Understanding the reasons why Americans are more willing to wage wars than Europeans is of historical interest, but not only. It has been asserted, for example, that Americans were willing to wage war against Saddam Hussein because of the manipulation of the American political system by a lobby that was more loyal to Israel than it was to the United States. It has also been speculated that after the latest Iraq war, the American public will become more like Europeans, and less likely to employ war abroad.

Bob Kagan has argued that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. Yes, but why? In my article in The American Interest, “Blood Brothers” (sorry, editor’s choice), I discuss how the large immigration to British North America from the English-Scotch border area, and the subsequent endemic and brutal warfare against the North American Indians, created a political culture in the United States in which failures to respond violently to challenges were seen as the mark of weakness that would lead to predation against the weakling, and in which willingness to fight was part of the duties of a citizen. We are a warlike people. We fought in Iraq because we rise, violently, to violent challenges, and we will remain a warlike people for the foreseeable future.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The prospect of being hanged, we are told, wonderfully concentrates the mind, but on what? The prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon now concentrates our attention on the possibility of Israeli preventive military action or on American sanctions, both of which might prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. These are important policy options, but concentrating on them diverts us from what may be the moment of maximum danger, which will take place one or two years after Iran tests a nuclear weapon.

I am assuming that Iran will openly test its weapon, for the psychological impact the test will have, both in Iran and abroad. Given the uncertainties that other nations have about the ability of Iran successfully to construct a workable weapon on the Chinese/Pakistani model, only a successful test will yield the political benefits for which Iran has paid so heavily. Iran may test the weapon above ground, to minimize the chances that preparations for the test are detected, and to achieve the maximum visual impact, something the regime has sought and exaggerated in its ballistic missile test program. On current projections, this test could come in 2010 or 2011.

After the test, what will Iran do? It is noteworthy that many new nuclear powers (but not India) have offered nuclear weapons technology, not the bomb itself, to allies and clients. The technology is valuable, and easily transmitted covertly, for money or for diplomatic influence. Iran may not make explicit nuclear threats. It is hard to find any new nuclear power that has done so. But Iran is likely to feel more secure against American and Israeli military action on Iran in retaliation for Iranian actions short of nuclear weapons use, because it will in fact be riskier to proceed with such retaliation once Iran has the bomb.

Iran’s friends will also be emboldened. Hezbollah and Hamas may feel that Iran is better able to protect them against Israeli or American military action once Iran has a nuclear arsenal. The hard core of the Revolutionary Guards and their counterparts in Hezbollah will feel free to pursue a more aggressive agenda against Israel by military but non-nuclear means, once Iran has nuclear weapons. Iran may warn Israel that attacks by her on Lebanon or Gaza would be “dangerous.” Another Lebanon war or more attacks from Gaza are hardly unlikely under such circumstances. If so challenged, Israel will call Iran’s bluff, and use all the non-nuclear force at its disposal against targets in Lebanon or Gaza.

In that case, will Iran sit by and do nothing? At moments of intense non-nuclear crisis, facing defeat or political reverses, the United States, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, and even Israel have taken actions designed to convince foreign observers that they were getting their nuclear weapons ready to use, in order to persuade foreigners to be more cooperative. It is not necessary to attribute any eccentricity to the leadership of Iran in order to suggest that they, too, may seek to avoid the defeat of their allies in an intense crisis by increasing the readiness of their nuclear weapons. Seeing Iranian preparations for nuclear weapons use, what will Israel do?

In other words, it is not an Iranian nuclear bolt out of the blue that will be the problem, but Iranian-Israeli interaction in an intense crisis in which Israel sees Iranian nuclear forces becoming more ready for action, and in which Iran fears Israeli pre-emption. That will be the moment of maximum danger.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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Gal Luft :: During the first term of the next president, some 68 million new cars will roll onto America’s roads. In China, the world’s fastest growing auto market, sales of new cars will surpass those in the United States as early as 2015, and in India millions of $3,000 Tata Nano cars will soon begin to flood the bustling streets of Calcutta and Mumbai. Most of these cars will have a street life of roughly 15 years and (barring action by those countries’ leadership) almost all of them will be able to run on nothing but petroleum, locking our future to OPEC and its whims for decades to come. In the words of the International Energy Agency: “We are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”

Avoiding such an outcome should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, despite the broad agreement by both presidential candidates on the urgent need to reduce petroleum dependence, they both focus on solutions that are politically contentious (like domestic drilling and increasing mandatory fuel efficiency standards) and that are by and large tactical rather than strategic. The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability. Such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the global transportation sector—almost all of the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes can run on nothing but petroleum—and the stranglehold of OPEC over the consuming nations’ economies.

