Feldman on Iranian Nukes
Noah Feldman's long article on the Iranian nuclear program manages to be equivocal on such minor issues as "why is Iran building this bomb?" and "what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program?" so I think that if I'd read it blind, I wouldn't have found it especially obnoxious, except insofar as it's weird to write such a long article on an important subject and not really say anything about it. But I didn't read it blind -- I got a panicked email from my dad asking if this was "some sort of soft campaign for March's surprise strike" and saw Martin Peretz call it a "really smart" article. So one starts to worry. And, indeed, there's much to complain about. So let's get to the carping.
First off, the geopolitical dynamics. The second paragraph of the article manages to misportray the situation in a fairly significant manner:
Today the nuclear game in the region has changed. When the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for “a Middle East free of nuclear weapons” this past May, it wasn’t Israel that prompted his remarks. He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared ambition to become a nuclear power has been steadily approaching realization.
Clearly, Feldman is correct to say that Iran's nuclear program, rather than Israel's, is what prompted Moussa's remarks. Israel, however, is very relevant to the conversation. Moussa is not an idiot -- he's a diplomat, he chooses his words carefully. If he wanted to say "a Persian Gulf free of nuclear weapons" he would have said so. But he said "a Middle East free of nuclear weapons." That means nukes for neither Iran nor Israel. The Arab League proposal, in other words, is that the Arab states will welcome -- and, indeed, support -- efforts to get Iran to abandon nukes if the West -- most of all the United States -- will also put comparable pressure on Israel. Perhaps this is a bad idea on the merits. Perhaps it's simply a non-starter. But that's the propsal; that's the position of the Arab states; and the American counter-position (nukes for Israel but not for Iran; sanctions for Iran, $3 billion in annual aid for Israel) should be seen for what it is -- a double-standard. Perhaps a double-standard we ought to adhere to, but not one that Muslim public opinion finds justifiable.
Then we get to the portion of the article which takes as its premise the odd idea that we ought to plumb the depth of Islamic theology to see if there's some unique Muslim friendliness to the idea of using nuclear weapons. A little cultural analysis never hurts, of course, but it would seem to bear mentioning that one and only one nation has ever actually used nukes against an enemy state and that nation was the United States of America.
Similarly, noting that millenarian Islam is an important strain in Iranian politics ought to be put in the context of a United States of America that features millenarian Christianity as an important political strain. I don't see any reason to believe that George W. Bush is actually trying to bring about the apocalypse, but all the evidence you could bring to bear in applying this argument to Ahmadenijad applies mutadis mutandis to Bush.
Meanwhile, when discussing the likely consequences of a nuclear Iran, Feldman suddenly drops into standard realist analysis. An Iranian bomb would create incentives for countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to go nuclear. But when talking about Iran, this very same analysis -- that Iran's program is motivated primarily by fear of Pakistan, Israel, and the United States -- is discounted. But, surely, raison d'etat exists in Teheran just as it exists in Islamabad, Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Washington. After all, Iran's nuclear program predates the Islamic Revolution.
And, again, why all the talk of suicide bombers in the context of nuclear deterrence? The West lacks a significant tradition of literal suicide missions, akin to those of kamikaze pilots or Sri Lankan or Muslim suicide bombers. We do, however, have a quite robust tradition of asking soldiers to undertake near-suicidal missions. Infantrymen are asked to charge fixed defensive positions, to go "over the top" of the trench lines, or to be in the first-wave of amphibious assaults. The 1st Infantry Division's official history of the Omaha Beach landing states that "Every officer and sergeant" in the leading company of the assault "had been killed or wounded" within ten minutes. This isn't exactly the same as suicide bombing, but it's a lot more similar to suicide bombing than suicide bombing is to deliberate, utterly foreseeable, national suicide.
I'll just conclude by emphasizing that a lot of this discussion seems to proceed as if Iran popped into existence six months ago or the Islamic Revolution occurred sometime in 2002. In fact, Iran has been governed by its current regime for over twenty years, and so we have a long historical record of its modes of behavior. Absolutely nothing in that record indicates a regime eager to seriously risk its own survival, a regime especially interested in launching aggressive wars, or even a regime engaged in a large-scale military build-up.
Comments
I shared your father's unease reading the article but never got further than feeling unconvinced and more than a little unsettled.
You have explained why: sometimes, Matthew, you are my brain.
What a weird article.
Feldman notes that the nonproliferation regime, to which the US is committed, "is not and could never be based on some principle of international fairness." Also, he flirts with whether Islamic Iran is more likely to nuke us that the Soviets were, but in the end declines to take any real position on this. Instead, he concludes that the US interest is mainly that permitting Iran to go nuclear would result in some meaningful loss to our geo-political dominance.
