Ask Ourselves: "Does Iran Make Anything Worth Buying?"

Edward Luttwak has written an engaging piece on strategy for dealing with Iran. At the risk over simplifying Luttwak's analysis, he urges restraint at this point because Iran is essentially incompetent and mismanaged. This argument has specific resonance, beyond Luttwak's detailed account of just what it takes to build a nuke, given what we have since discovered about our dreaded Cold War foe, the Soviet Union. Critics of Cold War hawkishness love to point out that the Soviets couldn't build a reliable toaster oven, yet we were deathly afraid of their war machine. But wasn't that the point? We inately knew this and decided to wage a war of economic attrition, ultimately forcing the Bear to gorge itself to death on military spending. Much preferable to a real war with large numbers of deaths if you ask me. And this is essentially Luttwak's point, that there is strong reason to believe that the Iranians are another gang that can't shoot straight, economically speaking. I find this argument compelling given Iran's inability to even get oil refining right, or it's fumbling of basic projects like its methanol plants. Sure their ideology is something to be highly concerned about, but how scared should we be about their engineering? Luttwak argues that we have time on our side, time to gather more intelligence, foment revolution, whatever.

After reading Luttwak and pondering a bit, I was less afraid that we are behind the eight ball on Iran. We've played some pretty damn good chess before, and there is every reason to believe that we can checkmate the mullahs without bunkerbusters.