There are pyromaniacs who become firefighters to give themselves ample opportunities to set fire to property and avoid suspicion. There are pedophiles who would coach a sports little league to have access to children, abuse them and remain safe. And there are psychotic devils who become public thinkers to have a platform from which to create mayhem and get paid for pushing an illegitimate agenda. Two characters who fall in the last category are Frederick W. Kagan and Maseh Zarif, both of whom are members of what they call the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. They wrote: “America's Iranian Self-Deception”, an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal on February 27, 2012 and given the subtitle: “Let's admit the facts about its nuclear program and then have an honest debate about what to do.”
When you read the subtitle and you see in it the words: fact and honest, you get the impression that the authors have decided to honestly play the role of unbiased observers and give you the facts only. You expect them to present a true assessment of the situation on the ground thereby let you and let everyone else make your own judgment. And you expect that when the debates will begin, the debaters among you will have the chance to make your own points without being nudged to take one position or another. Thus, the initial image you create in your mind of the two authors is that of someone who stands as righteous as a firefighter, a coach or a public thinker dedicated to serve you and the public. But when you start to read the article, you realize that you are looking at a pyromaniac, a pedophile or a psychotic devil out to do a job on you and the public.
You do not even have to read the whole article to reach that conclusion. The moment that you finish reading the first sentence, the conclusion is slammed in your face like a baseball bat that has slipped the hands of its thrower. This is how that sentence reads: “Americans are being played for fools – and fooling themselves.” You see right away that this is not the way that people begin an argument when they intend to give an unbiased assessment of a situation; it is what people do when they intend to peddle a laundry list of points that support one side of the story while ignoring all the points at the other side.
Two more sentences follow by which the authors continue to deny there is another side to the story. Here they are back to back: “There is no case to be made that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. There is no evidence that Iran's decision-makers are willing to stop the nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions or anything else.” Furthermore, to buttress their argument and to avoid the total collapse of their presentation, the authors name-drop and use as a crutch both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Security Council resolutions.
Because they and others like them were the ones responsible for involving America in the disastrous adventure that came to be known as Iraq -- an adventure that may yet prove to be the straw that broke the back of the American camel -- Kagan and Zarif thought of a cheap trick to get around the difficulty of convincing the superpower to take on a similar adventure. It is that the adventure they have been promoting up to now was seen to have the potential to be more disastrous than Iraq by several orders of magnitude given the new strategic realities in the Middle East. And so, to get around the difficulty, the two authors employed the trick of attacking Dennis Ross, what they call anonymous administration officials and the media for what they say has been confused policy discussion. They also accuse all those people of “conflating intelligence assessment with policy recommendation.”
And they go on to say this: “The prospect of war with Iran is so distasteful that people are desperate to persuade themselves that the problem is not serious.” But to show how serious it is in their view, they make a laundry list of what the IAEA has said about the matter lately. However, nothing of what came on that list turned out to be new because all of it was aired before and dismissed at one time or another by the experts in the field who called it undeserving of a skirmish, let alone a full scale war. And this is because the war that will be unleashed will be of the sort that will result not only in immediate casualties too horrifying to contemplate but also lead to the continued generation of consequences now unpredictable but that will be nefarious to the extreme for decades to come as this has been the pattern with the empires that rose by design or by accident to then conquer, expand and die ignominiously.
Being realistic enough to know that this part of their presentation was too weak to sway the reader, the two authors now approach the subject from another angle; that of challenging the motivation of the Iranian leaders. To this end, they draw up another laundry list; this one containing the difficulties that Iran and its people are suffering because of the sanctions that were slapped on them by the international community. This done, the authors ask this question: “What peaceful purpose could be served by accepting such damage to pursue an illegal nuclear program?”
Having started a new discussion, they participate in it with this: “The international community has … offered Iran … uranium … to produce both electricity and medical isotopes – and Iran has refused.” This is false in the sense that the offer was neither simple nor devoid of the sort of conditions that the Iranians see as unacceptable. Also, the Iranian refusal was not categorical but left the door open for more discussion. The trouble was that the American component of the negotiating team (five plus one as it was called) made the offer “a take it or leave” it proposition. This being a version of the “my way or the highway” approach that the Americans know from their experience at home is a sure killer of negotiations, we can only conclude that America deliberately made an offer that can only be refused. But having conveniently turned reality upside down, the two authors conclude that: “Iran's behavior makes sense only if its leadership is determined to … develop and field atomic weapons.”
