Wake Up

I claim no expertise in augury nor haruspicy, nor the more modest art of taking the correct measure of the political landscape. Still I wonder how anyone can doubt that war with Iran is a matter of when - not if. I certainly don't welcome it, and would be glad to hear a plausible scenario in which such is averted - but to convince me, the following phainomena will have to be accounted for.

In 2003, President Bush declared : "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

President Ahmadinejad has just said: ""The [Iranian] government will not back down one iota on defending people's rights" - namely, continuing with 'low-level' uranium enrichment.

Picture the scene: 150,000-odd US troops, 10,000-odd British troops (and sundry others), in Iraq,  with a hostile, newly nuclear theocracy right next door. Forget about whether the invasion/occupation of Iraq was a defensible and wise course originally. Especially - though not only - if the policy will be to "stay the course," how can a nuclear-armed Iran (as currently ruled) not be a direct, existential threat to the entire enterprise?

The UNSC debacle over Iraq ought to disabuse anyone of the notion that "Diplomacy" has much hope, since, then as now, the main parties required to speak univocally have, in actual fact, wildly divergent interests. Here I feel a small measure of sympathy for Iranian theocrats, who protest that they are suffering "colonial" treatment. When Clausewitz famously declared that (paraphrasing)  war continues policy according to other means, some wit might have affirmed the truth of the converse: diplomatic policy is war by other means. For "the West" to get its way in this situation, "diplomacy" can only be tantamount to a kind of aggressive intimidation, sweetened with various bribes.  The threat of force always lurks in the background - a sort of malign potentia. Thus, to cajole the Iranian government into abandoning its nuclear ambitions can hardly but be an act of de facto domination, that is, overlordship. They know it - and hence they resist it.  To a certain mentality, this shows the moral bankruptcy of "our side"; to me that judgement bespeaks the wrongheadedness of the mentality, which cannot or will not see the "Hobbesian" nature of the world scene, entailing hard choices.

Occasional rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding,  the so-called International Community is not a fellowship of free and equal states, neither morally, nor in terms of power and strength; behind the facade of order roils a barely containable anarchy. Alas, "might makes Right" - emphatically not in the sense that naked, destructive force is its own justification, but rather that "Right" is ineffectual without the capacity to coerce compliance.

The clearest minds have seen that war is ineradicable without a true world government - which would also likely mean global despotism. Nice choice, huh? - perennial war-making or the "peace" of a cosmopolitan pactum subjectionis. (Perhaps in a future post I'll consider the notion of "Christendom," as well as it modern-secular descendant, "neo-Liberalism," as candidates for world conversion and pacification).

Update: Read Niall Ferguson in the Telegraph.