Undeterred

Many pundits on the Left have recently begun endorsing the idea of "deterrence" as a way of avoiding direct conflict with the increasingly militant theocracy of Iran. They cite the success of deterrence and economic warfare against the Soviet Union -- which tactic, you'll remember, they adamantly opposed during the Cold War, and for which they still refuse to give credit to Reagan. Charles Krauthammer refutes this bit of quasi-intellectual nonsense in NRO:

Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombing is routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation from the 1983 Marine-barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012. Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for which the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet Communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.

It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife, and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.

Sir John Keegan, who regrettably passed away earlier this month, was one of the most brilliant military historians who ever lived. In his comprehensive 1993 book A History of Warfare, Keegan made the argument that Carl von Clausewitz had done the West a disservice with his famous volume On War, in that he confined his examples of casus belli to purely economic (and to a lesser extent political) motivations. Keegan wrote that when one steps outside of classical Western conflict, whether Alexander or Hitler, one finds that culture plays a much larger role as the root cause of war, and that economic concerns are often secondary or even tertiary in nature, important only in that they allow continuance of the war. With Napoleon, power and territory were the goals; militant Islam acknowledges those things only as means to a philosophical end.

Thus Krauthammer's analysis of Iran: their goals are more existential than material in nature, and that makes them unpredictable from our cultural point of view. Employing Cold War-style deterrence against Iran would be like sending a priest to a whorehouse -- wherein he'd be doubly useless.

This sort of mistake is very common among the Left. They like to take previous successes, even ones they originally opposed, and attempt to overlay them onto current events. That attitude derives entirely from one source: a blatant disregard and even distaste for the study of history. Simply reading a book and saying "Aha! That worked for [insert historical figure], so it'll work for us too!" is not studying history; it's obtuseness of the most dangerous sort.

There is only one way to control Iran, and that is direct application of force. You cannot discourage someone who refuses to be discouraged, you can only make it physically impossible for them achieve their goals. If the Soviets were bullies, the Iranian theocrats are psychopaths, and we must adjust our foreign policy accordingly.