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The Iranian nuclear plan remains profoundly worrying, and anyone who does not believe that it is intended to build an atom bomb (and, to my surprise, there are adult human beings who don't) has to answer the question I already asked one such person: why does a country that, one, floats on a sea of oil, two, has insufficient refining capacities - so that it has to buy back its own oil refined by foreigners - and, three, is terrifyingly earthquake-prone, want an expensive "civilian" atomic program, instead of the extra oil refining facilities it desperately needs?
However, a couple of recent news items have made me rethink some points that I was, perhaps, taking far too much for granted.
The first is what we have seen of the secret but obvious war waged by Israel against the Iranian nuclear project. In the last year, at least half a dozen top scientists and nuclear personnel have been murdered, inside Iran; and I, at least, haven't heard of the huge Iranian security apparatus catching even one of the culprits. The conclusion is obvious. Israel must have an efficient and extremely well concealed network of agents in Iran, who can be activated even for terribly dangerous activities such as repeated assassination (where the risk of detection is multiplied by each successive attempt) and achieve their goal. Such a network is not the work of one year: Israel - a country of less than seven million people - must have spent decades setting it into place, building it up piece by careful piece, constantly avoiding detection and exposure. Compare and contrast, for instance, with the frequent exposure of Soviet networks during the Cold War. My guess is that Israel must have had agents in Iran even in the time of the Shah, but that it must have started giving its network the shape it has now - a shape that can kill efficiently and confidently - when Khomeini came to power with his exterminating message against "the little Satan". The Israelis took that message seriously, and worked, year in, year out, from 1979 to this day, to achieve the capacity to strike inside the country if they had to. So it was that this network was in place on the day it was needed, when, after long years of verbiage and cheap terrorism, the Iranians really started on a project with the potential to destroy tiny Israel - namely, the atom bomb. And to the best of my knowledge nobody even suspected that it was there until it began to strike.
Now compare with the Iranians in action. In the last few days, to avenge the murdred scientists, Iranian agents have made murderous attacks against five different diplomatic Israeli targets in various countries including India. Not a single one of them achieved its goal, and the only victim was an Iranian agent who blew his own legs off while apparently trying to dodge the Thai police. The contrast with the Israeli action could not be more glaring. Every target the Israeli aimed at, they hit. Every target the Iranians aimed at, they missed. But there is worse. The Israelis struck inside the enemy country, at targets that could really damage the enemy effort; the Iranians struck around the world, over neutral territory, at targets that made no difference to them. Kill one top scientist and you may have done some harm to the enemy's race to build nukes; kill one diplomat, and another takes its place. (You may also have annoyed the neutrals on whose territory you did the killing - but that is not terribly important here, since neither Iran nor Israel, for different reasons, are very popular anyway.) And the fact that all of this had to be done by obvious amateurs and in neutral countries shows that after more than 25 years of incendiary rhetoric and covert aid to terrorists, Iran still does not have in place any useful covert network. They simply never approached the destruction of Israel as Israel approached the warding off of that destruction - as a job to be done, rather than as a display.
The proper frame to understand the deficiencies of Iran is the recent announcement that it was training a body of female ninjas. I immediately, of course, thought of the late Colonel Gheddafi's famous female bodyguard, for which similar claims were made, and which does not seem to have played any significant part in the struggle for Libya - when it came to the point, the Colonel seems to have put his trust in African mercenaries and local loyalists. It was all show, and rather buffoonish show at that. But at least in Gheddafi's case it had one serious purpose: it was the public face of his determined effort to advance women in Libyan society, an effort that put him at odds with most Libyans and that has since gone brutally into reverse. When a similar gesture is done by one of the most woman-hating and woman-murdering governments in the world, the element of buffoonery is simply unredeemed by any clear purpose. It looks like policy made on the hoof after watching cheap Japanese movies.
This, then, is my view now: the Iranian government is a bunch of buffoons. Mass-murdering buffoons, of course, and still immensely dangerous if they ever manage to build their bomb; but buffoons nevertheless - culturally so comically inadequate as to model supposed elite forces on Japanese comics, and in every way evidently incapable of planning ahead and working efficiently even towards what is supposed to be one of their main goals, the destruction of Israel. In some ways, of course, the idea of a bunch of posturing, inadequate buffoons (and still homicidal) in charge of atom bombs is terrifying; but it demands a different approach from that of an efficient, competent tyranny in the same position.
