Democrat concerns that the Government may be dragged into another military conflict.

Why is it that the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom completely skipped over Shia eschatology, the Mahdi, the Hidden Twelfth Imam and the realistic possibility that there cannot be a Cold War with Iran since according to scholars of Islam  the Iranian leadership may well be looking forward  to starting a nuclear war?

It almost defies belief that the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom can come up with such a statement without explaining the true nature of the problem.   Is it that he himself is completely ignorant of the opinions of Bernard Lewis, Raphael Israeli, Reza Kahlili, Harold Rode and other specialists on Islam and Iran or he believes that the  British public should remain in the dark. Which is it?  

Harold Rhode: The Iranians think the way they do. Whatever we do, we have to use THEIR context in which to understand it.

Harold Rhode, whose opinions I quoted in my July 27 blog entry, elaborates further in the Jerusalem Post  article by Oren  Kessler Fight against Iran nukes stymied by cultural gaps

Excerpts: 

According to Rhode, Iran’s current leaders “believe that if they provoke a conflagration, their hidden imam, the mahdi, will return to save them. So Mutually Assured Destruction – MAD – that we used effectively with the Soviets is an incentive and an inducement, not a deterrent.”

The Iranians think the way they do. Whatever we do, we have to use their context in which to understand it – they don’t think like Chinese or like Americans,” he said. “It is dangerous when you apply your mentality to try to understand another culture.”

In the Middle East, he said, “until you win, you show your enemies no mercy. But when you have them at your mercy, you must be magnanimous. There’s unfortunately no such thing as a win-win situation in the Middle East. Confidence-building measures are interpreted as weakness. You talk after you’ve won; if you do so beforehand, it is seen as weakness.”

In Iraq, he said, “we kept trying to appeal to Saddam. But in a culture based on honor and shame, he had no way to back down short of his own death,” Rhode said.

“In the languages of the Middle East, the concept for compromise doesn’t exist – at least not as we understand it.... Instead, one who compromises is said to have brought ’aib, or shame, on himself. That’s why the Middle East is always in a state of tension,” he explained.

“We talk about shalom and salaam and figure they mean the same thing,” he continued. “But in Arabic, ‘salaam’ is generally viewed to mean the joy one gets from submitting to Allah’s will through Islam. That’s not what peace is, to the best of my knowledge.”

 

Harold Rhode got it right.  While many understand the danger of a renegade country

acquiring nuclear weapons, cultural differences prevents them from comprehending that with Iran in particular the danger is worse by an order of magnitude.  To look forward to a global cataclysm  is too weird a concept for a western mind to seriously contemplate..

The day of the Israeli preemptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities seems to be approaching. All of a sudden at the Herzliya Conference there have been a number of speakers on Iran. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon, IDF Chief of Staff Lt-Gen. Benny Gantz, head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen Aviv Kochavi.  Apparently, Israel’s leadership, like Harold Rhode, understand the essence of the problem much better that their counterparts in Europe and the media - the Iranians cannot be deterred. Preemption is the only way.  

  

Death of MAD reaches GOP presidential candidates’ debate - no reaction

The following transcript  from FOX News is mine. If  the official transcript appears  I  will provide it  

Rick Santorum 

Rick Santorum served two terms in the U.S. House and two terms in the U.S. Senate. He became the Senate's third-ranking Republican in 2001. He was defeated for reelection in 2006

This is what Rick Santorum said on MAD:

                                      

"They’ve been at war with us since 1979…The IEDs that have killed so many soldiers, they are manufactured in Iran.   Iran is not any other country.  It’s a country that is ruled by the equivalent of Al Qaeda on top of this country.  They are a radical theocracy.  The principle virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran, according to president Ahmadinejad, is not freedom or opportunity.  It’s martyrdom. 

