December 14, 2005
Leave the Nukes, Take Out the Mullahs
By Herbert E. Meyer
To think clearly about how best to remove the looming threat of
a nuclear-armed Iran, just keep in mind the National Rifle Association’s
much maligned – but perfectly sensible – old slogan:
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
It’s
the same with nuclear weapons. The threat isn’t from the
warhead, but from the individual who controls it. For example,
right now several countries whose governments aren’t always
friendly to the US – China, Russia, France – each
have enough nuclear warheads, and the means to deliver them, to
obliterate our country. But we don’t lose one minute’s
sleep over this prospect because, although the leaders of these
countries are surly, petulant, sometimes vicious and often anti-American
– they are also sane. There isn’t the slightest chance
that any of these leaders actually will press the nuclear button
and launch Armageddon.
The president
of Iran, on the other hand, is nuts. (The tip-off came a while
back when, as mayor of Teheran, Ahmadi-Neshad Amadinejad ordered
separate elevators for men and women. His insanity became more
obvious – and more serious – when he demanded last
month that Israel be “wiped off the map,” and then
“clarified” this call to genocide by insisting that
the Holocaust never happened, and adding that he had only meant
to suggest that Israel be re-located somewhere in Western Europe.)
Moreover, it’s clear that at least several of the mullahs
who rigged the election that brought Amadinejad to power earlier
this year are also dangerous fanatics. Allowing Amadinejad and
these mullahs to get their hands on nuclear weapons is a risk
the civilized world simply cannot take. It would be like allowing
a bunch of escaped lunatics to roam the halls of your childrens’
school, armed with rifles, in hopes that maybe they really aren’t
as crazy as they seem to be and won’t, after all, start
firing into the cafeteria.
With this
weekend’s report
in The Times of London that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon has ordered his country’s armed forces to be ready
by the end of March for a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear
facilities, the technical complexities of such a strike are starting
to get attention. James Lewis’ recent analysis
in The American Thinker provides a superb overview of
just how difficult such a strike would be to execute.
A
Better Option
But if the
problem is the individual rather than the weapon, why not expand
our thinking a bit? More precisely, why not consider whether it
might make more sense to defuse the Iranian threat by leaving
the nukes, but removing Amadinejad and the mullahs from power?
In other words, perhaps the US – and even some of our European
so-called allies – could get cracking and start organizing,
or at least supporting, a coup d’etat or a revolution.
Despite what
you may have read in spy novels or seen at the movies, pulling
off a coup or a revolution is a very hard, very risky
thing to do. (A coup d’etat means the government
is overthrown from within, for instance by a group of military
officers or a group of politicians who have the military’s
support. In a revolution, the government is overthrown from the
outside, by the people, as happened recently in Georgia and Ukraine.)
All sorts of things go wrong: the coup leaders lose their
nerve, or the government uncovers their plot before it’s
launched, or the revolution ends in disaster when the government
orders the military to fire into the crowds and hundreds or even
thousands are killed in the streets.
On the other
hand, sometimes everything goes right and a coup d’etat
brings to power a new leader who, however imperfect, is better
than the one he replaced. For example, Pakistan’s Pervez
Musharraf, who seized power in October 1999, is a vast improvement
over the man he pushed aside, Mohhamed Fafiq Tarar. Moreover,
in just the last few years the percentage of revolutions that
succeed has started to rise. (To learn why, read A
Revolutionary Change.) Georgia and Ukraine are the two
best-known examples, and the turmoil now in the streets of Lebanon
looks very much like a revolution; it may well succeed in breaking
that country free of Syria’s grip.
Without access
to secret intelligence from inside the government in Teheran –
for the sake of this discussion, let’s just assume the CIA
has some – we cannot really judge how good may be the prospects
for a coup. As a general rule, in all dictatorships there
are factions, and factions within factions, and the internal struggle
for power among the top three dozen leaders never stops. And the
people who rise to power in dictatorships don’t play nicely
in the sandbox; they tend to kill each other from time to time.