This cartel, which owns 78 percent of global reserves, produces today about as much oil as it did thirty years, despite the fact that the global economy and non-OPEC production have doubled over the same period. Policies that perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worsening future dependence on the oil cartel as the relative share of non-OPEC oil reserves and production further shrinks.

The new president should therefore declare a strategic goal to break the petroleum standard and replace it with an Open Fuel Standard. This would require that every automobile sold in the United States (and, by extension, throughout the world, since no automaker would give up on the U.S. market) must be able to run on non-petroleum fuels in addition to gasoline. Flexible fuel cars (which cost automakers $100 extra to make and can run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline), electric cars and plug-in hybrids cars (which enable us to use made-in-America electricity) are only some of the solutions at hand. Only through competition at the pump (and the socket) can we drive down the price of oil, reduce its strategic value and curb the transfer of wealth from oil importing countries to OPEC. To bring those solutions to the marketplace in mass would require some presidential signatures, and like everything in life there is some cost involved. But christening more aircraft carriers than would otherwise be needed isn’t cheap either.

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Jacqueline Newmyer :: The next president’s foreign policy should be attentive to the ways in which the balance of global economic and military power has tilted toward Asia. To the extent that the Bush administration has been preoccupied with Central Asia and the Middle East since 9/11, an eastward shift in the U.S.’s foreign policy focus may be warranted. That said, the new administration should keep three points in mind as it crafts a Middle East agenda:

1. As the United States draws down its forces in Iraq (while renewing attention to Afghanistan), other external powers with strategic interests in the region are likely to perceive a vacuum to fill. For instance, China can be expected to continue to expand its ties in the Middle East by means of investments and agreements in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The United States may want to try to prevent any other single outside power from exercising undo influence. Options would include allowing India to develop better relations with Iran; encouraging Indian, Korean, and Japanese development of Iraq; and maintaining naval and air forces in the region.
2. The U.S.-India nuclear agreement is likely to have follow-on effects in the Gulf, where India has traditionally had strong ties. New Delhi will have incentives to transfer technology received from the United States. If American know-how is going to spread, it would be best for Washington to try to shape that process and build capital that might prove useful in the event of a future Middle East conflagration or crisis.
3. Whether John McCain or Barack Obama prevails, the United States will be led by a president with a compelling biography and personal appeal. Such a commander in chief creates a potential competitive advantage in executive diplomacy for the United States, relative to China and other Asian powers, in a region with a tradition of charismatic leadership and around the world. At least at the beginning of the first 100 days, the new occupant of the White House will project an image of U.S. strength, based on a record of self-sacrifice and resolve or a demonstration of the American electorate’s liberal tolerance and openness. Both kinds of strength have their uses in outreach to strategic interlocutors. After a campaign that seems poised to revolve around domestic issues, President McCain or Obama would do well to exploit this advantage by visiting allies with interests in the Middle East early in his term.

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Stephen Peter Rosen :: There are a number of ways in which we can think about the president’s agenda during his first 100 days. My suggestions reflect the belief that the new president will have essentially no staff in place, precious little knowledge of the ongoing work of the permanent bureaucracy, and not enough time to have developed a long term strategy. As a result, an agenda for the first 100 days should address an urgent problem in the international environment, and should make use of the president’s political capital at home in order to undertake necessary but difficult initiatives.

Most issues in the Middle East are not amenable to bold initiatives. The Arab-Israeli problem is not a problem, but a more or less permanent condition. Managing Iran will call for the slow and quiet development of American and allied military capabilities in the region, and new nuclear guarantees. Iraq and Afghanistan are problems for the long haul, both militarily and economically. Limiting the growth of Chinese influence in the region is a basic strategic goal, which presidential diplomacy can assist, as Jacqueline Newmyer points out.

