Cold War II
What Islamist Iran has in common with the Soviet Union.

BY DAVID HAZONY
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

AZURE -- A new Cold War is upon us. Though there is no Soviet Union today,
the enemies of Western democracy, supported by a conglomerate of Islamic
states, terror groups and insurgents, have begun to work together with a
unity of purpose reminiscent of the Soviet menace: not only in funding,
training and arming those who seek democracy's demise; not only in mounting
attacks against Israel, America and their allies around the world; not only
in seeking technological advances that will enable them to threaten the life
of every Western citizen; but also in advancing a clear vision of a
permanent, intractable and ultimately victorious struggle against the
West -- an idea they convey articulately, consistently and with brutal
efficiency.

It is this conceptual strategic clarity that gives the West's enemies a leg
up, even if they are far inferior in number, wealth, and weaponry. From
Tehran to Tyre, from Chechnya to the Philippines, from southern Iraq to the
Afghan mountains to the madrassas of London and Paris and Cairo, these
forces are unified in their aim to defeat the West, its way of life, its
political forms and its cause of freedom. And every day, because of this
clarity, their power and resources grow, as they attract allies outside the
Islamic world: In Venezuela, in South Africa, in North Korea.

At the center of all this, of course, is Iran. A once-friendly state has
embarked on an unflinching campaign, at considerable cost to its own
economy, to attain the status of a global power: through the massive
infusion of money, matériel, training and personnel to the anti-Western
forces in Lebanon (Hezbollah), the Palestinian Authority (Hamas and Islamic
Jihad), and the Sunni and Shi'ite insurgencies of Iraq; through its
relentless pursuit of nuclear arms, long-range missiles and a space program;
through its outsized armed forces and huge stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons; through its diplomatic initiatives around the world; and
through its ideological battle against democracy, Zionism and the memory of
the Holocaust. For the forces of Islamic extremism and political jihad, Iran
has become the cutting edge of clarity.

The West, on the other hand, enjoys no such clarity. In America, Iraq has
become the overriding concern, widely seen as a Vietnam-style "quagmire"
claiming thousands of American lives with no clear way either to win or to
lose. (As the bells of the 2006 congressional elections continue tolling in
American ears, it is hard to hear the muezzins of the Middle East calling
upon the faithful to capitalize on Western malaise.) Europeans continue to
seek "diplomatic solutions" even as they contend with powerful and
well-funded Islamists in their midst and their friends among the media and
intellectual elites--forces that stir public opinion not against Iran and
Syria, who seek their destruction, but against their natural allies, America
and Israel.

Throughout the West we now hear increasingly that a nuclear Iran is
something one has to "learn to live with," that Iraq needs an "exit
strategy," and that the real key to peace lies not in victory but in
brokering agreements between Israel and the Palestinians and "engaging"
Syria and Iran.

[Hilarious! That's naïve Pelosiism --DSH]

The Israelis, too, suffer from a lack of clarity: By separating the
Palestinian question from the struggle with Hezbollah and Iran, and by
shifting the debate back to territorial concession and prisoner exchange,
Israelis incentivize aggression and terror, ignore the role Hamas plays in
the broader conflict, and send conciliatory signals to the Syrians.

Like the Americans with Iraq, Israelis have allowed themselves to lose sight
of who their enemies are, how determined they are, and what will be required
to defeat them.

The greatest dangers to the West and Israel, therefore, lie not in armaments
or battle plans, but in our thinking.

Like World War II and the Cold War, this conflict cannot be won without
first achieving clarity of purpose.

Even the most urgently needed actions, such as stopping the Iranian nuclear
effort, require leaders who understand the nature of the threat and have
sufficient public support to enable them to act decisively. To achieve
this, however, requires a major, immediate investment in the realm of
ideas -- a battle for understanding that must be won before the battle for
freedom can be effectively engaged.

Israel, in particular, has a pivotal role to play. As the frontline state in
the conflict, and the lightning rod of Islamist aggression, it is to Israel
that the world looks to see how it will respond. From its birth, Israel has
served as a model to the West: in deepening its democratic character while
fighting a series of wars; in fighting terror effectively, from the defeat
of the PLO in the early 1970s in Gaza, to the Entebbe raid in 1976, through
Operation Defensive Shield in 2002; and striking pre-emptively against
enemies who combined genocidal rhetoric with the acquisition of
sophisticated weapons, as with Egypt and Syria in 1967, and Iraq in 1981.

Israel can again serve as a model of a state proud of its heritage, a
democracy that knows how to fight against its tyrannical foes without
sacrificing its own character. But to do this will require that Israel, too,
disperse the conceptual fog in which it has been operating, recognize the
strategic costs of ambiguous outcomes such as with the Lebanon war last
summer, and adopt a clear and coherent vision and plan of action. If the
West is to act decisively and with clarity, it may need Israel to show the
way.