Might this startling conclusion--that preventing Iran from going nuclear isn't really about a fear of getting nuked but instead simply to preserve US geo-pol dominance--have some bearing on the question of what means we should use to prevent it from happening? Feldman doesn't seem to think so. Presumably the "we'll get nuked" scenario will be the one used by those who will promote the most aggressive responses to Iran's nuclear program. If the real concern is actually "the US will be slightly less dominant in geo-politics generally," doesn't that radically impact what sort of risks and costs we're willing to incur (as would come from an air attack or invasion of Iran)?
It should also be noted that, not only is the U.S. the only nation that has every used nuclear weapons in war, it is also (to the best of my knowledge) the only nation that has a sizable portion of the body politic that regularly advocates the use of nuclear weapons against other countries. There have been calls to use nukes in every significant armed conflict involving the U.S. since WWII: Korea, Vietnam, and now in the Middle East, to say nothing of the fairly continuous attempts to create an maintain a first strike capability against the USSR and China during the Cold War. The current push for space-based weaponry is a part of this.
So, yeah, "could never be based on some principle of international fairness" is putting it mildly.
What a maddenly irritating article. First, there's this
We urgently need to know, then, what Islam says about the bomb. Of course there is no single answer to this question.
Has Feldman ever taken a position on anything? His book is like that too -- argument, counterargument, third argument, all layered with equivocation. It's like being attacked with a salad.
Or this
Islam contains a rich and multivocal set of traditions and ideas, susceptible to being used for good or ill, for restraint or destruction. This interpretive flexibility — equally characteristic of the other great world religions — does not rob Islam of its distinctiveness.
What the Hell does multivocal mean?
Second, Feldman is a leader in essentializing Muslims. A second Bernard Lewis. Contrary to Feldman, if you want to understand Iranian political policy, don't read Al-Ghazali! Should Iranians analyze Rumsfeld by reading St.Augustine's thoughts on a just war? Doesn anyone seriously think Musharraf launched the Kargil operation after analyzing Maududi?!
Feldman is really a character ripe for parody. See this
Whether force, negotiation or some combination is the right path to take to keep Iran from going nuclear is of course a hugely important question
Hugely important. Supergigantically important. Obesely important. Verbosely important.
Or this:
as we have recently learned in Iraq, it is not enough to think you have a good reason to go to war — you must also have a realistic understanding of the practical and moral costs of things going horribly wrong
Yep, for some, this is a recent discovery. What a great learning opportunity the Iraq war is!!
I wondered wtf when he said that Arab states worry more about a nuclear Iran than a nuclear Israel. I stopped wondering when he then asked, "whether there was something distinctive about Islamic belief or practice that made possession of nuclear technology especially worrisome." I also stopped reading. Sounds like I made the right call.
Good thing there isn't any sort of Western idealogy based upon say 300 Spartans taking a suicide mission against insurmountable odds.
I'm sorry, but pretending there is nothing novel about the advent of Islamist suicide bombing is what the French so pithily call "clever-stupid".
I'm sorry, but pretending there is nothing novel about the advent of Islamist suicide bombing is what the French so pithily call "clever-stupid"
As I understand it, the technique was invented by the Tamil Tigers who are Hindus. If you mean that the novelty is that now Muslims are doing it, say so. Though that seems like what the French might call a pretty "stupid-stupid" point.
I think that Rob's point is that there really isn't something novel about suicide bombing--other than the invention of concentrated explosives. People other than modern Muslims have been willing to engage in suicide missions against foreign invaders for millenia.
Nothing novel? There's something novel in everything, and the attachment of suicide bombing as a primary form of warfare to a religio-nationalist ideology within a postcolonial landscape in newish, sure.
But read Robert Pape - suicide bombing is a tactic for groups in territories occupied by at least nominally democratic powers, and it just happens that Palestine and now Iraq are the primary areas occupied by such powers. Read up on the Tamil Tigers for the non-Islamicist birth of modern suicide bombing. And read Pape.
The move to "there's something novel" basically gives away the game. So long as the major factor in the development of suicide bombing is not some essence of Islam which creates a wholly new military/political tactic, the anti-Muslim line dissolves.
Iran is taking all the steps necessary to use national assets to develop and deploy the entire uranium nuclear fuel cycle, ostensibly for peaceful nuclear power generation. That is not necessarily the same thing as planning to develop and deploy nuclear weapons, although much of the technology is dual use. Regardless, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NNPT), to which Iran is a signatory, appears to allow Iran to proceed without interference.
While it is clear US policy is to prevent Iran from having local access to the entire uranium nuclear fuel cycle, US rhetoric is focused on the prevention of Iran from developing nuclear weaponry. Despite the rhetorical device of focusing attention on the potential Iranian development of nuclear weapons, the apparent desired effect of US policy vis a vis Iranian nuclear capability is to prevent Iran from doing what the NNPT allows it to do.
