Advice From John Bolton And George Orwell About Ahmadinejad

Agree with John Bolton or not the one thing you’ll get from him is cold hard logic stripped of any fancy overlay designed to make you feel all nice and warm inside. He sees the world as a dangerous and risky place ruled by self interest and suspicion where nothing can be taken on trust. I am sure that if he were advising Governor Palin he would suggest she would learn more about foreign policy by wandering through the streets of Baltimore via “The Wire” than any number of Ivy League seminars.

So Bolton has cut to the chase with Iran

With Iran's hard-line mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unmistakably back in control, Israel's decision of whether to use military force against Tehran's nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever.
Iran's nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.
Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not.

Bolton thinks that Obama still wants to “engage” with Iran and sees all the fuss over the regime’s brutal repression of the recent protests as a distraction from his ultimate aim of negotiating an agreement where the Iranians renounce nuclear weapons. Indeed there is a school of thought which believes the Mullahs, sensitive to the criticisms of heavy handedness, now crave the goodwill of the international community.

Obama administration sources have opined (anonymously) that Iran will be more eager to negotiate than it was before its election in order to find "acceptance" by the "international community." Some leaks indicated that negotiations had to produce results by the U.N. General Assembly's opening in late September, while others projected that they had until the end of 2009 to show progress. These gauzy scenarios assume that the Tehran regime cares about "acceptance" or is somehow embarrassed by eliminating its enemies. Both propositions are dubious.

Obama’s flaw is that he treats foreign policy as an extension of the culture of wheeler dealing that soaked into his DNA as a hack Daley machine operative in Chicago. It’s the John Stroger worldview – everyone has a price to make a deal. But he’s not involved with a Cook County garbage disposal contract or a better paid sinecure for his wife. As Waller R. Newell has suggested the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran sees the possession of nuclear weapons as the key to the destruction of Israel, the establishment of a pure Islamic world power and the subsequent reappearance of the mysterious Twelfth Imam whose return would signal the final phase of the war against evil

Unlike mainstream Sunni Islam, Shiism has a strong messianic strain. Shiites rejected the institution of an earthly caliphate intertwining secular and religious authority, such as the Ottoman sultans, in favor of the rule of the descendants of the Prophet. The last of these, the Hidden Imam, left the world in 874, and devout Shiites faithfully await his return. When he does return, he will lead the righteous in a war against the wicked and establish a kingdom of perfect justice on earth.

Bolton is not saying that it is pointless negotiating with unfriendly regimes. The governments of China, Russia, even Venezuela might be characterised as acting like hard nosed gang leaders but even gangsters are driven by self preservation as well as self interest so Obama’s Chicago background ought, in theory, to have been an excellent preparation for deploying some good, old fashioned Nixonian cunning.

Unfortunately Obama’s predilection for Chicago style kneecappings don’t seem to go beyond those situations where unwise officials begin to question the activities of his cronies and donors. Certainly as far as the outside world is concerned he seems to have fallen into the fatal trap of believing everything his agitprop apparatchniks in the media have been feeding a gullible public – Obama the bringer of hopenchange, Obama the peacemaker and healer of a broken world...and, above all, Obama the anti-Bush.

Obama has revived the Carter/Clinton tradition of foreign politics as therapy for the liberal elite who can’t stand the idea of America being unloved so it’s touchy/feely time again, folks and don’t do anything that might upset The New York Times or the BBC. Let’s forget the cowboy stuff, chill out, stay cool and “engage”.

But with Iran you are dealing with a group of men who exist in a political and cultural dimension totally divorced from the salons of The Washington Post. Like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Hitler’s National Socialists and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge they were a small but fanatical millenarian sect catapulted into power after years of being ignored and despised by the ruling elite. They came to power through a popular insurrection but once in power they acted swiftly and effectively to consolidate their authority by brutally crushing any opposition. The very nature of their unexpected rise from obscurity confirmed their belief that they were pre-ordained to rule and therefore justified any action (mass murder, torture, betrayal) that others might be deemed immoral because their only measure of morality was what effectively promoted the cause.

As Heinrich Himmler once said in his notorious speech to the SS in Posen in 1943

Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interest me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.

Such is the mindset of the millenarian fanatic whether in Russia, Germany, Cambodia or modern Iran. Hitler, Lenin and Pol Pot would feel quite at home under Ahmadinejad and the Osulgaran.

The overall aim of the osulgaran faction, to which Ahmadinejad belongs, is to do away with the factional nature of the Iranian regime and have a top-down, unified, military-style government with a population which supports it unequivocally and by acclamation without being allowed to organise in any form. This is to be a united country, under an undivided, single and monolithic regime, preparing for war, with an economy that reflects those aims. The unorganised ‘people’ are to be mobilised when and if necessary to act as fodder for that war.

The regime has shown that it has no difficulty in mounting savage repression. This is an ideological regime, organised on fascist lines and fighting for its life. It has a well organised and financed body of Revolutionary Guards, as well as the voluntary bassij to do its deeds. While both of these will undoubtedly have within them large sections who are sympathetic to the popular movement, it is unwise to underestimate the power of ideology and even more the hierarchical structure of these organisations making the bassij foot-soldier far more likely to obey the orders to shoot than the conscript army of the shah.

The Obama notion of “engagement” with such people is driven by a dangerous mixture of naivety and wishful thinking. Obama is essentially a child of the liberal left which both in America and Western Europe refuses to believe that someone like Ahmadinejad means what he says. It must be for domestic consumption since no modern state could really be driven by such primitive ideas – but, regrettably we have been here before when perfectly rational liberal left intellectuals like H G Wells refused to believe Winston Churchill’s warnings about the nature of Hitler and his regime. Wells saw Churchill as a flag waving anachronism in a scientific and progressive world, a roadblock on the road to world peace and understanding. It took George Orwell, another left wing writer with a greater understanding of human nature to spell out in 1941 the blinkered myopia of the liberal left world view.

What is the use of pointing out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to “enlightened” and hedonistic people.

Orwell then pointed out that Britain only survived because of the leadership of the “anachronistic” Churchill whose charismatic leadership was able to harness and supercharge a deeper, unenlightened dynamic.

What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the “sacred soil of the Fatherland”, etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

One can only hope that underneath President Obama’s cool, sophisticated Hyde Park exterior those anachronistic Churchillian emotions are ready to be unleashed should the Iranian Millenarians run true to type....