Two men were guests of the November 21, 1999 episode of Firing Line, "The Conservative Search for a Foreign Policy." The host of the program respectively introduced one accredited as "sovereign," a strategist, diplomat and emissary beginning his third decade of retirement from public service; and a scholastic debutant, a "looming young presence in the coming years." Nine years before that, Firing Line's host, William F. Buckley Jr., explained the reason for worldwide solidarity against Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait by way of adage: "When a nation becomes nuclear, one calls it Sir."
The contemporary debate over a belligerent's atomic incipience returns the 1999 pair of invitees to front and center. In time for Thanksgiving last year, the first man, Henry Kissinger, regarded the subject country of Iran as determined for the bomb; and though he innately prescribed negotiations, they would be, under his direction, to impose on Iran a realization that "makes imperialist policies unattractive" or "if matters are pushed too far, America might yet strike." The second man, Fareed Zakaria, gave through his publisher a depreciation of any threats Iran has made or may make against American interests or allies, and doubts of the country's evident pursuit of nuclear technologies that are offensive. In the October 29, 2007 issue of Newsweek Zakaria will have none of it, not even Kissinger's preventatives, his piece titled "Hysteria over Iran."
President Bush, he begins, was caught mumbling lines reserved for those whom Zakaria thinks to be lunatics. Granted, Norman Podhoretz sets himself up when he prefaces with "I call this new war World War IV," but his message — that Iranian leadership, the Khomeinist patrimony and current government, is messianic, expansionist and eschatological all at once — can be traced to Tehran on most days of the week. Do you want to hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, executive appointee, dismiss Israel as a non-entity and glibly recite Holocaust denial in the same sentence as his own version of shipping Jews to Madagascar? Or presage, like those before him, a world without the United States? Why are Iran's agents, weapons and cohorts in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria — its ambassadors in Beijing, Moscow and Caracas?
But that isn't "reality," writes Zakaria, and states that Iran is either benign or impotent because its comparison of economic and military power with the United States can only be expressed in decimal fractions. Immediate thought: Zakaria has to rest impregnable from the word "asymmetrical." That Iran "has not invaded a country since the late 18th century" comes not from restraint but comprehension of the world since the last decade of the Cold War. Two of the last dictatorships to try annexation, Argentina with the Falklands and Iraq with Kuwait, were expelled and humiliated within six months. Tehran has since 1979 worked insidiously, though obviously to anyone willing to pay attention, its proxies killing Americans and allies in numbers large (the 1983 Beirut bombing) and steady (Iranian-made roadside bombs in Iraq today).
Where on the scale does measuring danger by contrasting national resources with geopolitical significance place, say, North Korea? Had Zakaria looked, he would have found that one can in fact be a destitute menace. Instead, he chooses to characterize Pyongyang's nuclear and inhumane blackmail — threatening to efface Seoul and Tokyo, hinting at letting millions of people in North Korea starve — not as an example of disruptive potential for Tehran but as divergent "international relief efforts." Even if Ahmadinejad's death-cult language is forever as subjunctive as the loony grandiloquence from Kim Jong Il's office, why is it OK to have another despot winning yearly concessions with its tantrums? And yet, since Tehran isn't in Pyongyang's straits, why should we assume that it will be content to simply survive through harassment?
Zakaria is somewhat accurate in labeling Western knowledge of Iran as "a black hole to us — just as Iraq had become in 2003." He blames this on obtuseness, whereas Ba'athist Iraq was and Iran is a totalitarian state. Allowing sporadic democratic resistance and the presence of a public transportation union reminiscent of Poland's Solidarity, Tehran is not as bloodily efficient as Baghdad was. But there is enough smuggled footage of the repression and execution of dissidents, homosexuals and women who defy Iran's theocratic chauvinism to wonder if when Zakaria refers to a "vibrant civil society" he is finally taking Ahmadinejad at his word.
Kissinger is best known for the equivocation of detente, and still he observed a year ago that "So long as Iran views itself as a crusade rather than a nation, a common interest will not emerge from negotiations." Zakaria scoffs at Bernard Lewis' exegesis of the radical Shiite vision of world's end. All is not unanimous among those who aren't democratists. Maybe not on William F. Buckley's old stage, but can these two men be sat across from one another once more?