However, a couple of recent news items have made me rethink some points that I was, perhaps, taking far too much for granted.
The first is what we have seen of the secret but obvious war waged by Israel against the Iranian nuclear project. In the last year, at least half a dozen top scientists and nuclear personnel have been murdered, inside Iran; and I, at least, haven't heard of the huge Iranian security apparatus catching even one of the culprits. The conclusion is obvious. Israel must have an efficient and extremely well concealed network of agents in Iran, who can be activated even for terribly dangerous activities such as repeated assassination (where the risk of detection is multiplied by each successive attempt) and achieve their goal. Such a network is not the work of one year: Israel - a country of less than seven million people - must have spent decades setting it into place, building it up piece by careful piece, constantly avoiding detection and exposure. Compare and contrast, for instance, with the frequent exposure of Soviet networks during the Cold War. My guess is that Israel must have had agents in Iran even in the time of the Shah, but that it must have started giving its network the shape it has now - a shape that can kill efficiently and confidently - when Khomeini came to power with his exterminating message against "the little Satan". The Israelis took that message seriously, and worked, year in, year out, from 1979 to this day, to achieve the capacity to strike inside the country if they had to. So it was that this network was in place on the day it was needed, when, after long years of verbiage and cheap terrorism, the Iranians really started on a project with the potential to destroy tiny Israel - namely, the atom bomb. And to the best of my knowledge nobody even suspected that it was there until it began to strike.
Now compare with the Iranians in action. In the last few days, to avenge the murdred scientists, Iranian agents have made murderous attacks against five different diplomatic Israeli targets in various countries including India. Not a single one of them achieved its goal, and the only victim was an Iranian agent who blew his own legs off while apparently trying to dodge the Thai police. The contrast with the Israeli action could not be more glaring. Every target the Israeli aimed at, they hit. Every target the Iranians aimed at, they missed. But there is worse. The Israelis struck inside the enemy country, at targets that could really damage the enemy effort; the Iranians struck around the world, over neutral territory, at targets that made no difference to them. Kill one top scientist and you may have done some harm to the enemy's race to build nukes; kill one diplomat, and another takes its place. (You may also have annoyed the neutrals on whose territory you did the killing - but that is not terribly important here, since neither Iran nor Israel, for different reasons, are very popular anyway.) And the fact that all of this had to be done by obvious amateurs and in neutral countries shows that after more than 25 years of incendiary rhetoric and covert aid to terrorists, Iran still does not have in place any useful covert network. They simply never approached the destruction of Israel as Israel approached the warding off of that destruction - as a job to be done, rather than as a display.
The proper frame to understand the deficiencies of Iran is the recent announcement that it was training a body of female ninjas. I immediately, of course, thought of the late Colonel Gheddafi's famous female bodyguard, for which similar claims were made, and which does not seem to have played any significant part in the struggle for Libya - when it came to the point, the Colonel seems to have put his trust in African mercenaries and local loyalists. It was all show, and rather buffoonish show at that. But at least in Gheddafi's case it had one serious purpose: it was the public face of his determined effort to advance women in Libyan society, an effort that put him at odds with most Libyans and that has since gone brutally into reverse. When a similar gesture is done by one of the most woman-hating and woman-murdering governments in the world, the element of buffoonery is simply unredeemed by any clear purpose. It looks like policy made on the hoof after watching cheap Japanese movies.
This, then, is my view now: the Iranian government is a bunch of buffoons. Mass-murdering buffoons, of course, and still immensely dangerous if they ever manage to build their bomb; but buffoons nevertheless - culturally so comically inadequate as to model supposed elite forces on Japanese comics, and in every way evidently incapable of planning ahead and working efficiently even towards what is supposed to be one of their main goals, the destruction of Israel. In some ways, of course, the idea of a bunch of posturing, inadequate buffoons (and still homicidal) in charge of atom bombs is terrifying; but it demands a different approach from that of an efficient, competent tyranny in the same position.