But the destabilization of Pakistan could occur quickly and might already be underway before the new president is sworn in. There is a generation of Pakistani Army officers who came of professional age in the 1990s, who remember the United States walking away from Afghanistan and abandoning Pakistan. They are reported to be more Islamist than their elders. The frontier province in the north of Pakistan is the current home of Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is safe there from the Pakistani Army. No Pakistani officer, old or young, was willing to fire on Pakistani civilians in the rioting earlier this year. The expectation, valid for 60 years, that the Pakistani Army will be able to hold the country together, is no longer supportable.

The American president-elect should begin private discussions with India, Israel, and China about what those countries would do in the event of a civil war in Pakistan that splits the Pakistani Army. This discussion would focus on how to contain the effects of the war within Pakistan, and how to ensure control of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The president-elect must not only ask the American military to present their contingency plans for such an event, but become deeply involved in shaping them. Homeland security must prepare for Pakistani nuclear weapons that are suddenly not under verifiable control. History, recent and old, confirms that absent a process that educates both political leaders and military officers about their often conflicting perspectives and needs, military plans will fail.

This is a problem which can benefit from timely preparation, in the days before and during the first 100 days of the next president.

Peter Rodman, a member of MESH, passed away on Saturday. I met Peter in 1980 in Santa Monica. I was very junior, he had already worked at the highest levels in government, and was just back from a long trip. But he immediately joined into a serious conversation and worked to include me in it. This seriousness and decency would be visible to me for the next 25 years. In Washington, no matter how high he rose, or what difficulties he faced, he kept the human qualities that made him admirable. He will be sorely missed.

Remembrances are invited from colleagues.

Seymour Hersh has recently alleged that the United States government is engaged in clandestine activities to destabilize Iran through appeals to ethnic and religious minorities. We hope that he is mistaken, not because we oppose regime change in Iran but because the history of Iran teaches that governments rise and fall according to a logic very different from the familiar narrative of ethnic separatism.

Immediately after World War One, Iran experienced the rapid rise and equally rapid collapse of two mini-republics, one involving the Azeri ethnic group around Tabriz and the other in Iran’s Gilan province on the Caspian Sea. These mini-republics might be thought to reflect proto-national separatist movements, but that would be incorrect. They were directed by men who capitalized upon events—concessions to the British and unequal treaties—that mobilized broad anti-foreign sentiment in Iran and in their regions. Both mini-republics failed after a few months, when foreign support for them evaporated.

What these examples illustrate is the rapid rise and fall of governments in Iran. Reza Khan rose quickly to power in the 1920s as a foreign-trained military officer who was able to suppress internal rebellions, but he was exiled in World War Two. Prime Minister Mossadegh rejected the terms of oil contracts imposed by the British and mobilized broad sentiment in Iran in support of this effort, but he was then easily deposed by the United States. Reza Khan’s son was brought back to Iran and was installed as monarch, until he was displaced by the Khomeini revolution, when American support for the Shah was perceived in Iran to have weakened as a result of increased concerns with human rights. This historical record demonstrates the extraordinary fluidity of Iranian politics, in which mass sentiment, foreign support, and charismatic leadership can make regimes, but cannot sustain them.

What explains this fluidity? The Iranian sociologist Homa Katouzian has suggested that the absence of any independent property rights over land in Iran precluded the emergence of stable social structures independent of the state. Administrations exist, but not a stable governing system because Iran has never had an institutionalized legal system based on the support of groups with independent property rights. Such groups do not exist in Iran.

So particular administrations govern while they can capitalize on mass social sentiment—against foreign oppression, for example—but they have no grounds of support that transcends particular personalities or geopolitical circumstances. In Europe, a foundation of stable property based interests allowed for shared public action on behalf of working, middle, and upper classes. Iran has had no equivalent tradition of independent property rights that would nurture a system of laws to protect them, divorced from the identity of a particular ruler or rulings of an elite juridical class.