The idea, Ron, that mutual assured destruction like the policy during the Cold War with the Soviet Union would work on Iran when their principal virtue is martyrdom is.… mutual assured destruction with respect to Iran would not be any idea of preventing a war; it would be an inducement to war.  This is what their objective is. Their objective is to, in fact create a calamity. That is what their theology teaches. They believe that it is their mission to take on the West. They don’t hate us because of what we do or the policies we have.  They hate us because of who we are and what we believe in, and we need to make sure that they do not have a nuclear weapon, and we should be working with the State of Israel right now. We should use covert activity and we should be planning missile attacks against their facilities   and  say that if you do not abandon those facilities  and close them down we will close them down for you.”


The good news is that the death of MAD has been discussed at the GOP presidential contenders‘ debate in Sioux City, Iowa  on Thursday, December 15. The bad news is that hardly anybody noticed.  I could not find a single video or transcript of the entire debate let alone the MAD related part. This in itself is quite indicative. Newt Gingrich’s comment on the Palestinians being an “invented people” created a considerable uproar after  the previous debate . Rick Santorum’s statement on the death of MAD regarding Iran, as important as Gingrich's statement on the Palestinians,  went unnoticed. Is everyone asleep?. Or is it that nobody else except him grasps the significance?  

Deterrence is irrelevant

When I launched this blog in July 2011, I wrote: “It will be updated only when something referring to MAD and Iran is published, i.e. it will not be updated often.”

It seems that we have reached a turning point and that the main stream media, or at least the Israeli one, has finally decided to write about the most dangerous issue facing the world today. About time!  Congratulations to the Jerusalem Post!

In  Deterrence is irrelevant, Israel Kasnett writes: 

            Nuclear deterrence will not help prevent Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons since the Iranian regime has religious motives to bring about the return of the Mahdi and is prepared to die for it.

Iran is led by a group of irrational men who believe they can hurry the arrival of the Mahdi – the 12th Imam who, according to Shi’ite Islamic tradition, went missing in 874 CE and will return under conditions of global chaos. The Iranian leadership appears willing to sacrifice the population of its own country to achieve this goal.

In his book The Rise of Nuclear Iran, former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold writes, “Mahdi Khaliji, an Iranian Shi’ite scholar... has noted that there are apocalyptic hadiths [received Shi’ite traditions] that the Mahdi will not return unless one-third of the world population is killed and another third die. But Ahmadinejad and his followers believe man can actively create the conditions for the Mahdi’s arrival in the here and now...”

In 2006, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting website said in a program called “The World Towards Illumination,” that the Mahdi will reappear in Mecca and form an army to defeat Islam’s enemies in a series of apocalyptic battles, in which the Mahdi will overcome his archenemy in Jerusalem.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a member of the Hojatieh society, a group which believes it can and should hasten the arrival of the Mahdi. According to Islamic tradition, the Mahdi’s arrival will be accompanied or followed by near destruction of nations. The group appears to maintain a deep desire to create the necessary global chaos. And Ahmadinejad has publicly called for the Mahdi’s speedy return. In his first speech to the UN in 2005, he ended his remarks with:
“O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.”

In the same venue in 2006, he began his speech by saying: “... hasten the reappearance of the Imam of the times and grant to us victory and prosperity. Include us among his followers and martyrs.” The same occurred in 2007 when he said: “Oh God, hasten the arrival of Imam Al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those who attest to his rightfulness.”

Clearly Ahmadinejad has one objective on his mind – to bring back the 12th Imam.

It will be interesting to follow the reaction to the JP article.  Since the media have been silent for so long, this revelation that a whole country may take on a role of a suicide bomber will be received with disbelief.  Most will reject it outright, but at least they will have heard the arguments.

The media’s silence in regard to the 12th Imam and Shia eschatology has been  part of the general reluctance to write about Islam.  But even this taboo is in the process of being broken. In a watershed piece titled  A study in self-cannibalization, Martin Sherman writes:

Orwellian mind-control tactics
The politically correct endeavor to shy away from harsh truths has introduced an almost Orwellian atmosphere of 1984 mind control into the debate on the ramifications of Islam for political liberalism.

