Fareed Zakaria on the Iranian Threat

What's the old Buckley definition of a conservative? Someone who stands athwart history and yells, "Stop!" The Newsweek editor hauls out a few helpful but insufficient facts:

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

I had the same cosmological inquiry when I read the transcript of Mohammed ElBaradei's speech to the 51st Regular Session of International Atomic Energy Agency's General Conference. The IAEA director listed four points about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons:

First, the Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has continued to provide the access and reporting needed to enable Agency verification in this regard.

Second, Iran has provided the Agency with additional information and access needed to resolve a number of long outstanding issues, such as the scope and nature of past plutonium experiments.

Third, contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, calling on Iran to take certain confidence building measures, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities, and is continuing with its construction of the heavy water reactor at Arak. This is regrettable.

Fourth, while the Agency so far has been unable to verify certain important aspects relevant to the scope and nature of Iran´s nuclear programme, Iran and the Secretariat agreed last month on a work plan for resolving all outstanding verification issues. These verification issues are at the core of the lack of confidence about the nature of Iran´s programme, and are what prompted actions by the Security Council. Iran´s agreement on such a work plan, with a defined timeline, is therefore an important step in the right direction. Naturally, Iran´s active cooperation and transparency is the key to full and timely implementation of the work plan. If the Agency were able to provide credible assurance about the peaceful nature of Iran´s past and current nuclear programme, this would go a long way towards building confidence about Iran´s nuclear programme, and could create the conditions for a comprehensive and durable solution.

In other words, the mullahs are baiting a global regulatory body for more time to amass the very arsenal they say they don't want. Points 1, 2 and 4 are meaningless without 3, don't you think?

Zakaria's mention of North Korea as the real totalitarian menace that should keep Mssrs. Giuliani and Podhoretz awake at night is, to me, only a further validation of their fears.

North Korea is a beggared failed state. It manufactures no substantial good worthy of export, save for military materiel. It enslaves and brainwashes its population under the maxims of a messianic death cult moored to a decades-old revolution. It envisions itself as the perennial victim of foreign aggression and imperialism and assumes no responsibility for the sorry lot of its own people. It possess no real domestic industrial or commercial base. Whatever semblance of an intellectual class it may have once had, it has murdered or hounded into non-existence. It has, by its own transparent behavior, earned almost the entire world's suspicion and scorn. It sees a nuclear arsenal as the only means of self-preservation because it can use the threat of unleashing that arsenal to blackmail thriving nations into helping it improve its economy.

Does any of this sound at all familiar?

I'm with Zakaria on keeping perspective about the mad mullahs. Ayatollah Khameini is not Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, and to compare him to them diminishes some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. (Neoconservatives would do well to remember one Straussian injunction — the one against moral equivalence.) However, the Islamic Republic can and should be examined on its own terms and with due attention to how it operates in war. One can learn a lot about a regime by how it chooses to defend itself. A regime that creates "human waves" of sacrificial soldiers and a large army of suicidal children, all promised divine reward for their hollowed-out and dismembered cadavers, is not that can be called anything other than totalitarian. Three to eight years before such a regime has a nuke? OK, then. What can we do to ensure it never has it?

Zakaria errs, too, in saying that Iran has not "invaded a country since the late 18th century." What the hell is it doing in Iraq right now?