The Conservative Cat

« Wednesday's | Main | Thursday's »

September 7, 2006

Notes from Ferdy - Iran's Marketing Strategy for a Nuclear Future

My biggest problem with Iran is that I don't know the extent to which the people who run the place believe their own PR.

What cannot be denied is that President Ahmadinejad is being sold as a hot new pop star. He has his own blog, he gets American journalists to fawn all over him, and he's always preaching to the infidels. The man is practically another John Kerry, only with an actual personality.

So here's my question: does Ahmadinejad really believe he's the most powerful person in the world? He certainly has reason to believe it, since the world keeps telling him to stop making nuclear weapons and he's doing it anyway.

The common wisdom is that we can't enforce our will in Iraq, where we have an active military force, and that in fact we're even losing ground in Afghanistan. What reason, therefore, does anybody have to believe we can do anything about Iran?

I have one hope: that an unambiguous GOP victory this November scares Al-Qaida and the Taliban into submission. If we get that, then we have allied states on either side of Iran with miliatry forces already in place. If that doesn't happen, then the policy question becomes not how to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, but how to react should Iran decide to put nuclear tips on Hezbollah's rockets. This is serious! Ahmadinejad needs to know what we'd do, and he needs to know that it will be the same reaction regardless of whether the United States is run by Democrats, Republicans, or public opinion polls from France. China and Russia knew: it was called Mutually Assured Destruction, and that's the reason the Cold War stayed cold.

See, it's possible that Ahmadinejad is a cynical politician who is milking a PR campaign in order to extort cash from the West. It would be very bad if he succeeded in doing that, but it would be far worse if he really thinks he's the most powerful man in the world.

You don't need to know a whole lot of history to realize just how dangerous guys like that can be.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Thu 4:59 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Notes from Ferdy | Tags: conservative Iran John Kerry Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nuclear proliferation

Trackback Pings

Comments

Posted by: siavash kazemi at August 20, 2007 6:01 PM

Posted by: siavash kazemi at August 20, 2007 6:03 PM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

Post a comment

Name:
Email Address:
URL:
	Remember personal info?
Comments:
Enter the anti-spammer code shown below.