June 15, 2008
"Hit us and we shall hit you ten times harder!" This is how General Muhammad-Ali Jaafari, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) has responded to speculation about a possible attack by the United States and/or Israel on Iran's nuclear installations.
Jaafari replaced General Yahya Safavi last year after the latter made a speech in which he implicitly warned the mullahs that Iran's military was not ready for war against far more powerful enemies.
Those familiar with Iranian military capabilities know that it is Safavi's sober assessment, and not Jaafari's bluster, that reflects the true situation.
The problem is that Jaafari can make his claim because he, and his political masters in Tehran, are convinced there would be no military action against their regime.
In 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the then newly-minted President of the Islamic Republic and darling of the IRGC, unveiled a strategy based on the assumption that once George W. Bush is out of the White House, the United States would bite the bullet and accept a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic as "regional superpower" in the Middle East.
Two events convinced Ahmadinejad that his strategy was correct:
n The first came in May 2006 when the Bush administration, then at the nadir of its unpopularity because of the situation in Iraq, joined the line of supplicant Europeans begging Tehran to negotiate a deal.
That unexpected shift in Washington's policy produced the opposite effect.
Far from persuading Ahamdinejad that this was a good time to defuse the situation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's attempt at nuance and multilateral diplomacy convinced Tehran that the Americans had blinked.
n The second event that confirmed Ahmadinejad's belief that "America cannot do a damn thing" came with last year's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Using a language of obfuscation, the NIE claimed that Tehran had abandoned key aspect of its nuclear programm in 2003. The NIE undermined the whole case brought by the International Atomic Energy Agency against the Islamic Republic.