Pronouncements almost on a par with the “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength” employed by The Party to control the dystopian state of Oceania in George Orwell’s classic novel of pervasive dictatorship are emerging with disturbing frequency.

For example, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in effect pronounced that “religious fundamentalism is secular” when he characterized the radical Muslim Brotherhood as an organization that is “largely secular.”

A similar instance of convoluted, nonsensical gobbledygook came from the Obama administration’s homeland security adviser James O. Brennan, when he made the astounding claim that accurately defining the threat would exacerbate it: “Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists, because jihad is a holy struggle. [C]haracterizing our adversaries this way would actually be counterproductive,” he said.

So by reorganizing the rhetoric we will somehow dispel the misperceptions, from which the planners/perpetrators of wholesale carnage in the name of Islam apparently suffer, as to the sources of their beliefs and the nature of their motivations? But perhaps the pinnacle of Orwellian endeavor came from then-British home secretary Jacqui Smith, who took it upon herself to bring home to radicalized UK Muslims that they were not who they thought they were. In a breathtaking stroke of self-contradictory double talk, she presumed to dub the acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamists in the name of Islam as “anti-Islamic activity.”

Her 2009 interview with Der Spiegel was shockingly reminiscent of the "mind control through language” policy employed by Orwell’s Big Brother and his omnipresent Party.

Clearly in an intellectual climate such as this – where truth is condemned and dismissed as politically incorrect hate speech – no effective response can be marshaled against the gathering storm facing Western civilization and the values of political liberalism that underpin it.

Menace of Muhammadanism: Prescient premonitions
Such reticence and evasion was not always prevalent. In an era long before political correctness crippled the ability to articulate the truth in the public sphere, far-sighted men warned of the impending clash.

Thus seven decades ago, Hilaire Belloc, the prominent Anglo-French writer and historian, raised the trenchant question: “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world... reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?” (The Great Heresies, 1938) He was not alone in his sense of foreboding.

In the first edition of his The River War, published in 1899, Winston Churchill set out a withering critique of the effect Islam has on its followers, its debilitating effect on economies of nations that embrace it, and the enslavement of its luckless women.

While he admits that “individual Muslims may show splendid qualities,” he contrasts this with realities on collective level, where “the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.”

Few who page through the latest Arab Human Development Report sponsored by the United Nations Development Program and independently authored by intellectuals and scholars from Arab countries, would dispute this today.

Churchill goes on to warn: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Muhammadanism is a militant and proselytizing faith... and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science... the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

But how long will the West remain “cradled in the strong arms of science?” Might this question not help concentrate minds over the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program? 

The Friday Nov 11, 2011 copy of the Jerusalem Post should be kept for posterity. It is the day the media fulfilled its purpose to inform. 

The debate about the death of MAD has finally begun.

Stephanie Spies, a  research intern for the Project on Nuclear Issues,  has written a piece  titled  “MAD” Still Works: Even with So-Called “Mad” Leaders where she disagrees with Prof. Raphael Israeli’s article MAD deterrence is being foiled by mad leaders

Stephanie Spies writes:

Israeli’s argument relies on the idea that “mad, unpredictable leaders” such as Ahmadinejad will decide to use nuclear weapons, despite the devastating repercussions, because religious national ambitions are incompatible with the rationality required for MAD. For Ahmadinejad specifically, the article claims that “the possibility to hasten the return of the Imam”, a religious concept whose merits are beyond the scope of this post, can prompt this “clinically mad” leader to use Iran’s nuclear weapons.  

Well, this religious concept of the return of the Imam Mahdi and the Shia belief in it is the crux of the argument and if Stephanie Spies says that the merits of the religious concept of the return of the Mahdi are beyond the scope of her post then why write an opinion piece at all?  

MAD is dead because Iranian mullahs believe that a nuclear war would trigger the return of the Mahdi.  This is what they believe in.  We are not here to asses whether the Mahdi really exists or not but whether the depth of Shia  belief in it is such that it could trigger a nuclear war.  