The characteristic political leader in Iran is thus the same as the characteristic hero of the Thousand and One Nights, the tales told to a Persian king, Shahryar, by his wife, Scheherazade. In those stories, a young, gifted man who comes from nowhere, with nothing, rises to wealth and power by chance, and is then cast down by betrayal. So, too, did the Shah, Khomeini, and even Ahmadinejad seemingly come from nowhere, and, by virtue of charisma or foreign support, gain power.

If this view of Iranian politics is correct, we should not expect class-based social revolution, religious opposition, or ethnic opposition to topple the existing regime. The reign of Ahmadinejad was originally propelled by a reputation for probity and a populist appeal that have been eroded now that they have not materialized into benefits for the people. While this makes his administration a failure, the shared civic interests and independent political institutions that might transform disaffection into coherent political action does not yet exist. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s nuclear endeavors and diplomatic offensives constitute a way for him to replenish his legitimacy.

Political change should only be expected, therefore, when some widely visible event causes social sentiment to coalesce into opposition to a regime that has come to be perceived as weak. The fact that the regime is corrupt means little—all governments are expected to steal and to be indifferent to the welfare of the people. But visibly outrageous behavior (for instance, flagrant affronts to religious principles) create a climate in which a new charismatic figure may emerge to rally an alienated populace. Leading indicators of this possibility would include social behavior that is universally considered deviant—for instance, reported sexual abuse by clerics and an increasing incidence of prostitution by married women whose husbands are aware of and condone the activity, according to Iranian academics.

However, social outrage is likely to flare and fade unless focused by a charismatic figure. Such a figure will not be associated with the current establishment but will have to have engaged in activities that demonstrate a commitment to the good of the nation and personal rectitude that have brought him to the attention of the Iranian population. Therefore, we should be looking for mayors of major cities (as Ahmadinejad once was), mid-level military commanders with histories of success (as was the case with Reza Khan), and clerics with reputations for piety. Most currently discussed potential rivals of Ahmadinejad do not fit these criteria because they are already tainted by scandal or association with the regime.

Does this mean that American military or covert action against the government of Iran will mobilize support for Ahmadinejad or indicate the weakness of the regime? That depends on the character of the action. Military strikes against Iranian nuclear installations will be perceived as foreign humiliation and may lead to internal opposition to the government, but in the name of stronger resistance to foreign domination. Actions that are not clearly tied to foreign governments and that lead to increasingly ineffective police and military control over society will contribute to the perception that the regime is weak. But, again, a dramatic event will be necessary to catapult a charismatic leader into power. This leader will almost certainly not be visibly pro-American. He is more likely to adopt highly nationalist rhetoric. That said, he will have opportunity and incentive to make a new start with the Iranian people, and improved economic and political relations with the West will be a part of what he has to offer Iran.

Illustration: Unfinished statue of Reza Shah, Saadabad Palace, Iran.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

MESH has invited a number of responses to this question: Assuming the United States decides than Iran must be stopped, and that only military action can stop it, should the United States delegate Israel to conduct the necessary military operations? Or should the United States undertake the operations itself, and insist that Israel stay on the sidelines (as it did during the two Iraq wars)?

Josef Joffe begins, followed in the comments by Mark T. Clark, Mark N. Katz, Stephen Peter Rosen, Martin Kramer, and Chuck Freilich.

From Josef Joffe

Israel’s well-publicized war game in the Eastern Mediterranean was a classical signaling stratagem. The message to the European Union and the United States is: “Unless you get serious about real sanctions, we’ll go the Samson route. We’ll throw some 100 F-15s and F-16s against the Iranians, and we don’t care what they do to the rest of the Middle East. Whatever they do, escalation dominance is ours because we have the nukes and they don’t. And our threat would be credible because our existence is at stake.”

This Schellingesque game (”if you don’t do what we want, we’ll lose control over ourselves and take the plunge”) makes perfect sense for the Israelis, being the only nation on earth that is existentially threatened by the Khomeinists. It also makes some sense for the United States to have Israel strain against its chain in order to soften up Iran. But it does not make sense to “delegate” Israel or to let it strike on its own. Here is why.

