Engaging Iran
So it's now official. Ali Resa Asgari, 63, a general in the elite Revolutionary Guards and former Deputy Defense Minister has defected to the West, specifically the United States. It was well planned. He traveled to Turkey with his family, never checked in, and found his way to the US. The Times of London has a write-up with an estimate of his intelligence value. He resigned as Deputy Defense Minister in 2005, so he can't be quite as far out of the loop as the Iranian government is trying to make out.
I don't think we can prevent Iran from getting a small number of nuclear weapons. There are just too many fissionables for sale out there, and Iran has both the money and the engineering expertise to acquire the materials and make weapons. Uranium enrichment is an expensive way to go if you want weapons grade fissionables. It can also be messy, as the inhabitants of Richland, Washington and other places can tell you.
Enrichment to high grade fuel status is not as expensive and is decidedly less messy. Nuclear fuel enrichment as opposed to selling oil and buying nuclear fuel, or simply gearing your country to burning petroleum products as a primary source of heat is an economic decision. On purely economic grounds, a country with lots of oil wells might decide to go either way depending in part on how much of the capital costs of nuclear enrichment you have already paid. As a political decision, any country that is included in the Axis of Evil as defined by the President of the United States would find possession of at least a few nuclear weapons highly attractive; and of course any regime accused of being Evil by the Emperor should be desperate to get and demonstrate some bombs and do that fast. The lesson taught when Saddam Hussein turned out NOT to have weapons of mass destruction can hardly have been lost on either Iran or North Korea.
The world has made it very clear to dictators: get nukes and get them fast, and never let go, never retire. If you don't have nukes you can be invaded on the will of the President and his advisors. If you retire or let go of power, even if you establish a democratic regime on the way out, you will be hounded for the rest of your life and you will probably die in captivity if you are not executed. No one clever enough to become a dictator is likely to be stupid enough not to have observed all this.
As to policy regarding Iran, time is very much on our side. The West's cultural weapons of mass destruction are doing their work in Iran and doing it well. We recently heard General John Custer telling us how al Qaeda and other such outfits use the Internet to recruit suicide bombers and other members. It all sounded grim, but what that really says is that Internet access is growing: potential suicide bombers are using the Internet.
If the West can't manage to win in the war of ideas: if we can't put on a better show, and demonstrate that here and now you can live in a world of blue jeans, rock and roll, rock stars, wristwatches, jewelry, pretty girls, careers for girls, pretty clothes for girls, freedom for women to drive cars and go shopping, education for everyone, birth control -- well you get the idea -- if we can't make our real world more attractive than a place where you get 71 unconsulted virgins for blowing yourself up, then we're really in bad shape. Radical Islam and the culture death shouldn't be more attractive to young people than what we can offer.
Of course we aren't trying to win that way. The West's intellectuals compete with each other to tell the world what a rotten place it it, how AmeriKKKa is dangerous and needs to be brought down, (We don't like this world of ours! Bring it down! Bring it down!) are feeding al Qaeda some of their best lines.
And if using our cultural weapons of mass destruction to seduce our enemies into a life of material plenty and somewhat over regulated liberty won't do it, we can turn loose the Gospels and the Good News. Christianity once thrived in many of the places where the Muslims get their suicide recruits, and it was only replaced by the threat of Islam or the sword; indeed in many places even that was insufficient.
But I sure don't see us fighting much on those fronts.