The problem is not Ahmadinejad alone but the whole regime which believes in Shia eschatology.   Prof Raphael Israeli is not the only one warning of the demise of MAD.   Prof Bernard Lewis has repeatedly warned that for the Iranian Mullahs

"mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent—it's an inducement."..

Western secular minds tend to disregard the depth of conviction of the Shia faithful.  Should not we in the West take more notice of what our scholars of Islam are saying?

MAD Deterrence and Mad Leaders

Raphael Israeli
Professor of Islam at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

MAD Deterrence and Mad Leaders
By Raphael Israeli

  The published article in Hebrew in Maraah

During all the fateful years of the Cold War, the world survived due to the rational  reasoning that since both parties to the ideological conflict were in possession of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other, many times over, and since each of them had the capacity of a second strike should it be taken by surprise and attacked with its guard down, none of them would be irrational enough to launch a nuclear strike and none of them would take the responsibility for destroying the world, erasing  mankind and possibly returning human culture and civilization to the Stone Age. In short, this calculation worked, and though most major cities in the world, East and West, were permanently targeted for destruction, the entire humanity lived under the fear of sudden and total annihilation, and strategic missiles, submarines and bombers were in a state of constant alert to avert the worst, the worst was avoided, until Star Wars exhausted one party economically and provided a final exit from MAD.

MAD, the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, could be dubbed thus,  precisely because it’s logic was accepted by the parties, while it was agreed that only madness of leaders of an unpredictable kind, not seen on the international horizon of that era, could invalidate that equation and shake the world’s security equilibrium. No one could predict when, where and how that kind of leadership could emerge to defy the two main rivals of the Cold War, and no one foretold that it would appear on the "bloody seamline" of Islam, in accordance with Huntington's fertile vision of the world of the post Cold War. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, of February 1979, which thrust Khumeini to power and  forced the pro-western and rational Shah to abdicate and to undercut one of the most formidable bastions of the US in the Middle East, produced this sudden and revolutionary change.

The Mullah regime of Khumeini indeed provided Iranian society not only with the rule of  the Cleric, who being learned and versed in theology, was better able than politicians to understand its intricacies, but due to the supreme Ayatullah’s ability to maintain spiritual contact with the Hidden Imam, the true ruler of the Universe, and to comprehend  His desires, intentions and dispositions to the Muslims and the world. The Doctrine of the Hidden Imam is the heart and essence of the Shi'ite belief inasmuch as it renders the expectation of the return of that Imam, the 12^th and the last in the series (hence the Twelver Shi'a), who went into hiding in childhood in the 10^th Century, and will return to rule the earth and bring plenty and justice, a very concrete projection for the near future, and no longer an indefinite and vague messianic promise for an uncertain future.

Ahmadinejad, a fanatic believer reared in that tradition, though not himself a cleric of any rating, has repeatedly, as a mayor of Tehran, widened the Avenues of his city to contain the multitudes of onlookers who would flock to the streets to watch the Imam's return, which the Mayor considered close at hand. As a President, he recounted to his crowds how he felt the aura of the Imam enveloping him when he was addressing the General Assembly of the UN, sometime after his own inauguration. For him this is not a messianic dream or a mystical vision, but a very operational blueprint whose implementation must be planned and provided for. For him, there must be an additional benefit: when he comes back, the role of the Supreme Leader, Khamenai, with whom he has had some friction over authority lately, would become redundant.

According to Shi'ite eschatology, the end of the world will come with the return of the Imam, whose arrival will be announced by violent pangs, unrest, wars, injustice and misery; and all the more, the more imminent his coming. Namely, mad leaders like Ahmadinejad, who are full of hatred and bellicosity, and imbued with messianic zeal and unimpressed by any worldly circumstances or restrictions, might very well, especially when controlling nuclear powers, decide to use them regardless of the costs or the consequences, as long as it will hasten the return of the Imam. For then, even the worst errors made by human leaders would, in their view, be redressed in an instant by the omnipotent Imam in the new post-apocalyptic world.