| With every passing day the drums of war are beaten harder and louder. Ironically enough, however, with each passing day it becomes also more and more difficult within Iran to speak of war and to warn of its terrible destructiveness. On Monday, September 10, El-Baradei walked out of a UN meeting in Brussels in objection to what in his mind amounted to some European leadrs’ bellicose path of collision with Iran . In one of his first comments on the issue, on August 27, France’s new president, Sarkozy, warned of the "catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran," and not long after, on Sept. 16, his Foreign Affairs minister, Bernard Kouchner, warned the world to “prepare for war with Iran.” |
| Despite all this, however, the Iranian stance continues along the double lines of belligerence and denial. If you are asking ‘why’, then you are precisely where I have found myself again and again, at least for the past two years –ever since the beginning of Ahmadinejad’s presidency term, to be more specific. And the single disturbing answer I have come up with, again and again, passes through the dark and twisted mental alleys of a character known commonly as Hassan Abbasi (though some would recognize him as Yadollah Qazvini). Let me explain. |
| About a year ago, on Jan 22, 2006, Elaine Shannon wrote an article in Time Magazine titled, ‘A Slow Iran Squeeze’. In her article Shannon said she had learned from an EU diplomat that “Western nations have been mapping out a careful, incremental plan” to stop Iran’s plans of developing nuclear technology and becoming a local power. That plan was presumably developed by Condoleezza Rice, and her British, French and German counterparts. The slow squeeze strategy, wrote Shannon, is known informally as the frog strategy, referring to a trick for cooking live frogs: you don’t throw a frog into hot water, it will hop right out of the pot, instead, you put the frog in a pot of cold water, then slowly raise the heat so that by the time the frog feels the need to jump out it is already too late and its muscles have long given way. “This time,” said the EU diplomat to Shannon, “it will be an Iranian frog”. Though Shannon didn’t tell her readers, when the diplomat said “this time,” he was making an implicit reference to a recent success story of the frog strategy, where Saddam was cooked at a pace that by the time the pot came to full boiling he was far too helpless to avoid ending on the dinner plate. |
| The frog strategy approach has so far worked very nicely with Iran as well. The frog is still in the pot, and though bubbles are clearly forming on the bottom and, for all means and purposes, the boiling point is well in view, President Ahmadinejad announced recently (Sept. 2, 2007), that God and mathematical calculations have made it clear to him that the United States will not attack Iran. So once again we find ourselves back to the opening question, why does Ahmadinejad act the way he does ? How can it be that not only reformists like former president, Khatami, but even prominent conservative figures like the head of the Expediency Council, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or former military commander, Mohsen Rezai, are cautioning against extreme behavior and rash reactions, yet Ahmadinejad and his camp insist on minimizing the threat of a military attack, ridicule those who advise caution, and announced that they have torn and thrown away the brakes from the ‘Iranian nuclear train’? It is precisely at this point, as I said earlier, that we find traces of the warped mind of a certain Professor Hassan Abbasi. |
| Over the course of a few years leading to and through the presidency of Ahmadinejad, Hassan Abbasi gave an unusually large number of talks across Iran and published prolifically on paper and on the internet, leaving anybody interested a huge body of thoughts and ideas that, though bordering on lunacy, provide a wonderful source of information for understanding many of the points of views expressed by Ahmadinejad and his government. The relationship is of course not accidental. In 2004, Michael Ledeen (whom, incidentally, Abbasi has called ‘the second thinking brain of the American conservatives’), wrote an article about the Iranian situation, titled ‘No Way Out’, in which he introduced Abbasi as “a well-known Iranian political scientist, longtime top official of the Revolutionary Guards, and currently ‘theoretician’ in the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the head of the National Security and Strategic Research Center”. Abbasi, added Ledeen, “holds special responsibility for North American affairs.” Two years after Ledeen’s report and well into Ahmadinejad’s term, In 2006 Amir Taheri, a prominent Iran Analyst, described Abbasi as, “professor of strategy at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University,” and “the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.” |
| Among Hassan Abbasi’s writings one article is of special interest to me here, one which is available also (in Persian) at Abbasi’s own website, ‘Doctrinal Analysis for Security without Borders’. The paper is titled “Frog Strategy: Dimensions and Possibilities”. As the title says, this is an article about a notion pointed out by some, including Shannon, that the United States is following the strategy of gradual squeeze, or the Frog Strategy, in the case of Iran. The paper is too long and complicated to detail here, but let me translate the very last section of it, where Abbasi concludes his analysis by suggesting how Iran should regulate its foreign policy in response to the American Frog Strategy. He writes, |
| But what should Iran’s response to the Frog Strategy be ? The simplest way is to attack the enemy’s strategy. |
| The Frog Strategy, like the West’s earlier strategies against Iran, is an insulting one. By persisting on “Chicken Strategy” we can emphasize and lean on an honorable approach of matching strategies. |
| Regardless of the outstanding capacities of the Chicken Strategy … we can replace the classic Phoenix Strategy for the Frog Strategy. In that situation the “Doctrine of Nimrod’s Nose” and the Strategy of “Abraham’s Fire Garden” will counter and cancel the Frog Strategy. |