To cement this view in the mind of the readers, Kagan and Zarif do something I am personally familiar with. So let me tell you about it first; then I'll tell you what they did. I know from experience that the act of blacklisting someone works because it is essentially the rule of a mob out of control. You participate in the act of bullying someone because everyone else is doing it -- and this is enough of a peer pressure to make you forget every principle of rightness you grew up with. You do the most horrible thing to someone you know is innocent because if you don't, you fear it will be done to you. It is cowardice of the lowest kind.
Throughout my forty years ordeal with being on the blacklist, I was offered a way out if I betrayed my principles and went along. I was told repeatedly that this was something everyone did to enjoy the fruits of their talent in this meritocracy -- which I was supposed to believe was the most glorious thing to happen to the Universe since the Big Bang. But I knew something that even the well-meaning among these people didn't know. I thought of telling them about it but refrained because I thought it will be a waste of time given how removed they were from my state of mind. But then something happened that I thought had the potential to tell them what I would have. It was the people of Egypt who rose up to take back the dignity they felt they were losing. The thing is that to some of us, dignity is a far more precious commodity than anything your talent can procure for you however much you merit to have it. I could not explain all this to even my closest friends, and so I hoped that the Egyptian Revolution would.
At first, some people over here got the message of the Revolution over there but then lost it. I tried to find out why, and found to my dismay that the Yiddish inspired bumper sticker culture in which we live on this Continent cannot go deeper than the material on which the message is printed. To these people, dignity was a word that fit nicely on a bumper sticker so they took it, savored it and swallowed it. But when the people of Egypt put dignity into practice by telling the IMF, the World Bank, Europe and America to take their money and shove it if they will want to impose conditions, the bumper sticker crowd became disoriented. What happened was that they looked at the depth which dignity was generating and they got the vertigo. No way, they said to themselves, no way I'm going to overload myself with this.
Like a scavenger smelling the blood of a freshly killed prey, those of the Kagan ilk sensed an opportunity here they could not pass up. It happened that Ms. Naga -- the Iron Lady of Egypt as someone called her -- was heard telling some people off, and so they labeled her a holdover from the previous regime. The professional haters latched on to the word “holdover” and threw it at the crowd to make it feel oriented again -- which it did because the word easily fit on a bumper sticker. It was a nice replacement to the word dignity that went out the window to cede its place to the new word.
In the meantime, the haters were creating the image of a woman imposing her will on 80 million people who were otherwise itching to take orders from abroad. The trick worked because the made-up image of Ms. Naga was not that of a dignified woman enjoying enough depth to give a thousand American editors the vertigo, but an image so simple and so superficial, it became bumperesque enough to be repeated over and over. And from that time on, holdover was the word that purveyed a very thin message. The old American values had gone out the window and the new Yiddish culture had taken their place.
Knowing what works in this dirty game, Kagan and Zarif are using the same trick on the Iranian leaders. Given that the people of Iran are enduring hardship because they see their fight as being one of dignity, Kagan and his pal are having a field day creating images that fit on a bumper sticker. By way of example, there is an infamous paragraph -- quoted here in its entirety -- showing the potential for six bumper sticker quotations: “Iran is, however, (1) preparing rhetorically for war with the West. Iran's military (2) has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, (3) attack American naval ships passing through it, and (4) pre-empt what it perceives to be preparations for an attack on Iran. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other political figures (5) have seconded these threats, and no Iranian leader (6) has denounced them.”
Now, my friend, imagine that to put things in perspective and to be honest like they promised at the start they will be, Kagan and Zarif had written the following explanation just before that infamous paragraph: In response to the constant drumbeat in Tel Aviv and New York about all options being on the table, and despite the fact that emissaries from those two places are now running around the world to lobby whom they can and get them to join the mob that is out to cripple the Iranian economy, the leaders of Iran have warned America and Israel of the following, should they be foolish enough to escalate their ill-advised adventure into a hot war such as they hint they plan to do.
Had the authors of the article done this, they would have added so much depth to the subject matter, it could not be expressed on a bumper sticker. However, they would have been intellectually honest and would have achieved the purpose that their article was supposed to achieve. And the ending as they have it now: “...the debate must take place on the basis of a reality … Those who oppose military action against Iran under any circumstances must say so ... Those who advocate military action must ... accept and consider the consequences ... neither American nor Israeli nor any Western interest is served by lying to ourselves...” would have commanded the respect of the readers.
But I'm afraid, Frederick Kagan and Maseh Zarif, have failed miserably to win any level of respect with this article.