Iran means it--"Death to America"

Joshua Muravchik:

Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war, involving more states--Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others--is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.

Consider the pell-mell events of recent weeks. Iran imprisons four Americans on absurd charges only weeks after seizing 15 British sailors on the high seas. Iran's Revolutionary Guard is caught delivering weapons to the Taliban and explosives to Iraqi terrorists. A car bomb in Lebanon is used to assassinate parliament member Walid Eido, killing nine others and wounding 11 more.

At the same time, Fatah al-Islam, a shady group linked to Syria, launches an attack on the Lebanese army from within a Palestinian refugee area, beheading several soldiers. Tehran trumpets further progress on nuclear enrichment as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats his call for annihilating Israel, crowing that "the countdown to the destruction of this regime has begun." Hamas seizes control militarily in Gaza. Katyusha rockets are launched from Lebanon into northern Israel for the first time since the end of last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war.

Two important inferences can be distilled from this list. One is that the Tehran regime takes its slogan, "death to America," quite seriously, even if we do not. It is arming the Taliban, with which it was at sword's point when the Taliban were in power. It seems to be supplying explosives not only to Shiite, but also Sunni terrorists in Iraq. It reportedly is sheltering high-level al Qaeda figures despite the Sunni-Shiite divide. All of these surprising actions are for the sake of bleeding the U.S. However hateful this behavior may be to us, it has a certain strategic logic: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

What is even more worrisome about the events enumerated above is that most of them are devoid of any such strategic logic. For example, the Hamas "putsch" in Gaza--as Marwan Barghouti, the hero of the Palestinian intifada, labeled it from his prison cell--was an enormous blunder.

Hamas already mostly controlled Gaza. It is hard to imagine what gains it can reap from its "victory." But it is easy to see the losses. Fatah, and the government of its leader Mahmoud Abbas, will be able to restore their strength in the West Bank with the eager assistance of virtually the whole outside world, while Gaza will be shut off and denied outside aid far more strictly than during the past year. Israel will retaliate against shelling with a freer hand. Egypt will tighten its border. And Hamas has in one swoop negated its own supreme achievement, namely winning a majority in Palestine's 2006 parliamentary elections. Until now, Hamas had a powerful argument: how can the West demand democracy and then boycott the winners? But now it is Hamas itself that has destroyed Palestinian democracy by staging an armed coup. Its democratic credentials have gone up in the smoke of its own arson.

...

There is much more. There is an air of desperation in Iran's latest war efforts against the US and the West. Its paranoia is driving it to make mistakes like the action in Gaza. What is interesting is how little investment by the US it took to drive them to distraction. We pick up fewer than an dozen of its agents in Iraq and announce a program to support democracy in Iran and they act like it is an invasion plan.

TigerHawk comments on Iran's irrationality. He asks:

Given Iran's provocations, here is a serious question for both the hawks and doves who comment on this blog: If our goal is to change Iran's behavior, are we more likely to do that by reducing the threat we pose to Iran (and thereby alleviating Iran's sense of insecurity) or increasing the threat to Iran (and thereby stimulating a desire within the theocracy to appease us)? The former is the dove case, and the latter is the hawk case, each stripped to its bare essentials.

I am a PrairieHawk on this one although I think it will take substantial coercive force to make Iran change. As long as Iran thinks Democrats will be elected and give her a better deal, negotiations are unlikely to achieve anything at this point. Iran will then probably drive a harder bargain which will force the Democrats hand making war more likely unless the Dems go to absolute surrender mode.