Is it just me or do we see a lot of these "This threat is even bigger and more dire than that threat" conversations these days? It almost makes one want one of these threats to just get on with it and devastate us so that we could get it over with already:
Iran is a larger problem for the United States than the threat of the Islamic State's jihadist aggression, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger maintained in an NPR interview Saturday.
"I think a conflict with ISIS — important as it is — is more manageable than a confrontation with Iran," Kissinger told NPR's Scott Simon, explaining that Iran is a powerful nation with incentive to reconstruct its historical ancient Persian Empire while ISIS "is a group of adventurers with a very aggressive ideology."
He's right about Iran's ambitions, not so much about their power. Power, of course, being relative, and if the United States had had the collective national will to bring to bear the power it used to have, Iran would not only not be "powerful," the Shiite jihadist regime in Tehran would be a pleasantly fading memory. But President Bush never pulled that trigger, whether because he did not wish to himself or because the American Left made that necessary pre-emptive move politically impossible. Today, Iran is more relatively powerful than it once was, but that's because of two factors: America is much weaker, thanks to its poor ballot box choices, and the mullahs have nukes, which has changed everything, not least of which is because as eager as they are to construct a nuclear arsenal, we are even more obsessed with getting rid of our own.
"There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut," said Kissinger, secretary of state to late Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. "This gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire — this time under the Shia label — in the rebuilding of the Middle East that will inevitably have to take place when the new international borders [are] drawn. The borders of the settlement of 1919-'20 are essentially collapsing."
ISIS, in comparison, still has a way to go before it poses the threat that Iran does, said Kissinger, as "they have to conquer more and more territory before they can become a strategic, permanent reality."
I understand why Dr. Kissinger considers Iran a bigger threat than the Islamic State. He's a diplomat. And diplomats think in terms of established nation-states with which they can negotiate, however ill-advisedly, not surpa-national terrorist networks. That's why I believe that Barack Obama's real strategy for "managing" ISIS is to initiate diplomatic relations with them, including a full fledged exchange of embassies in Mosul and Washington, D.C. Because diplomacy as its own end is what diplomats do. Sometimes I think that last diplomat who understood that diplomacy was but one tool in the statecraft toolbox, and that a diplomat's job is not diplomacy for its own sake but representing, defending, and advancing the interests of one's country was Otto Von Bismarck.
But I digress. I also have a couple more departures from Dr. Kissinger. One is that Iran isn't a bigger threat than ISIS, but simply a different sort of threat. Iran has qualitatively inferior but numerically superior (in terms of manpower) conventional armed forces, with the former factor being much more significant. But they also have nukes (trust me, they do, and likely have had them for a number of years now), which means that they are immune from any Iraq-style "regime change" operations - indeed, that may be why Dubya never pulled that trigger on getting rid of them. Or, put another way, we were <***AHEM***> "deterred" from doing so. As such, the mullahgarchy becomes a more immediately stable but ultimately greater potential threat to Israel, Europe, and the U.S. The Islamic State, by contrast, is an immediate threat that The Powers That Be are certain to be underestimating, just like the Clintonoids underestimated al Qaeda prior to 9/11, both in their reach, ability to hit us at home, and even with what they can hit us.
Which brings us to my other point of departure from Dr. Kissinger. Who is to say that ISIS and the mullahs are not, in fact, collaborating? Go back to his reference to "reconstruct[ing] the ancient Persian Empire — this time under the Shia label," then look at a map of the Middle East showing the territory the Islamic State has conquered. Eastern Syria and northern Iraq are smack in the middle of that "Shia belt," and ISIS is a dire threat to Iran's control of its Iraqi vassal state, generously surrendered to them by Barack Obama's precipitous and ill-advised withdrawal. Yet Tehran isn't making any moves to roll back ISIS's gains, appearing content to simply hold on to Baghdad and the southern Iraqi oil fields. I can conceive of only two possible reasons for this Iranian passivity: either they're not able to take on ISIS, or they've struck a deal with them.
If the latter, that means the Islamic State, with its own vast oil wealth on top of what they plundered from Mosul's banks, may well have access to Iranian nuclear weapons. I'm sure you can connect the rest of the dots of this equation.
Remember: Shiites and Sunnis see each other as rivals in their respective global caliphate ambitions, but (1) they're all jihadists and (2) they both hate the West with an unquenchable, fiery passion. Thus, destroying the United States and Isreal will always have a higher priority, after which both figure they can settle with each other. Plus it's a documented fact that the mullahs and al Qaeda have had a prosperous operational relationship for upwards of twenty years, and ISIS is an al Qaeda offshoot - some might say the next stage of jihadist devolution. "Six of one...." and all that.
Which harkens back to what I was calling for over a decade ago: liberating the entire Middle East, from the Levant through Iraq, Iran, through Afghanistan. Or, as one Donk antagonist called it, "madness".
As opposed to the "sanity" in which we are drowning now.
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