Elliott Abrams is back, decorating or defiling (depending on
your point of view) the February 17, 2014 edition of the Weekly Standard with
another one of his articles. This time it has the title: “A Misleading Cold War
Analogy” and the subtitle: “Don't count on containing Iran .” He wrote
the article not at his home-of-the-head which is America
but his home-of-the-heart which is Israel . As the subtitle suggests,
he is worried that seeing some kind of analogy between the Cold War and the
current situation with Iran ,
the West may settle for containing Iran .
The point he makes is that through his observations – while
circulating among the officials of the Obama administration in America , and while circulating among what he
calls the “security establishment” in Israel – he has detected a
widespread misunderstanding of the Cold War and its lessons. And so he sets out
to educate these people as to what the Cold War was about, and why it does not
compare with the current situation involving the West and Iran .
He tries to do that by debunking the current understanding
of the Cold War which he says is based on the premise that the deteriorating
economy of the Communists weakened the ideology even among the ruling elites
who lost faith in their system. And this is what prompted Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain
to observe that President Reagan of the United States won the war without
firing a shot.
This being the current understanding of the Cold War, the
misguided people in the Obama administration and the security establishment of Israel suggest that the performance can be
repeated with Iran whereby
the standoff will be won by the West given that the religious elites in Iran lost the
youth and the businessmen. He also suggests that the elites must have come to
realize they need a compromise – which is why moderates like Rouhani and Zarif
have risen to lead the country.
No, says Elliott Abrams, all that is false, and he makes
three points to explain himself. The first is that Margaret Thatcher was wrong
about the Cold War being won without firing a shot. In fact, shots were fired
in Korea and Vietnam , he
says, and also in many battlegrounds where American soldiers, CIA agents and
proxy forces killed and died. He attributes the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan to
these American efforts. By contrast, he goes on to say, it is the Iranians who
are currently taking the offensive by masterminding terrorist attacks against
American interests in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq. They also
support Assad in Syria , and
Hezbollah in Lebanon ,
he points out.
All of that is happening, says Abrams, without America or its
allies responding in kind. And this is where he demonstrates how much in error
he is. To begin with, it is said that Iran has been working on its
nuclear program for something like 30 years. And it has been repeated over and
over for 15 years that Iran
is only 6 months away from having the bomb. But time after time, the prediction
proved to be without foundation. Thus, one must ask: Why the delay? And the
answer can only be given by a series of questions as follows:
Could it be that someone is assassinating Iranian
scientists? Could it be that someone is hacking into the Iranian nuclear
installations and sabotaging the work? And what about Saddam's use of chemical
weapons on Iran ?
Were they not weapons he obtained with American help? And that's not all
because there is now a regime of sanctions in place; one that is the toughest
the world has ever known. This, in itself, is an act of war to which Iran has not
responded. And so, it is America
and its allies that are belligerent; and Iran that is not responding in
kind.
The above was Abrams first point by which he sought to show
that the analogy between the Cold War era and the current situation does not
exist. So now, he tries to make the second point, but instead of showing that
the analogy does not exist, he strives to do the opposite, which is to show
that the analogy does indeed exist – or at least has the potential to exist. He
says that nuclear proliferation happened during the Cold War, and that the same
thing may happen now. In the same way that Stalin, Mao, the British and the
French wanted the bomb and got it, the Saudis, the Turks and others will want
it now, he openly speculates.
He now comes to his third point where he neither asserts the
existence of some kind of analogy between the Cold War era and the present, nor
does he refute the possibility. And the reason why he cannot make this point as
clearly as the previous two is because the Iranians have a real religion, he
says, whereas the Communists had an ideology that substituted for religion. And
then, by some weird gesticulation of his mental muscles, he arrives at the
conclusion that the Iranians are not about to produce a Gorbachev. Make what
you wish of that.
So then, what to do according to Elliott Abrams? Well, he
suggests a bag of ideas on how to proceed from this point forward. When you
look inside the bag, however, you see nothing that is more convincing than what
is being done now. He says that Iran
must be fought ideologically with attacks such as those delivered against the
Soviets by Truman, Kennedy and Reagan. And here is something that Reagan did
which caught Abrams eyes and raised his spirits: the Soviet
Union is an evil empire that would end up on the ash heap of
history. Can you imagine how scared the Iranians would be if President Obama
said something like that to them? Gosh, it will make them drop to their knees
and beg for mercy.
Guess what Abrams does after that. He admits to something he
kept hidden early on. He now says that what is missing is a campaign to
undermine Iran
“not just by sabotaging centrifuges but sabotaging its belief system.” Well,
for one thing, this contradicts him saying earlier that the West did nothing to
fight Iran
physically. As to sabotaging its belief system with what he calls “greater
ideological clarity” the American effort in this area has been worse than
dismal. It has been abominable for the simple reason that the propaganda
machine was handed to the Jews (such as Elliott Abrams) who stirred up the bile
of the normally tolerant Muslims, the same way that Jews stirred up the bile of
the Europeans – those that did not exactly respond by hugging or kissing their
Jewish neighbors.
The Jewish leaders continue to do what they do in order to
make the world safe for Jews, they say. But there is only one way to make the
world safe for Jews; it is to feed the stinky pies to those who bake them as
soon as they bake them.