What would such a struggle look like? We should not fear to call this
conflict by its name: It is the Second Cold War, with Iran as the
approximate counterpart of the Soviet Union. Like the U.S.S.R., Iran is an
enemy that even the mighty United States will probably never meet in full
force on the battlefield and instead must fight via its proxies, wherever
they are found. Like the Soviet Union, the ayatollahs' regime is based on an
ideological revolution that repudiates human liberty and subjects its
political opponents to imprisonment and death, a regime which, in order to
maintain its popular support, must continue to foment similar revolutions
everywhere it can, to show that it is on the winning side of history. And
like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Iranian regime today has two clear
weaknesses, which could ultimately spell its downfall: economic stagnation
and ideological disaffection.

With unemployment and inflation both deep in double digits, an increasing
structural dependence on oil revenue, a negligible amount of direct foreign
investment, and a stock market that has declined over 30% since the election
of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's heavy investment in other people's
wars and its own weapons and terrorist groups must in the end exact a price
in terms of support for the regime. Today, moreover, the great majority of
Iranians do not identify with the government's Islamist ideology, and among
young people the regime is widely derided.

Is it possible to bring about the fall of revolutionary Iran? Despite the
obvious differences, there is a great deal the West can learn from the way
victory was found in the first Cold War. Led by the United States, Western
countries in the 1980s mounted a campaign on a wide range of
fronts--military, technological, diplomatic, public relations and covert
operations--to convince the Soviet elites that their regime was failing at
every turn, and was headed for collapse. By deliberately escalating the arms
race and through trade sanctions on the Soviets, America increased the
pressure on the Soviet economy. By supporting dissident groups, sending
radio transmissions into the Soviet Empire, and making dramatic
pronouncements such as Ronald Reagan's famous Berlin Wall speech in 1987,
the West emboldened the regime's internal opponents. And by supporting
anticommunist forces around the world, from Latin America to Africa to
Western Europe to Afghanistan, the West halted the expansion of the
communist bloc and even began to roll it back. In all cases the goal was the
same: to make it clear to the ranks of Soviet elites, upon whom the regime's
legitimacy continued to depend, that they were on the wrong side of history.

When taken in combination with the Soviet Union's failing economy and
widespread ideological disaffection among the populace--much as we see in
Iran today--it was possible for the West's multifront strategy to bring
about the downfall of what was, during the time of Jimmy Carter, believed to
be an unstoppable, expanding historical juggernaut for whom the best the
West could hope was "containment" and "détente." Its vast nuclear arsenals,
its pretensions to global dominance, its coherent world-historical
ideology--none of these could protect it against the determined, united
efforts of the free world. But it required, above all, a spiritual shift of
momentum which began at home: A belief that victory was possible, that the
Soviet Union was impermanent, and that concerted effort could change
history. It required a new clarity of purpose.

[...Which President Ronald Reagan brought to the American People--DSH]

By most measures, Iran is an easier mark than the Soviet Union. It does not
yet have nuclear weapons or ICBMs; its Islamist ideology has less of a
universal appeal; its tools of thought control are vastly inferior to the
gulag and the KGB; and its revolution is not old enough to have obliterated
the memory of better days for much of its population. In theory at least, it
should be much easier for the West to mount a similar campaign of relentless
pressure on the regime--from fomenting dissent online, to destabilizing the
regime through insurgent groups inside Iran, to destroying the Iranian
nuclear project, to ever-deeper economic sanctions, to fighting and winning
the proxy wars that Iran has continued to wage--in order to effect the kind
of change of momentum needed to enable the Iranian people to bring their own
regime down the way the peoples under communism did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet it is precisely because of the ayatollahs' apparent frailty that the
West has failed to notice the similarities between this menace and the
Soviet one a generation ago. For despite their weakness on paper, the forces
of jihad are arrayed in full battle armor, and are prepared to fight to the
end. What they lack in technological and industrial sophistication, they
more than make up for in charisma, public-relations acumen, determination,
ideological coherence and suicidal spirit. Above all, they possess a
certainty, a clarity and a will to sacrifice that will greatly increase
their chances of victory, and of continued expansion, until they are met
with an equally determined enemy.

The fall of the Iranian regime will not end the global jihad. Beyond the
messianic Shiite movement, there is still a world of Sunni and Wahhabi
revolutionaries, from al Qaeda to Hamas, determined to make war on the West
even without Iran's help--just as anti-American communism did not end with
the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet there can be no question that today, it is
Iran that has earned the greatest admiration, given the global jihad its
greatest source of hope and funds, and racked up the most impressive
victories, taking on the West and its allies throughout the Middle East--and
especially in Iraq, where its proxy insurgencies have frustrated American
efforts and even brought about a shift in the internal politics of the
United States. Iran is not the only foe, but it is the leader among them. It
is only through Iran's defeat that the tide of the Second Cold War will be
turned.

Mr. Hazony is editor in chief of Azure, in whose Spring issue this article
appears.
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