The basic problem is the divergence of interest once you go beyond the shared loathing of the Tehran regime and the common U.S.-Israeli abhorrence of Iranian nukes. Since these threaten Israel’s existence, other items like oil fields in Saudi Arabia, tanker traffic in the Gulf or terror in Iraq are logically secondary concerns. For the United States, on the other hand, these “secondary” concerns are primary ones. In the war in Iraq, it matters a great deal how the Iranians would respond on that front line. Forget the Mahdi Army; even Moqtada Sadr is not a flunky for the “Supreme Leader.” But how about a straightforward lunge of the Revolutionary Guards into the Basra province—oil wells and all?

For the world’s economic Number One, it matters whether burning oil fields and sinking tankers add up to short-term oil prices of $300 or $400 per barrel. So Israeli and U.S. interests on these “secondary” items are not alike, whence two conclusions follow.

First, the global power can’t “delegate” to its “continental sword” in the Middle East. If you’re in on the crash, you want to be in on the take-off. The idea that the United States could pretend non-involvement is absurd. At a minimum, the United States would have to give overflight permission for Iraq as the Israelis would hardly fly around the Arabian Peninsula to strike Iran from the sea. To permit is to condone, and to condone is to be in cahoots. “Who, me?” is not an American option in this highest-stakes game. As predestined target of retaliation, the United States would want to be in the cockpit ab initio—especially since this has to be done right the first time round.

Hence the second and properly strategic reason why the United States can’t outsource this act of pro-active de-proliferation. This would not be a one-afternoon cakewalk as against Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. This would have to be a massive and sustained air campaign the Israeli air force could not prosecute (though it is larger than the German or French air forces). And it would have to be flanked by a serious naval engagement, which only the United States can mount.

The war, given those crucial American “secondary” interests, would have to consist of three parts.

• One, lasting, say, a week or even two, would take out all of Iran’s air defenses. The drill is well-known, it has been executed twice over Iraq and once over Serbia. But remember: we could never detect, let alone destroy, all of Saddam’s mobile missile launchers.
• The second campaign would have to proceed almost simultaneously. Its purpose would be the elimination of all Iranian assets—naval or air—that could threaten tanker traffic in the Gulf. This is where the U.S. Navy comes in. Before that first cruise missile is launched against Bandar Abbas, the United States would want to establish an intimidating (or shall we say: terrorizing?) presence in the Gulf so as to sharpen Iranian risk assessments.
• The third campaign would be launched consecutively against those nuclear targets proper. This author does not believe that we don’t know where all of these targets are; the Israelis for sure know the addresses and ZIP codes. But some of them are hardened, and others are located within cities. So the bombing will have to be smart, surgical and repetitive. Again, it is better to think in terms of weeks rather than days.

The Israeli air force cannot stage such a three-pronged campaign. Nor would it have to because even $300 oil pales in significance to national survival. For the United States as the global power, however, Iranian retaliation in Iraq or against oil assets matters greatly. Therefore, these threats would have to be eliminated along with the Bushehr reactors and the enrichment and reprocessing plants.

Hence, it is either a real war or none at all. Israel cannot be “delegated.” Nor should it be.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The extension of American nuclear guarantees in the Middle East has been posed as a question of American guarantees to Israel. This is understandable given the intense hostility to Israel expressed by the Iranian regime. However, there is a broader objective that may be served by U.S. nuclear guarantees in the region. If the United States is not able to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, its goal must be to prevent this development from destabilizing the region as a whole, and to prevent Iran from gaining any political advantage from its new capabilities. These twin aims are served by the extension of the American deterrent umbrella to a full range of U.S. allies.

The question of how Iran will use its new strategic capabilities, or how Iran’s behavior will be affected by the possession of a nuclear arsenal, has already elicited a range of expert opinions. At one end of the spectrum is the view that Iran’s religious elites would order an offensive nuclear attack against the United States or U.S. forces or Israel, despite the certainty of suffering a catastrophic response, because they would be willing to die to eliminate Iran’s infidel enemies. (Some critics of the Bush administration accuse it of adopting this eschatological understanding of Iran’s strategic calculus.) It is difficult to envision any effective U.S. deterrent to a nuclear Iran if this view is accurate.

