Iranian escalation in historical and cultural context

Reuters reports that Iran has unveiled a whole new generation of non-nuclear (at least so far) weapons: 

On a stage in front of military officials, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pulled a sheet away from the aircraft, called the Karrar, which Iran says is its first long-range drone.  With the United States and Israel saying they do not rule out a military strike to stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb, the Islamic Republic has showed off new mini-submarines, a surface-to-surface missile and announced plans to launch high altitude satellites over the next three years.

So what does this mean?   This author claims no special insight into Iranian plans--although I have never believed that Iran is guided by some sort of "death cult."  Yes, there's a strong martyrdom theme running through Shia Islam--written about by the eminent critic Matthew Arnold back in 1871--but if the Iranians, or at least their leaders, all wished to be dead, they could have done that by now.   In history, there have been precious few genuinely suicidal regimes.

Indeed, I recall hearing former CIA director James Woolsey saying, "The Iranians invented chess."  The Persians have had a continuous culture for 3000 years--they have obviously mastered the art of survival, in all its dimensions.   The question now is how far they will go with their skills--and what will they do with them.  

To me, the position of the Iranians today is somewhat like that the Chinese.  They know that in past millennia, their ancestors were at the top of the world "league tables," and they know that something went terribly wrong for them within the past 500 years or so.  So as part of their plan for moving ahead, they are looking to their own roots, as a way of affirming their identity, even as they prepare to take on a new identity of rapidly developing nation.

Thus the Chinese look to Confucianism, while the Iranians to Islam.  (The Shah of Iran made the mistake of trying to go back all the way to the ancient Achaemenids, which was too far back--and seemed to dismiss Islam.  The ayatollahs got the last word.)  

As the Englishman Edmund Burke said, the task of the statesman is to channel the tides of change through the canals of custom.  So while Confucius and Mohammed never heard of electricity, their professed spiritual descendants today are happily explaining to their subjects that they, the leaders, are doing the work that Confucius or Mohammed would want them to.  

The point here is not to get bogged down in a theological or cultural debate--instead the point is to show that the Chinese and the Iranians believe it is perfectly possible to be retro in politics and culture and cutting edge on science and technology.    They don't seem to need, or want, our democracy and pluralism--only our technology.   If they get that, one way or another, or if they invent their own, then we will have to deal with them on a military plane--ideology, theirs and ours, will be subordinated.  

And in fact, there's plenty of science and technology for Muslims to look back to--even if the US doesn't volunteer NASA for the cause of advancing Muslim self-esteem.   The Islam of the 13th century before, when Islam led the world--or at least led Europe--in science and understanding.

So we're on notice--there's no rule that says that Islam has to lag behind the West.   It didn't lag in the past, and it might not lag in the future.  American, and European, and Israeli security, based on military supremacy, is no given.

In fact, we were warned about the possibility of Muslim military catch-up many decades ago.   Hillaire Belloc, a British politician and writer, controversial to this day, had written some doggerel in 1898 about the true source of Western superiority over colonialized peoples in his era: "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim Gun, and they have not."  In other words, a century or more ago, we had the power of shock and awe.   We had weapons--the machine gun, the airplane, the steamboat--that made resistance to the West futile.   These words are not repeated to defend colonialism, merely to note that at that time, the West could vanquish any non-Western foe--except, of course, for rapidly modernizing Japan, which blazed the trail on what be called nostalgic modernization, the trail that the Chinese and Iranians seem to be following today.

Yet 40 years later after he wrote about the Maxim Gun, Belloc could see that Muslims would not be so militarily vulnerable and easy to defeat as they had been at Omdurman.  As Belloc observed in 1938:

There is nothing in the Mohammedan civilization itself which is  hostile to the development of scientific knowledge or of mechanical aptitude. I have seen some good artillery work in the hands of Mohammedan students of that arm; I have seen some of the best driving and maintenance of mechanical road transport conducted by Mohammedans. There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war. Indeed the matter is not worth discussing. It should be self-evident to anyone who has seen the Mohammedan culture at work. That culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no  reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it--whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.



In other words, Bellow was saying, the Muslims could learn Western wars of war.   With that knowledge, plus, in Belloc's view, their more intense faith, they would be formidable on the battlefield.   One needn't be a fan of Belloc the man--he was an anti-Semite, for example--to still acknowledge that he was on to something here.  

So more than 70 years ago, Belloc--no fan at all of Islam, either--warned the West against "The recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing."  

Well, here we are, and Islam has recrudesced.  Islamic radicalism is emerging in new places, such as Kenya, where  support for Al Shabab is soaring, The Washington Post's Sudarsan Raghavan reports.  What's our counter to this?  




Perhaps the time has come to admit that our efforts at promoting democracy and pluralism in the Muslim world are showing mixed results, at best.   Democracy and pluralism are wonderful things, but it might be the case, sadly, that our valiant and courageous military efforts notwithstanding, the plan of changing them seems to have either little effect or it provokes an outright backlash.    



For the last decade or so, the dominant view has been that the US can prevail against jihadism by public diplomacy and nation-building--we can call that Plan A.   But as Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, it seems that a more pessimistic Samuel "Clash of Civilizations" Huntington-type vision is needed for the future, at least as a failsafe.  Maybe they don't hate us because we're free, or because they're not free--they just hate us.   A sobering thought, perhaps, but thinking is always better when it's sober.   

So it seems clear that we need a Plan B, which is unchallengeable military strength--strength that creates a differential equivalent to the Maxim Gun.   

But first we need to take the measure of Iran as a potential military adversary.  Starting with all those new weapons they are unveiling.  Can we counter them on likely battlefields, or not?   Let's put that ahead of the question of whether or not we can convince them to like us. 

Prevail or not.  Survive or not.  Those are the questions that Belloc would be asking--and so should we.