Kamangir (Archer)

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Why War with Iran Won’t Solve Anything

Kamangir | February 5, 2007 | Category Iran

Two good pieces are published in Open Democracy today. First, Reza Aslan talks about how to persuade the Iranian regime to respond to the national community’s calls in regards with the nuclear crisis. Second, Nasrin Alavi shows how the war would be exactly what Ahmadinejad needs. I strongly suggest reading this piece. She shows how regime’s undemocratic tools, Basij and alike, were developed during, and justified by, the war with Iraq.

A military confrontation with Iran will serve only to revive the fortunes of the country’s infamous president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and fortify the Islamic Republic’s last, desperate grab for a rebirth. In particular, the United States’ military option will have no consequence but to bolster a regime and a leadership it professes most bitterly to oppose. A better, peaceful way forward is urgently needed.

Reader's Comments

Vince P | February 5th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
So what you’re saying is Peace in our Time?
kamangir | February 5th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Vince P,
Having said that war will not solve anything, I have no idea what the solution might be.
Vince P | February 5th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Kamangir: Neither do I. It’s frustrating.
kamangir | February 5th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Vince P,
Yeah…
smileme | February 5th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
There is a concept in chess called as “mandatory move”. Some times in life you must choose between defeat and survival. There is no option for winning nor is there an option for solving anything. In this situation you can only prevent a defeat. The US is really going to lose the battle now and the most important reason for their defeat is IR. So, IR is forcing them to do it.
kamangir | February 6th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Smileme,
You seem very confident. Why?
frieda | February 6th, 2007 at 2:09 am
If America wanted to attack Iran, they sure would not have talked about it for the last 2 years! Where is the element of surprise?? Based on President Bush’s interview with WSJ last week, I don’t even believe that the WAR is in the cards at all. “Soviet strategy” is more likely, they will try to chock Iran financially and let it crumble on its own.
kamangir | February 6th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Freida,
Are you sure? They did a similar thing with Iraq.
Vince P | February 6th, 2007 at 3:43 am
Frieda: It’s impossible for the US to do a surprise attack or invasion *. After all, we’re way on the other side of the planet. Anyone who is going to be attacked will be aware of it becasue we have to position the weapons of war to where they are.

* Of course if we’re just trying to blow up one specific place and could do it with a missle then yes that’s a surprise. I’m talking about more siginificant types of military action
Matthew | February 6th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Frieda,

Also, to turn the standoff with Iran into a poker game, the IR would have to have no backers. When we choked out the Soviets, western Europe helped us. Now we have France, Russia and others sending the IR cash and crumbs when needed.
smileme | February 6th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Kamangir,

I just remembered an old joke about our Persian proverb which says “threating with a big rock is just a bluff”

The joke says, a man threatens a person that he is going to hit him with a big rock and the other person says “you are kidding huh? threating with a big rock is just a bluff!” and the man hits him with the rock :D

That would be really funny if this happens :)
Frieda | February 6th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Mattew,
You are correct regarding Europe…Even Saddam could have crumbled on his own if it was not for French, Russians, and Germany business help keeping his regime alive for 10 years.

But things are a little different now. Germanâ€™s Merkel has come along way cooperating with US in many levels. She is the Iron Lady of Europe now (keep in mind, Blain is almost gone and Chirac is history). Europe, at least, have learned their lessons, they now know, that war has actually made their business climate worse. So they are willing to go along with US to pressure Iran to prevent another war. War with Iran is more harmful to Europe (Iranâ€™s #1 business partner) than to US. Now, Russia is another animalâ€¦I donâ€™t know about Putin , he is getting closer to end of his term, God know how he would play this game. We shall see.
kamangir | February 7th, 2007 at 12:57 am
smileme,
Funny?
smileme | February 7th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Of course I don’t enjoy if anything happens to my family and friends… nor my people, nor even an American soldier. So that doesn’t really look funny to me.

I am a software architect and my job is to make sure that a program doesn’t make any error in the worst possible situations. To do this, I have to think of the most stupid mistakes that a user might do in suing my program. I keep asking my team members to duoble check everything and make sure that they are pessimist enough about the users. Our plans are always based on Murphy’s Law:

things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance

I keep repeating this Law for the team members to make sure that the outcome is perfect. So, personally I don’t like an optimist programmer who says, I will not verify value of a telephone field because I am sure that users understand to enter only digits in a telephone field! it is clear that they can simply enter alphabet and believe me they do ;)

Iranian people are making similar mistakes. They were optimistic about the revolution, they were optimistic about Rafsanjani, Khatami, and then Ahmadinejad. They keep getting disastrous results every time but they repeat their mistakes again and again just because of their optimistic hope about the future. Look at the people, they are really optimistic about the war. They show fingers to the outside world assuming that nobody dares to do anything about their arrogance.

Now tell me, is there any place left for making more of such disastrous historical mistakes? besides, what do you think is better? planning for everything from negative point of view? or being a lazy and stupid optimist?

In the worse situations, if you plan for a disaster and it doesn’t happen, you won’t lose anything but if you don’t plan for it and one day the bad thing happens, it is an unforgettable mistake!

In our team we had an arrogant programmer who had a loooong list of bugs in his codes. The company finally decided to fire him because he was not even ready to follow the rules in programming. I remember he was still cursing the company when he was collecting his stuff to leave the company forever. At this moment, everyone started laughing at him. May be because he was a loser who wanted to still act as a proud person. That’s the funny part of this story. Of course I believe that it is equally sad!