Most media coverage and much of so-called scholarly discussion of US policy toward Iran fails to make either the distinction noted above or to explain the Iranian view of their nuclear activities in relation to the NNPT.
It's like being attacked with a salad.
brilliant.
So long as the major factor in the development of suicide bombing is not some essence of Islam which creates a wholly new military/political tactic, the anti-Muslim line dissolves.
Right ... it's the rough equivalent of arguing that Christians have some special affinity for snowshoes rooted in Christian theology -- after all, most of the people with snowshoes are Christians. But then you look at it and the technology was actually invented by Eskimos. Meanwhile, by coincidence, most Muslims and Hindus live in warm countries.
It's like being attacked with a salad.
Back about 10 years ago or so, Mr. Feldman served as a fill-in high holiday rabbi at my local congregation. This statement directly sums up what his sermons were like!
Both times I've attended this seminar Feldman's questions have been insightful. Just figured I'd throw something positive in the mix.
"Being attacked with a salad." I haven't seen a diss of an intellectual argument that good in while. I'll have to remember that one. Brilliant!
Ironically, Khomeini was against Muslims developing - and using - nuclear weapons. His basic theory IIRC was that nukes indiscriminately kill children. One of his big moral beefs with the US was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In essence, Khomeinism says developing nuclear weapons is forbidden in Islam. Tis doesn't mean in general he wasn't a douchey hypocrite, but it does suggest that the current Iranian administration is actually moving away from strict religiosity by building nukes and focusing on realpolitick (and playing to economic populism for the home crowd and allowing women to attend soccer matches).
If you mean that the novelty is that now Muslims are doing it, say so.
The novelty is that now Muslims are doing it against us, and they're doing it a lot. It also bears mentioning that there are vastly more Muslims than Tamils, and the reach of Muslim-vs.-infidel violence circumnavigates the globe from New York to the Philippines.
What Feldman is writing about is the necessity of recalculating doctrines of nuclear deterrence in the environment of a conflict between the US and potentially nuclear-armed militant Islamism. Since nuclear deterrence was developed in the context of an ideological clash between liberal capitalist democracies and Communism, it reproduces some features of that conflict -- for example, the assumption that the nuclear powers will be centralized with top-down command structures, which has a non-trivial relationship to the nature of Soviet Communism. It is perfectly obvious that the doctrines of deterrence need to be re-examined in light of the political character of the new nuclear powers and their ideology. This is not to say that deterrence won't work against Iran; I happen to think it will. But simply grafting our old anti-Communist nuclear doctrine onto the conflict with militant Islamism, which is a big fuzzy web of cells rather than a coherent unified command structure, would be negligent and stupid.
More important, the efforts above to wash away the differences between a rationalist totalitarian ideology like Communism and an anti-rationalist eschatological religious ideology like Islamism are strained and unconvincing, especially coming from people who, like me, are horrified by eschatological theocratic trends in American culture, and do associate them with irrational American foreign policy decisions.
It is, for example, silly to claim that there is no difference between soldiers on the battlefield undertaking missions which are almost certainly suicidal, and suicide bombers blowing themselves up in pizza restaurants. One takes place in combat; the other takes place in civilian life. This means that a decision has been taken by the suicide bomber to erase the distinction between military and civilian. That has implications for the way that Islamists might use nuclear weapons. I didn't get through Feldman's article, and it's legitimate to criticize him for failing to come to any conclusions. But it's ridiculous to say that the entire effort is simply an Orientalist essentialist exercise in demonizing the Muslim bogeyman. The nature and aims of Communism were relevant to formulating deterrence doctrine in the '50s, and the nature and aims of Islamism are relevant to formulating deterrence doctrine today.
Is that seriously your argument? Gawd, you're a stupid fuck. I started to respond, but--jeebus--I don't know where to start. I think I'd have reconstruct an argument (or maybe several, and treat them as cases) first.
Look, you could always move to another country, where you'd feel safer. Seriously, think about it. Better for everyone. You'd feel safer, by definition. And gawd knows I'll feel safer once you're out of my country.
You're right, you don't know where to start. Maybe you should think about where to start, and then eventually you might figure out where you should go, too. As it stand, I'll assume you have nothing to say.
Seriously, if you're worried about your safety in this country, you should totally consider getting the fuck out. Trust me, we'll manage without you.
Matt's like a great rock band. Somehow, you feel you're part of the music, even though you're just listening.
I live in Vietnam, you moron. I have no idea what you're attempting to say, except that it is stupid and insulting.
Brooksfoe -- I would say it is an orientalist exercise, and don't call me ridiculous. In analyzing Iranian statcraft, looking exclusively at religious arguments is essentializing.
In the same way, looking exclusively at communist doctrine to understand 1950s nuclear policy would be unenlightening. Reading Das Kapital would tell you little about Kruschev's intentions in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Understanding the Soviet trauma of the Great Patriotic War would tell you a lot.
