Five reasons US must avoid war with Iran

From the Christian Science Monitor:

• Iran is chiefly a threat to itself. Its diplomacy has been inept, featuring charm offensives alternating with making gratuitous enemies. It has few friends in its region, beyond tiny, Christian Armenia. Unlike most of its neighbors, it is not Arab, Turkish, or Sunni Muslim, and thus lacks a ready entree into regional affairs. Its support of President Bashir al-Assad’s regime in Syria, while under­standable from a strategic point of view, has won it few friends in the region.

• The priority of those in power in Tehran is their own political survival. When that is at stake, they can become remarkably flexible (or brutal). As a former Iranian official once put it, regarding the Iran-Iraq war: They don’t care how many young people die in the Iraqi swamps. But they are not going to commit political suicide.

• The Islamic Republic wants the US to over-react to its posturing. Provoking us to do and say something stupid is the national sport. Iranian bellicose statements about closing the Strait of Hormuz and the recent officially sanctioned attack on the British Embassy are signs of weakness, not strength. America and its allies should not swallow the bait. The best response to Iranian bravado and claims of this or that achievement is a collective yawn.

• The Iranians may or may not be working toward a nuclear weapon. We should make a cold calculation, however, about just what such a weapon will do for them. It certainly does not solve their economic problems, nor does it silence opposition protesters in Tehran or ethnic separatists in Baluchestan, Kordestan, or elsewhere. Nor does a nuclear weapon help the Islamic Republic counter what it claims is the main threat to its survival: a covert war of “soft overthrow” waged by its traditional enemies in the West.

• America should not paint itself into a rhetorical corner. American presidents have said that a nuclear-armed Iran is “unacceptable”. So, presumably, is a nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, or North Korea. The Berlin wall was also unacceptable. In all these cases, however, Americans remained smart and did not become captive to their own rhetoric.