Administration Makes A Smart Move--At Last.

The imposition of new economic sanctions against the Iranian Ministry of Defense as well as the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Aerospace Industries Organisation is a well-timed, intelligent, and major foreign policy move. In and of itself, the new sanction package shows the analysis of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole misses the point.

Professor Cole writes in today's Salon.com that the current administration's foreign policy is in chaos. See, http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/24/kurds/index.html?source=newsletter. The professor contends that US policy in the Mideast and Northwest Asia has become a morass of ad hoc gimmicks since the start of our Adventures in Regime Change.

The Geek takes a different perspective. The Geek maintains that six years ago with both the declaration of Global War On Terrorism and the invasions first of Afghanistan and then Iraq, US policy lacked both realistic purpose and achievable goals. Forced in recent months to accept the dictates of reality by events in the two regions, US policy has been changing from its initial formless mass into something that begins to approximate a purpose and goal.

The inchoate Global War On Terrorism is being replaced (at long last!) by a focus on achieving a measure of stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan while reducing the potential potentency and appeal of Islamism/Jihadism. There seems to have been a small, but critical, shift in the worldview within the current administration.

"What's that?" You ask.

While defensive efforts conducted by FBI, CIA ,and other organs focus on detecting and interdicting terrorist operations aimed at the US at home and US personnel or facilities overseas, offensive American operations have been more narrowly focused on the challenges of bringing stability to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and defanging Islamist supporting states such as Iran and Syria.

That's not much. But it is a beginning. An important beginning.

Iran is and will continue to be a major troublemaker. The mullahocracy likes ever so much to play the role of, "Let's you and him fight!" The technical term for this sort of foreign policy gambit is proxy war.

The idea is to cause endless difficulty for your actual adversary at little or no risk to yourself. The old Soviet Union played the game. They played it long and almost well in southern and eastern Africa during the Seventies.

The US has played the proxy war game too. We played it long and reasonably well during the Reagan Administration in Afghanistan. Our game fell apart only when we handed operational responsibility over to the Pakistani regime of General al-Huq. The Paks had their own proxies in mind. (Can we say, "Taliban?")

The Iranians and Syrians have been playing proxy war for decades now. These national actors prefer to use stateless groups as their pawns. But, whether a lesser state or a non-state agent, proxy war has numerous benefits for the sponsor and very few risks.

Using the Revolutionary Guard Corps foreign operating division, the al-Quds Force, as agent, the mullahocracy has been able to provide support, training, intelligence, and other services to The Party of God in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, among others. Closer to home and more recent in time, the same Iranian agency has provided the same services to anti-US, anti-regime groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is true that the Iranian footprint has often been light on the ground, but one does not need to be an Australian aboriginal tracker to see it.

(To those ideologues who are in a state of denial about the Iranian proxy war efforts, the Geek would like to point out that the whole purpose of proxy war is to lessen risk through plausible deniability. Just because American covert and clandestine efforts are often as well concealed as a hippopotamus in a phone booth is no reason to think that all countries are equally as inept at keeping secrets.)

While maintaining proxy operations the mullahs in Tehran have been trying to cast the largest possible shadow on the world stage. By so doing they not only divert internal attention from internal problems, they also gain influence with both Islamist entities and potentially threatened states. It is important to remember that the mullahocracy has the goal of a global caliphate--a global Shiite caliphate.

The current torrent of over-the-edge rhetoric flowing from both Tehran and Washington over Iranian nuclear ambitions is a very good way of enlarging the Iranian shadow. It is also riskier than low level proxy war.

In large measure due to Russian protection (extended for reasons to be further laid forth in a future post) as well as Chinese (see previous parenthetical expression) the mullahs have been able to follow their game plan without real pain and with real (internal political) benefit. At the same time the mullahocracy has enjoyed a collateral benefit.

The Geek hears you muttering, "Don't keep me waiting."

As a spin-off of the Iranian intransigence over matters nuclear, the neocon ninnies of the current administration have been eager to introduce unnecessary complications into American foreign policy generally. Among these are two of particular noteworthiness.

The present US-Russian standoff over the basing of a limited anti-missile system in Eastern Europe is one.

The other is the Turkey-PKK affair. As mentioned in a post yesterday, the US has been smiling on one arm of the Kurdish insurgency--the one directed against Iran--while frowning mightily on the other--the one directed against Turkey. As a result, the US has not been able or, (to err on the side of probable accuracy) willing to effectively assist in the reduction of the PKK threat with the result that Ankara is ready, willing, and able to mount destabilizing incursions into Iraq.
The prime beneficiary of these collaterals is, unsurprisingly, Iran.

The Iranian shadow must be reduced. It must be reduced so that the US can afford to pull back from the unnecessary complications. It must be reduced so that modulated diplomatic discourse might prove effective in gaining the desired end of preventing Tehran from acquiring atomic weapons in either the near- or mid-term.

It is equally necessary that Tehran feel real, even exquisite, pain to slow or stop its proxy war operations. The UN imposed sanctions have hurt. But, not enough.

The new sanctions, if imposed on foreign companies or financial institutions or governments who do business with the targeted entities as well as in the US, will add pain, perhaps intolerable amounts.

Think of it as the foreign policy equivalent of what police call a "compliance hold." The goal is to coerce compliance with dictated behavior by imposing increasing amounts of physical discomfort.

These sanctions may not prove to be sufficiently intense to force a modification on the mullah's actions and policies. They may be sufficiently unpleasant in application to force a limited change for a limited time. They may not work at all.

Those are questions that can only be answered in the next few weeks and months. The sanctions are nonetheless a strong indication that the US has today what it did not have six years ago--an actual policy that is more realistic than not as well as one more likely to achieve positive results than not.

If nothing else, these long overdue new sanctions delay the date of our next Adventure in Regime Change. For that, the Geek is grateful. So should all of us be.