At the other end of the spectrum is a view that a nuclear-armed Iran would not behave much differently from how Iran behaves now. This might be reassuring or distressing, depending on one’s view of Iran’s current foreign policy aims, and how Iran might seek to advance them under a nuclear umbrella.

Closer to that end of the spectrum, one can envision two possible courses of action by a nuclear-armed Iran that would be of concern to the United States, because they extrapolate current Iranian policies already designed to intimidate and weaken U.S. allies and protégés.

1. Gulf coercion. Projecting out from current Iranian efforts to maximize revenues from natural resources, Iran may try to use nuclear threats to coerce the non-nuclear oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf into transferring oil-producing territories, oil revenues, or maritime rights to Iran. Those nuclear threats might involve mobilization of nuclear forces, demonstrative test launches of missiles into disputed areas, military violations of the air and sea frontiers of Arab Gulf states, and nuclear weapons tests, in ways analogous to the behavior of the Soviet Union in the 1956 Suez crisis.

It is difficult to imagine how the Arab Gulf states could independently resist coercion by a nuclear-armed Iran. But the United States has a clear interest in neutralizing the impact of such Iranian efforts. American nuclear guarantees to its non-nuclear allies in the region, perhaps supported by the deployment of American submarines armed with nuclear cruise and ballistic missiles, could serve this interest. This class of guarantees could include Israel, but need not, since Israel has a perfectly adequate nuclear deterrent force of its own.

2. Proliferating to proxies. Iran may transfer nuclear weapons technology to proxy groups. Every state except India that has developed nuclear weapons technology has transferred valuable know-how to others. The United States shared technology with the United Kingdom; France shared reactor technology with Israel; Israel shared technology with Taiwan and probably with South Africa; China shared warhead technology with Pakistan, and so on. Iran would not be doing anything unprecedented if it clandestinely transferred nuclear weapons technology, not bombs, to others. This might, however, result in nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Syria and then Hezbollah. (In the past, Iran and Syria transferred missiles of a kind never before deployed by a sub-state actor, into the hands of Hezbollah.) An anonymous terrorist use of a nuclear weapon against Israel, perhaps detonated on a ship off shore from Israel, is, therefore, a real worry.

Israel recognizes this potential, and sees the credibility of its deterrent as being eroded by the difficulty of establishing responsibility for such an attack in ways that would seem undeniable to world opinion. This uncertainty increases the likelihood that Israel might act unilaterally to reduce the danger posed to it by Iran’s arsenal. A strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would risk inflaming the whole region and would be seen by Jerusalem as providing, at best, temporary relief. But it is not clear what other choice Israel would have.

Israel’s compulsion toward a unilateral attack that could destabilize the region might be mitigated by a U.S. statement that it regarded a terrorist nuclear explosion directed against any American ally in the Middle East as an Iranian attack on the United States, to be met by the full force of an American nuclear response. To be sure, such a guarantee might lead Israel to take greater military risks in dealing with Iran. Such a guarantee, then, would have to be part of a formal alliance and a quid pro quo in which Israel did agree to coordinate its actions with the United States.

Israel might refuse such a deal. But the offer would not be unreasonable. It would follow the precedent of earlier efforts of the United States in the 1950s and ’60s to coordinate nuclear deterrent doctrines with NATO, and it might be the basis of a new international doctrine for dealing with terrorist nuclear threats.

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…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

What are the alternatives available to the United States in Iraq? Three appear to be worth considering.

First, the United States might consider withdrawing its forces to the areas that produce the bulk of Iraqi oil in the south. This would enable the United States to ensure that oil is pumped and exported from the country, and to prevent Iraqi oil revenues from going to a hostile government. This would mean the defense of an enclave, supported by physical and electronic barriers, and would reduce the manpower needed to defend the U.S. position in Iraq. Periodic raids would be conducted to spoil impending attacks on those enclaves. While this would deny Iran or a hostile Iraqi government the ability to use oil revenue for hostile purposes, this would be an openly imperial seizure of territory, which would confirm every worst suspicion of the United States in the Islamic world, and perhaps lead other countries to make similar grabs of oil producing areas.

