Playing Chicken with the US of A

Incredibly interesting article by Amir Taheri where we get this little gem:

The idea that the Islamic Republic faces a game of “chicken” against the West was publicized last month by Ali Larijani, the new “security czar” in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration. But the man who first came up with the analysis is Hassan Abbasi who has emerged as Ahmadinejad’s chief strategic guru.

Abbasi heads the Center for Security Doctrines Research of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (RGC). His friends call him “The Kissinger of Islam”, after Henry Kissinger who served as US secretary of state in the 1970s.

“To Iran’s new ruling elite, Abbasi is the big strategic brain,” says a European diplomat in Tehran. “More and more officials quote him in meetings with foreign diplomats.”

According to Tehran sources, Abbasi is the architect of the so-called “war preparation plan” currently under way in Iran.

Last month Abbasi presented an outline of his analysis in a lecture at the Teachers Training Faculty in Karaj, west of Tehran.

The lecture merits attention because it offers an insight into the way the new leadership in Tehran approaches issues of international politics.

According to Abbasi, the global balance of power is in a state of flux and every nation should fight for a place in a future equilibrium. The Western powers, especially the United States, still wield immense military and economic power that “looks formidable on paper.” But they are unable to use that power because their populations have become “risk-averse.”

“The Western man today has no stomach for a fight,” Abbasi says. “This phenomenon is not new: All empires produce this type of man, the self-centered, materialist, and risk-averse man.”

Read the whole article.

We are moving into the orbit of war. The strategy paper I linked to thinks we can somehow find the Lagrangian point and stabilize the descent. I am not so sure, and Iran's recent hardline posture makes me even less so. With Ahmadinejad's recent asinity, the tug of gravity grows ever stronger, and the probability of controntation rises.