Iran Thinks Attack Talk is a Bluff

An opinion piece in the Washington Post by David Ignatius, apparently informed by his trips to the Middle East.

Slow down, everybody. The Bush administration should stop issuing warnings and ultimatums that could force military action. Iran should get the message that the West -- including Russia -- is serious about stopping Iran from producing nuclear weapons.

We can start here. I always ask when Western commentators speak of nuclear weapons, is it that they don't understand that this dispute is over a theoretical capacity to make weapons, not nuclear weapons, or is it that they believe it serves some moral purpose to mislead their readers.

I think in this case it is very unlikely that Ignatius has not come across this distinction. Ignatius would rather his readers who do not already understand the core issue find out the difference between a nuclear weapon and a theoretical nuclear weapon capability somewhere else. I can only guess he thinks he is being a good supporter of Zionism this way. Maybe he is avoiding some pressure he would feel if he is not adequately alarmist about Iran.

"Somewhere else" where the distinction is explained may be Time magazine, as I've posted earlier.

But once we get past that we get to the crux of his opinion piece

Here's how one Gulf official sums up the problems with use of force against Iran: "When you look at it seriously, what's the objective and what are the consequences? People talk about a bombing campaign, but in six weeks of bombing in the Gulf War in 1991, you didn't take out the [Iraqi] Scud missiles. If the Iranians fire a missile across the Gulf, what happens to the price of oil? Or suppose they sink a tanker in the Gulf. And then they have Hezbollah, they have sleeper cells. What is your target?"

Many Arabs argue that the Iranians actually want America to attack. Politically, that would help the hard-liners rally support. And militarily, it would lure the United States onto a battlefield where its immense firepower wouldn't do much good. The Iranians could withdraw into the maze of their homeland and keep firing off their missiles -- exacting damage on the West's economy and, most important, its will to fight.

That's the lesson for Muslim warriors of the Iraq and Lebanon wars: Draw your adversaries deep into terrain that you control; taunt them into starting a war they can't finish. I'm told that the Syrian military, for example, is now changing its doctrine to fight an asymmetric guerrilla war against Israel that it can win, Hezbollah-style, rather than a conventional war it would certainly lose.

When Iran says that it expects to hurt the US more than the US hurts it if there is a military confrontation, it is being honest.

It is funny watching everyone in the world panic about a US attack on Iran, except Iran. At least some parties in Iran think that its country, its revolution, the Islamic world and even the Arab world would benefit from a long struggle in which Iran plays Afghanistan and the US loses its capacity to maintain an empire playing USSR.

Another 8 year war will, thirty years from now, produce more Ahmadinejad's. More engineering students-turned-extremists. The US thinks it is making a threat. There are some parties in Iran that hope it is a promise.

The only thing is that Putin knows this, which is why he could say something crazy like Russia would treat a US attack on Iran like an attack on Russia (even though I doubt he said that). US planners know this, even though they think pretending they don't will scare investment away from Iran (which is true, but it raises the price of oil more than enough to offset that). And Iran's planners know the US knows this.

So Iran's military is preparing, because that is what militaries do. But they aren't even thinking about suspending.