Irrational Iran and Nukular Weapons.

Let’s talk Iran for a moment.

This is the country that we’re very afraid of, because they’re probably building a nuclear weapon of some sort. They say it is nuclear development for peaceful purposes. I will agree with the administration that we cannot necessarily believe this. Iran has every incentive to build a nuclear weapon. That incentive rises out of the fact that we have militarily invaded two of their neighbors, Israel “secretly, but not-so-secretly” has nuclear weapons trained on Iran, and the Bush admin. has Tourette syndrome when it comes to sabre-rattling.

Plus, nuclear weapons are still all the rage – Israel, North Korea, India, Pakistan are all unwelcome additions to the nuclear power club of US, Russia, China, France and Britain.

The nature of WMDs, such as nuclear weapons, is that it is a deterrent weapon – it keeps other countries from wanting to invade you, because if they do, you’re going to nuke the crap out of them.

So, I think the administration is correct that the Islamic Republic is developing a nuclear weapon.

But what does it mean?

The first caviat that they don't mention is that Iran is still about a decade away from producing nuclear weapons. They also lack the ability to deliver the weapon by way of ICBM.

The neo-con Kool-Aid is that Iran is going to hand the weaponry over to Islamist terrorists, and we cannot afford for that to happen. They believe that Iran will do this, because Iran is an Islamic republic, and they share the suicide bomber mentality that al-Qaeda has. Iran is an Islamic ideological irrational actor, according to the bloviators.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Iran is, in fact, the very model of a pragmatic state with an ideological veneer.

My favorite case-study on this fact was the alliance behavior the Islamic Republic exhibited during the Armenia-Azerbaijan war, during the early 90s. Background: Armenia is a Christian nation, at war with Azerbaijan, which is by-and-large Shi’ia Muslim. Azerbaijan rigs an embargo against landlocked Armenia, with it’s buddies Turkey and the Republic of Georgia – strangling Armenia for supplies, notably oil and gas. During this period, which neighbor comes to Armenia’s aid – the Islamic Republic of Iran. Why? The Iranians actually don’t like their “Shi’ia brothers” in Azerbaijan, because of irredentist notions floating around in North-west Iran, which is largely ethnic Azeri. How best to get a dig in against Azerbaijan than support Armenia with energy and weapons?

Moral of the story – Iran talks Islamic, but they can definitely shelve their ideology when the need to do so is there. The Islamic Republic is a perfectly rational regime. Why would they not hand the nuclear weapons over to Islamists? Nuclear weaponry has a certain signature to it – there’s something about the nuclear material that can be traced. In other words, if al-Qaeda used an Iranian bomb – we’d know it, and we’d remove Tehran from the face of the planet, and the Ayatollah knows it.

As far as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being a lunatic, who cares? (I doubt that this is, in fact, true.) The people in real control of Iran are the same mullahs that have been in control since the revolution in ‘79. The President doesn’t have the same types of power that ours does.

In thinking of how to deal with Iran, we need to think of it in the context of traditional international relations. There is no new type of post-9/11 threat that we are supposed to be thinking about in the context of Iran. Iran is a rational actor, and we can deal with them as such – much in the same way we dealt with the Soviet Union.

Our biggest problem with the Islamic Republic, is that it’s Islamicism is a perfect ingredient for neo-con Kool-Aid.