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Thinking the Unthinkable: War with Iran

(American Interest) Walter Russell Mead - President Obama clearly doesn't want a war with Iran (and neither do I), but if history teaches anything, it's that you can't always get what you want. There are signs that the Iranian mullahs overestimate their clout and underestimate America's ability to confront them. In the past, Iranian radical factions have turned up the temperature in the U.S.-Iranian relationship in order to improve their political standing at home. Calling on Iranians to unite against the foreign menace has worked before, isolating moderates and consolidating the radicals' grip on power. It would be easy for radical clerics to miscalculate and, intending only to stage a crisis, to overreach and set off a war. Paradoxically, the only way to avoid scenarios like these with Iran may be to make the regime and its radical allies fear us more than they now do. Somehow the mullahs need to understand that a real shooting war between the two countries almost certainly means regime change in Tehran. There are quiet ways of communicating a truth that the Iranian leaders must never forget: that an attack on the forces of the United States would be an act of suicidal folly. But we should not be so polite and so low key that they miss the main point. The writer is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2010-03-04 08:20:15
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