Cold War Veterans Blog

A Indian opinion on a Nuclear Iran

The Problem with Containment and a Islamic Cold War is that the religious ideology that drives the Mullahs is not a rational one. Live and let live is great if both parties have a equal reverence and respect for human life. It is a fact that some sects of Islam will not rest until they or the West is destroyed . The Mad (mutually assured destruction) model will not work when in one culture the after life is the only one that matters. No value on life no deterrent. If Iran had a secular rational govt a policy of containment might be feasible but Iran will no doubt deploy a nuclear weapon via a third party Hezbollah, Al-Queda, or just a unnamed sponsored terror cell and hope to cloud their involvement enough to prevent a full nuclear retaliation. In my estimation the longer we wait the more danger we are in . The more we kid ourselves into thinking there is a diplomatic solution the closer we come to a larger and uglier war. No doubt any preemptive action will be a dangerous and costly effort and Bush-Cheney folly in Iraq has made the political will of our population and our allies precariously low except for Israel.

The Isreali People learned during the Yom Kippur War That Ignoring a threat is costly.

The IDF had intelligence that the Arabs were preparing for a invasion 72 hours before but the lack of political will and Golda Mayer's desire to been seen as the victim of aggression in the world community was proven costly. Permission to launch a preemptive attack was denied and only a fraction of available reserves were allowed to be mobilized ahead of time these decisions caused Isreal to nearly be defeated and suffering nearly 30,000 casualties in the October War unnecessarily. Now Imagine that on a much Grander Nuclear Scale . We hesitate to act at our own peril.

Sean P. Eagan
Northeast Zone Director
Cold War Veterans Association

CWVA NY 716-708-0505

A Cold War idea whose time has come?

By IE

Friday March 2, 01:24 AM

Containment is back. Over the last 12 months, commentators as varied as George Will, Barry Posen and Thomas Friedman have all suggested that containing a nuclear-armed Iran might be preferable to attacking it. Even James Baker's Iraq Study Group proposed in its December report that the US should work with Iran and Syria to contain the Iraqi conflict. Containment is a Cold War idea, articulated by historian and diplomat George Kennan in the late 1940s in his famous Foreign Affairs magazine article 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct'. Kennan, who had been stationed at the US Embassy in Moscow, argued that as long as the Soviet Union did not attack us, we should not attack it - but should rely instead on economic sticks and carrots, on intelligence and diplomacy and on promoting the health and vitality of the capitalist democracies to win the Cold War. Yes, Kennan wrote, US policy should be built on "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." With time, he believed, the dysfunctional Soviet system, overextended beyond its own borders, would collapse of its own accord. History proved him right. But that was then and this is now. Containment fell into disfavour in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration denounced it as inadequate to meet the threats of the post-9/11 world. If al-Qaida is attacking and nuclear terrorists are roaming the globe and rogue governments are providing them with weapons, the administration argued, only radical measures - pre-emptive war and forcible regime change - can protect us. So what's the truth? Is containment in fact obsolete, as the Bush administration would have it? Numerous parallels suggest that it is not. After World War II, for instance, Kennan knew that national security would have to be managed with scarce resources as troops were demobilised and military budgets cut. Trying to dominate the world would be impossibly expensive. It made more sense, Kennan thought, to work for a world that no one could dominate. This lesson is lost on the Bush administration. Instead of following the Kennan model and pitting our adversaries against one another, the administration encourages them to make common cause at every turn. The "axis of evil" speech in the 2002 State of the Union address is a stunning example. The senseless alienation of Iran when the moderates had the upper hand there and were cooperating in Afghanistan made no sense for the United States. Kennan believed that the way to win hearts and minds was by demonstrating the superiority of democratic capitalism on the ground. Hence his support for the Marshall Plan to consolidate democratic success in Europe as fast as possible. This too is medicine for our time because Islamic fundamentalism shares with communism the lack of a viable political economy. Where fundamentalist movements have come to power in Afghanistan and Iran, the results have been disastrous. Islamic fundamentalism poses no competitive threat to democratic capitalism. That's why so much of the population of Iran (as distinct from the country's leadership) is strongly pro-Western in values and orientation. Think of Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi responded to the incentives (and disincentives) of containment despite his anti-Western invective. In the late 1990s, containment (including economic sanctions) led him to stop sponsoring terrorism, turn over the Lockerbie bombers for trial and pay compensation to British and French victims of Libyan-sponsored terrorism. Instead of Iraq being the model for Iran, Libya should be. But allies of the administration see it differently and are pushing the modern equivalent of rollback, suggesting that we should attack Iran to stop its nuclear weapons programme. True, in some respects, Kennan's doctrine needs to be modified for a world that is no longer bipolar. This requires the creation of regional security alliances. Kennan opposed the creation of NATO on the grounds that it would militarise the conflict with the Soviets unnecessarily. But, as Col. Joseph Nunez of the US Army War College has argued, we now need NATO-like organisations on every continent to contain terrorist groups and sectarian conflicts in failed states. Kennan also had little time for international organisations such as the UN, believing that they would be swept aside in any real conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. But in the globalised world of the 21st century, such international organisations are essential for peacekeeping, international law enforcement and legitimisation of intervention when containment requires it. It is ironic that the two areas in which Kennan's views are most outdated and wrongheaded - working with regional allies and international institutions - are the two areas in which the Bush administration follows his lead. Kennan died two years ago at 101. But his doctrine of containment should not be buried along with him. Containment is not obsolete. The Bush doctrine is.