Second, the United States could withdraw U.S. ground forces from Iraq, but maintain a naval and air force presence in the Gulf and the Gulf states. We would accept whatever state emerged as dominant in Iraq, and hope that economic motives would lead it to produce and sell Iraqi oil in the world market. Though the oil revenue might flow into the hands of people we do not like, the remaining American military presence in the region would deter Iraqi or Iranian military aggression or coercion of the Gulf states. Money might flow from Iraq to terrorist organizations, and Iraq might become an area within which terrorists could be trained, but this is happening now. American air power and special forces could strike at terrorist training camps to reduce their level of operations, and to retaliate against egregious terrorist attacks.

Until 2007, this appeared to be a serious option. It now appears less attractive. The acceleration of the Iranian nuclear enrichment program and the decrease in the credibility of any American or Israeli action against Iranian nuclear weapons productions facilities mean that an American withdrawal would take place against the backdrop of a nuclear Iran. The credibility of American guarantees to the Gulf states in that context would be low. Moreover, the demographics of Iraq are such that we can expect disproportionately large numbers of young Iraqi males of military age for the next fifteen years. They are likely to be unemployed, and easy recruits for militias, street mobs, and the like.

In short, absent an effective Iraqi state that has a monopoly of force, and that can put young men to work or put them in a national army, the demographic foundation of Iraqi society seems unlikely to support any kind of social peace. Endemic war internal to Iraq would be the consequence of this option. Endemic internal war in Iraq, a nuclear Iran, and the withdrawal of American forces would seem to create the conditions for an expansion of Iranian control over Iraqi and Persian Gulf oil production and sales.

The remaining option is the continuation of current levels of American ground forces in Iraq, with an increased emphasis on building an Iraqi police force and national army from the ground up, with continued American operations to clear and secure populated areas, and continued American air and artillery support for Iraqi ground force operations against insurgents. This would have to be supported by an expansion of the Army and Marine Corps. While costly, it is not clear where else in the world the United States would need to deploy its ground combat forces. Iranian influence would be balanced by American ground, naval, and air forces. U.S. casualties would probably spike as Iran and the Shi’ite militias under their influence tried to force the United States out, but could decline if the Iraqi army improved. The end state would be an Iraqi state built around an army, and that could keep social peace, perhaps on the model of Turkey in the 20th century.

The first two options are not impossible, but if the outcomes associated with them are unacceptable, we are left with the last remaining option—however improbable.

From the inception of this public website, we imagined that it would have a companion forum for the exchange of ideas among persons with a professional interest in U.S. strategy and foreign policy. We call that companion MESHNet. MESHNet is a members-only message board, ideal for hosting open and structured discussions. We plan to develop MESHNet as a place where established and budding experts can express views among their peers, and where we can quickly congregate to enlighten and update one another during the crises that inevitably punctuate the affairs of the Middle East.

MESHNet will be launched next Tuesday, April 1. If you think you might qualify for membership, we urge you to apply. Read more about MESHNet here, and apply here.

I am worried. Last year I did some historical research on the shifts in discourse within British, Japanese, and South African official elites prior to their use of biological weapons. In all these cases, including the deliberate distribution of small pox-infected blankets by the British in North America, the use of bubonic plague by the Japanese in China, and the use of anthrax by the South Africans in what was then Rhodesia, use of biological agents was preceded by an escalation of rhetorical campaigns to demonize and dehumanize the targeted enemy.

The problem in using these shifts in discourse as an early warning indicator, is, of course, one of calibration and of over-prediction. Many references to enemies as less than human are not associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings. Some streams of discourse are chronically laden with dehumanizing rhetoric. Detecting meaningful shifts requires close study of the discourse of interest over time, and I have not done this with regard to Iran and Israel. Casual observation suggests that references to Israel as a “cancer” are old, but that the reference to Israel as a “black and dirty microbe” is new.

On the basis of my historical research, my recommendation was that a significant shift in discourse of this character be used as a indicator that we should focus intelligence collection assets on a target that is now suspected of being willing to engage in mass killing by unconventional means, and to issue specific deterrent threats of retaliation. I do not know if either of these measures has been adopted by the government of Israel, or the United States, but it would seem prudent for them to do so.

I invite comment from those who systematically track Iranian discourse, to reassure me that there is nothing to worry about, or to verify my concerns.