Rational Grounds

Thomas Schelling, in his book Arms and Influence, describes the concept:

Another paradox of deterrence is that it does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, cool-headed, and in control of oneself or of one's country. One of Joseph Conrad's books, The Secret Agent, concerns a group of anarchists in London who were trying to destroy bourgeois society. One of their techniques was bomb explosions; Greenwich Observatory was the objective in this book. They got their nitroglycerin from a stunted little chemist. The authorities knew where they got their stuff and who made it for them. But this little purveyor of nitroglycerin walked safely past the London police. A young man who was tied in with the job at Greenwich asked him why the police did not capture him. His answer was that they would not shoot him from a distance - that would be a denial of bourgeois morality, and serve the anarchists' cause - and they dared not capture him physically because he always kept some "stuff" on his person. He kept a hand in his pocket, he said, holding a ball at the end of a tube that reached a container of nitroglycerin in his jacket pocket. All he had to do was to press that little ball and anybody within his immediate neighobrhood would be blown to bits with him. His young companion wondered why the polic would believe anything so preposterous as that the chemist would actualy blow himself up. The little man's explanation was calm. "In the last instance it is character alone that makes for one's safety... I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That's their impresion. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly."

It is possible, however unlikely, that the Bush administration is merely trying to rattle their sabres at the Iranians to force them to make concessions. Because of their well deserved reputation for being belligerent, self-destructive idiots the Administration's threats are thereby made credible.

Now, of course, even if this were the plan it's been fairly horribly executed. As James Fallows (via Matt Yglesias) points out in an excellent article, any such threats should have been sent via back-channels.

By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel "create 'excess demand' for military action," as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices.

In other words, if everybody sees that we just threatened to bomb Iran, and then they thumb their noses at us because we'd be fools to bomb them, and we don't bomb them, then we look like fools anyway (but not as big of fools as if we had actually bombed them, let me stress).

The administration is now calling these reports "wild speculation." And one can hope they are. Certainly, that reaction serves as a bit of a walk-back even now - it's hard to call all this wild speculation and then turn around and commence to bombing runs. However, when we have State Department officials pushing ridiculous lines on Iranian nukes and the requisite supporters in the conservative newsmagazines gamely making the case for war again go a long way toward undermining that conclusion.

Either way, this hardly seems like the most effective way to get where we want to go. Per Schelling:

We ought to get something a little less idiosyncratic for 50 billion dollars a year of defense expenditure [Ha! Sorry, that was written in 1965 -ed.]. A government that is obliged to appear responsible in its foreign policy can hardly cultivate forever the appearance of impetuosity on the most important decisions in its care. Khruschev may have needed a short cut to deterrence, but the American government ought to be mature enough and rich enough to arrange a persuasive sequence of threatened responses that are not wholly a matter of guessing a president's temper.