Bob Dylan and Ayatollah Khamenei

The expression on his face while threatening World War III

A Good Piece
By Tony Karon

"In Bob Dylan’s 1963 song “Talking World War III Blues,” he dreams of being the last person alive after a nuclear apocalypse, then discovers that his shrink has been having the same dream, and so has most everyone else. Dylan concludes with a solution: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” If we are to avoid a catastrophe in the Middle East and beyond, it may be of supreme importance that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, be introduced to the dreams of his adversaries. For it is in the fevers of President Bush — and much of the leadership on both sides of the aisle in Washington — as well as those of most of the Israeli political spectrum that the danger of war is most vivid......

In short, if we are reliant on the ability of the current U.S. and Israeli leadership to reason not with the empathy of the Dalai Lama, but even, say, according to the ruthless Machiavellian pragmatics of the Kissinger school, then many thousands of Iranians, Americans and Israelis face the prospect of a violent death in the not too distant future.

And the truly scary thing is that the Iranians appear to be banking on Washington making rational calculations. I’m not yet sure what to make of the resignation of Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the eve of new talks with Europe, but most of the reporting I’m seeing suggests it is a sign that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is leaning more towards the confrontational positions of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than toward the more pragmatic positions of others like Larijani.....

But I did find particularly disturbing the sense of the thinking in Tehran conveyed by the L.A. Times piece on Larijani’s resignation. Iranian analyst Saeed Leylaz told the paper that “Iran’s leadership, watching oil hover near $90 a barrel, thought it had little to lose by taking a tough stance, convinced that the U.S. wouldn’t dare launch a military attack against Iran and risk sending the world economy into a recession.....Oy. If these guys are thinking that the U.S. decisions are going to be made on the basis of what’s best for the world economy or avoiding a recession, we’re in serious trouble......

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation as it perceives them, under the circumstances responsible leadership in Tehran has an obligation to understand the thinking of those who might launch military strikes on their territory. And to understand, also, that in President Bush’s fevered imagination, causing a recession (that may already be in the works regardless of the state of conflict with Iran) may be an acceptable price to pay for stopping what he perceives as an epoch-defining power-shift as a result of Iran attaining the ability to enrich uranium. Deranged as that reasoning may be, it may yet drive the U.S. to war....."