| Don’t worry if this translation strikes you as bizarre, the original text sounds no less so. And if you find yourself starting to ask ‘but how can these strange ideas be taken seriously by Ahadinejad,” stop and remind yourself that Ahmadinejad is the person who spoke of a halo having surrounded him when he talked at the United Nations, or who once told his audience the story of a sixteen year old Iranian girl who had produced Atomic Energy in their basement. And yes, both these claims are captured on video and available on Youtube. |
| The so called ‘Chicken Strategy’ that Abbasi is recommending is what is known in Game Theory as the Hawk-Dove Game, or The Game of Chicken. Think of Rbel Without a Cause, and the scene where Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) are driving towards the cliff with the idea that whoever ‘chickens out’ loses the game, and with it all respect in his peers’ eyes. The other variant, that Abbasi describes in his paper, is the scenario when two drivers drive towards each other on a line of collision. Again, the drivers need to decide how close the imminent collision is, and when or if they should turn to one side, jump out of the car or wait for the other to jump out first. So let’s recap this. Abbasi is giving the strategic consult to President Ahmadinejad, that the way to counter the Americans’ Frog strategy is to push with the Chicken Strategy. In fact in an other article he even goes into greater details to describe the various tricks the Iranian government can undertake to ‘win’ this game of chicken . Those range from wearing sunglasses so the other cannot read your emotion, to honking the horn and flashing the lights to distract and agitate the opponent, all the way to finally tearing off and throwing out the driving wheel. |
| It would be only too obvious to anybody who has followed the policies of Ahmadinejad’s administration to recognize how he has put to good practice his guru’s advice, be it in the standoff over the Iranian Atomic technology, or in the face of the growing threat of an American attack. His by now infamous mode of defiance and bold statements, his threats, and even his statement that ‘we have torn off the brake of the Iranian Atomic train and thrown it out of the window’, all have clear traces of Abbasi’s ‘strategic’ advice. In fact even the letters that Ahmadinejad famously wrote to G. W. Bush and other heads of powerful states was following the suggestion made by Abbasi. |
| Some may feel something of a relief, to hear what I have just said. After all, it is much more comforting to know that you are dealing with a bluffing trickster than to think you have a madman on your hand. But, I’m afraid, the situation is in fact more frightening than this, for at least two significant reasons. One reason is that to truly understand the confrontation between Iran and the United States as a game of chicken is a hugely misguided error whose price will be paid by many an innocent, in flesh and blood. It is misguided because the game of chicken has two sides, both of whom similarly vulnerable to the possible disastrous ending. Whichever driver falls off the cliff or crashes into the other is likely to die. The difference between this and a possible military confrontation between Iran and the United States is only too obvious. The good analogy for Iran and the States crashing into each other would be more like a bird running into a Boeing 747 engine, than two cars colliding –they will not get hurt in similar ways. Playing chicken against the mighty United States sounds more like a sad joke at the end of which either Iran gets destroyed, or Iran gets destroyed. |
| The second still more tragic reason why the situation may be more frightening than it appears is that for Ahmadinejad and Abbasi, the game of chicken is actually not even the real strategy, in the normal sense of the term. In other words, they are not just bluffing. The reality is that for people like Ahmadinejad or Abbasi, the game is an open ended one, because the real strategy is a suicidal one: “regardless of the outstanding capacities of the Chicken strategy,” said Abbasi, “we can replace the classic Phoenix strategy for the Frog strategy.” Let me refresh your memory, that the Phoenix is a mythical bird that commits suicide by making a large fire and burning itself in it, with the idea that from its ashes a new Phoenix will rise. And if the Phoenix reference is not unambiguous enough, ‘the strategy of Abraham’s Fire Garden’ is a precise expression of the same mélange of magical thinking and suicidal resolve. According to the Quran, one day when his entire town were out to celebrate a religious occasion, Abraham picked up his ax, headed for the main temple, and shattered all the idols. Abraham’s crazy plot was not simply intolerant and violent, it was also obviously suicidal, since he was the only person in town that day, and since, to make sure he will be recognized, he also left his ax at the temple, hanging from the last standing idol. On his return, King Nimrod duly ordered a great fire and had Abraham thrown into it, at which time Allah interfered so that when the fire was over, people found Abraham soundly smiling in the middle of the ashes. So the basic shared elements of the Phoenix and Abraham’s Fire Garden strategies are quite clear: they are both modeled on the magical idea of divinely protected immortality or indestructibility, and they both culminate in suicidal acts of self destruction –except in this case they will be annihilating a whole country with them. It should be hardly striking then, to learn that the same Dr. Hassan Abbasi who advised the Phoenix and Abraham’s Fire Garden strategies was also the master mind behind the creation and organization of Iran’s first ever suicide bombing squads, known as the ‘Special Units of Martyrdom Seekers’, not long after Mr. Ahmadinejad started his term. |
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Far beyond a macho game of chicken, Mr. Ahmadinejad and his strategists are speeding the Iranian train on a fanatical suicide mission. Are we going to help them blow to pieces the nation they have taken hostage ?
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2 نظرات:
You have hit the mark. It seems to me it is good thought. I agree with you.
Very remarkable topic
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