If the jockeying for power inside the Teheran government right
now isn’t vicious, that would be unusual. So it’s
reasonable to assume that a coup d’etat that would
replace Amadinejad and some of the mullahs with people who are
less dangerous is, at least, possible.
Here
Comes the Revolution
What is clear
is that the prospects for a genuine people’s revolution
in Iran are excellent. Indeed, if ever there was a country primed
for revolution, this is it. As Michael Ledeen has reported in
a brilliant series of essays for National Review Online,
Iran today is in a classic pre-revolutionary state. Iran’s
population is Muslim, but not Arab, and its people are weary of
the fundamentalist regime that overthrew the Shah in 1979 and
has held power ever since by turning that country into the kind
of police state the Shah himself never came close to building.
Despite its oil revenues, Iran’s economy is a mess. And
the government’s recent responses to several devastating
earthquakes have been inept.
Today, by
every credible measure the Iranian population hates its government.
And within the population, nowhere is this hatred of the government
greater than among the young people – and fully 70 percent
of Iran’s population is under the age of 30. These young
people have been risking their lives by demonstrating against
the regime – week, after week, after week – for at
least two years. Moreover, the kids never miss an opportunity
to make clear their desire for friendly relations with –
of all countries—the United States.
Given the
extreme nature of the Iranian nuclear threat – and given
the widespread reluctance among so many of our allies to use military
force, even to save their own lives – working together to
organize or at least support a coup or a revolution in
Iran may be the one thing everyone can agree is worth doing. The
very nature of this sort of endeavor – making contact with
top-echelon insiders, providing student and worker groups with
communications equipment, the wherewithal to produce posters,
newspapers and the like, and of course enough money to keep the
pot boiling – means that it’s done in secret, by intelligence
services. This means our nervous allies – some of whom have
first-rate intelligence services – can help quietly, without
paying the political price of being seen to be working with the
Americans and, from their viewpoint even worse, with the Israelis.
…Or
Maybe a Coup
The obviously-leaked
report that Ariel Sharon has given orders for the Israeli military
to prepare for a strike on Iran will give a huge push forward
to the idea of a coup or a revolution. For one thing,
it will concentrate minds in Teheran itself. That country’s
military leaders – unlike its political leaders –
aren’t nuts. The last thing they want is an Israeli, or
an Israeli-American, air strike on their weapons plants. If some
of the top military people weren’t thinking of a coup
before word of Sharon’s orders was leaked, they are now.
Moreover, among Iran’s political leaders are at least a
few men who aren’t crazy. They know that a military strike
– even if it fails to completely destroy Iran’s nuclear
plants – will be a disaster for that country. And at least
a few of them will now be pondering the thought that the Israelis
have shown a real talent for “targeted assassinations”
– that if the Mossad doesn’t know today where they
live and what cars they drive, it soon will. (If you were an Iranian
politician, how willing would you be right now to sit next to
Amadinejad at some outdoor ceremony – or accept his offer
of a lift back to the office?)
Of course,
there’s no way to predict whether a coup or a revolution
in Iran would bring to power leaders who would dismantle that
country’s nuclear capabilities. It may well be that whatever
government comes to power will continue the present course and
– more likely sooner rather than later – turn Iran
into a nuclear power. That will be worrisome, to say the least
– but not nearly as terrifyingly dangerous as having these
weapons in the hands of crazy people.
As events
in Iran unfold during the coming weeks, never forget the first
rule of projecting the future of dictatorships: keep your eye
on the guys with the guns. At the end of the day, it’s the
military leaders – not the politicians – who decide
what happens. If the military throws its support to the leader
of a prospective coup, that coup usually succeeds.
And if a revolution starts to build and the military leaders refuse
the dictator’s orders to fire into the crowd, that revolution
usually succeeds. Given the alternative of a massive attack by
Israel, with or without help from the US Air Force, a coup
or a revolution may not strike at least a few of Iran’s
political and military leaders as such a bad thing.
Which is
why that leaked story in The Times of London is so very
interesting. It may mean the ball has already started to roll….
Herbert
E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant
to the Director of Central Intelligence, and Vice Chairman of
the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Herbert E. Meyer
writes for The
American Thinker.
