What's old cannot always be new again

Yesterday we had Clifford D. May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Today we have Mark Dubowitz also of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

This time, Dubowitz wrote “Confront Iran the Reagan Way,” an article that also came under the subtitle: “In 1983 he abandoned 'containment' and adopted a plan to roll back Soviet expansionism. It worked.” The article was published on July 5, 2017 in the Wall Street Journal.

The Dubowitz article brings to mind a wealth of analogies taken from social science, political science and from science fiction. Most prominent among them are these sayings: “one-dimensional thinking”, “playing a three-dimensional chess game” and telling the story of the flatlanders.

That last story is used to explain the real science behind the science fiction tales that unfold in a space that's outside our own. The reason why we, who live in a three dimensional space, cannot visualize a fourth dimension or higher, is often likened to intelligent beings who nevertheless live in a two-dimensional flatland, and cannot imagine what a third dimension would be like. Well, you may think of Mark Dubowitz as being a one dimensional historian, or you can think of him as a flantlander that's trying to play a three-dimensional chess game of history … and doing badly.

Here is his problem: Unlike Iran, none of the Soviet Republics had an illustrious ancient history. Unlike the Western European countries, none of them had a colonial background either. What happened to the Soviet Union is what happened to most Easter European countries. They all embraced the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions and were good at them, but were engulfed soon thereafter by the Marxist system of economics. It proved to be the crucial factor that kept them from progressing fast enough in a competitive world.

Those nations were simply not equipped to distinguish themselves in a dog-eat-dog environment that showed no mercy for the underdog. They were eaten before they could eat the other. On that note, imagine someone trying to devour a Persian while buying a rug from him. The poor thing will find himself swimming in the stomach of the rug dealer before he gets to see the color of his rug.

This says Dubowitz was correct to say that Reagan took advantage of the Soviet Union, being the “internally fragile regime” that it was. But Dubowitz made the mistake of assuming that Iran suffers from the same sort of fragility. And this means that the Reagan plan will have a slim to none chance of working on Iran. You'll know why when you study what the plan includes: “a massive defense build-up, economic warfare, support for anti-regime proxy forces and dissidents, and an all-out offensive against the regime's ideological legitimacy”.

Unlike the Soviet Union and the other East European countries, Iran has the qualities we saw in Vietnam, and now see in North Korea. Whereas the European Communists were rigid, thus broke under the Reagan pressure instead of bending, the inheritors of ancient civilizations – though Communist themselves – were schooled in the first rule of survival. It is to bend when you cannot withstand the pressure of harsh circumstances. You wait; you study the situation, retool and rise again when you're better prepared to confront what's pushing against you.

Oblivious of those realities, Mark Dubowitz did not learn his lesson even though he watched Iran bend under pressure and then come to the negotiating table where it parlayed an equitable nuclear deal for itself. And he missed the North Korean lesson even though he watched that country blow up its plutonium installation in public view, thus got the food and fuel aid it wanted, and then went on to arm itself with nukes and missiles.

Having missed the significance of those lessons, Dubowitz failed to apply them to Syria. Instead, he acted like a one dimensional would-be historian, and foolishly yodeled this song: “The early signs of the return of American power are promising: 59 Tomahawk missiles, military strikes, the downing of a Syrian fighter plane and Iranian-made drones, and 281 Syria-related sanctions in five months”.

Mark Dubowitz could not see that Bashar al-Assad bent under pressure and lived to continue the fight against the forces amassed against his country. Unable to realize that nothing was achieved through violence that could not be achieved through other means, Dubowitz saw fit to express his full-throated celebration. He did so because the president's response gave him something to haggle about … which is what makes a Jew feel good regardless of the result.

And that's why these people always lose in the long run.