Bernard Lewis was an idiot for predicting doomsday on August 22. But like the Seventh Day Adventists, the failure fo the world to end has not dissuaded his fellow travelers. (I'm putting you in that category for the present purposes).
Matt, while some of your criticism is cogent, I get the sneaking suspicion that you (and your dad) saw some sinister agenda behind Feldman's article and that you're attacking it by trying to knock down that agenda. But I think if you read the text itself (I'll refer you to your Derrida quote in another post) rather than infusing it with the presumed motives of its author, it was actually a helpful discussion.
For example, you criticize him for examining Islam to see if there's anything unique it has to say about the use of nuclear weapons, on the ground that it's the US that should be examined. While this latter point is undeniable, it's also a different question from the one he wanted to address. Look, isn't it a fact that our political discourse here often treats Islam, and the relationship of Islamic countries to the rest of the world, as a uniquely problematic and dangerous area? And so, isn't it legitimate to ask whether, at least in the area of nuclear weapons, that's true? And, from reading that article, I take Feldman's answer to be "No": that while there are strains of Islam and Islamic thought that might view the use of nuclear weapons in unique ways, in the end there's little reason to think that an Islamic country would not be responsive to the same rewards and deterrents that other countries are. And if so, isn't that an extremely useful conclusion? Just because you long ago reached that conclusion, Matt, doesn't mean it's not helpful to restate it.
Actually, among the first suicide bombers were the Confederates manning a Confederate submarine. This boat was so suicidal that it sank at the dock, killing everyone on board, three times before it ever departed on a combat mission.
Frankly, I cannot even imagine the state of mind that would make you go out in a submarine that had already sank and killed the entire crew three times in a row.
The mission was the typical crude submarine warfare of the times- hold this package of explosives at arms length against the enemy hull and detonate it.
You can probably guess, this did not end well.
These "salads" already did a good job helping start one war.
Ikram, I agree that in analyzing Iranian statecraft, looking EXCLUSIVELY at religion would be essentializing. Worse, it would be poor thinking and bad analysis; no one is motivated exclusively by ideology. Similarly, as you point out, looking exclusively at "Das Kapital" wouldn't have told you much about Khrushchev's attitudes in the '50s.
But looking more broadly at the writings and pronouncements of Soviet Communism as it evolved from 1917 through the late '50s, at the development of national-greatness Communism under Stalin in the '40s, the way Khrushchev explained Stalinist crimes in his '56 speech, the ideological language of the Soviet-Yugoslav and Soviet-Chinese splits, and most importantly the ideological justifications the Soviets used to talk about their presence in Eastern Europe and their support of socialist movements in the Third World, was a part of understanding what the USSR was up to in the world and how it could be expected to use nukes -- just as Russians looking to understand when the US might be willing to use nukes, and how to deter us from doing so, needed to look at American ideology. American analysts in the '60s placed too great an emphasis on a simplistic understanding of expansionist ideological Communism as the driving factor in Soviet behavior, failing to account for nationalism and the material self-interest of the stable Soviet middle class -- and this error was hugely compounded when Americans saw third-world socialist movements as being mainly driven by Communist ideology and directed from Moscow, rather than driven by nationalism and class conflicts and directed locally. But that doesn't mean they should have simply ignored the intellectual history of Communism entirely. Should people seeking to understand when Israel might use nukes ignore the history of Zionism?
That's all. And I think if you read Feldman's article, you'll see that this is pretty much where he's coming from. He makes some errors of style which sound sweeping, simplistic, and essentialist. But I think the thrust of the criticism that's being leveled here is to dissuade people from even looking at Islamic intellectual history to understand the behavior of the Iranian Islamic state or of Islamist jihadist movements; and that seems to me to be very misguided.
I think there are so many levels of (perhaps intentional)conflation at work in the article that its less a salad than a ball of gunk, hurled at a wall. You can call it essentializing, or call it racist, or just call it stupid -- but the implication is that the government of a Arab-Muslim state is intrinsically suicidal, and thus undeterrable. Thus Iran must at all costs be prevented from proliferating.
"$3 billion in annual aid for Israel"
And 2 for Egypt, but who's counting?
"but it would seem to bear mentioning that one and only one nation has ever actually used nukes against an enemy state and that nation was the United States of America."
He does, in fact, mention that.
"it's a lot more similar to suicide bombing than suicide bombing is to deliberate, utterly foreseeable, national suicide."
Suicide bombing has amounted to national suicide (or rather, national self-partial-birth-abortion) for the Palestinians.
"all the evidence you could bring to bear in applying this argument to Ahmadenijad applies mutadis mutandis to Bush."
Bush doesn't talk about green auras. (But he does talk directly to god, so, I see what you're saying).
Okay, I'll shut up now.
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