Israel defense planning: Will Iran's leaders be rational, irrational or mad?

Whether Iranian national decision makers will turn out to be rational, irrational, or mad is clearly beyond any imaginable powers of selection or creation in Jerusalem.

By LOUIS RENÉ BERES
Satellite image shows a nuclear facility in Iran (photo credit: REUTERS)
Satellite image shows a nuclear facility in Iran
(photo credit: REUTERS)
In matters of defense planning, rationality has a special meaning. Always, it signifies a specific leadership preference ordering, or hierarchy of preferences, one in which national survival is valued most highly. Traditionally, whenever all forms of deterrence are said to rest upon "assumptions of rationality," this precise signification is what is intended. It follows that traditional threats of deterrence ought never to work against those particular adversaries who are seemingly "irrational."
What does this special meaning suggest about Israel's rapidly approaching rendezvous with a nuclear Iran? If Jerusalem does not believe that the decision-makers in Tehran will fulfill traditional expectations of rationality, should Israeli nuclear deterrence be abandoned altogether in this singularly volatile "dyad?" Or, might there still be some way for Israel to deter a non-rational Iranian adversary by focusing instead upon threats to a very different set of core values?
For example, even an "irrational" Iranian leadership elite that might be willing to value certain preferences more highly than national survival could still be influenced by convincing threats to pertinent Shiite religious institutions, obligations, or belief systems.
There is something else, something beyond both "rationality" and "irrationality." This is a third decisional orientation, the even more bewildering prospect of enemy madness. Significantly, genuine madness is profoundly different from both rationality and irrationality in world politics. In essence, it would mean no longer maintaining any consistent rank-ordering of national security preferences.
Of course, an authentically mad Iranian national leadership, one with no determinable ordering of preferred choices, would be more-or-less unpredictable. For Israel,  having to face a presumptively mad adversary in Tehran would represent the very worst case scenario. Such a fearful narrative is arguably implausible, but it is still conceivable.
Worth mentioning, too, is that Israel will have absolutely no choice in determining the mindset of its adversaries. Whether Iranian national decision makers will turn out to be rational, irrational, or mad is clearly beyond any imaginable powers of selection or creation in Jerusalem.
Back in 2012,  Meir Dagan, speaking to CBS interviewer Leslie Stahl, stated reassuringly: "The regime in Iran is a very rational one." At that time, however, considering Dagan's corollary explanations of "rationality," the former Mossad chief was suggesting only that the Iranian regime was not mad; that is, that it could be expected to prudently consider all decisional consequences. Understood here, Dagan's notion of  Iranian rationality resembled the above meaning of irrationality - that this Tehran regime would weigh all anticipated costs and benefits of policy alternatives, and that its relevant preferences would fall conspicuously within a consistent rank-ordering.
The bottom line? Meir Dagan's statements notwithstanding, the current Iranian leadership cannot always be counted upon by Israel to value national survival above all else. Yes, to be sure, the leadership's authority patterns may turn out to be entirely reasonable, well-ordered, and even predictable  (certainly not "mad"), but there still can be no adequate assurances of any determinable national priority for national self-preservation.
The successful "containment" or deterrence of an already-nuclear Iranian regime should not be taken for granted. Any resultant balance-of-terror might not closely replicate those particular circumstances of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that had formerly existed between the Soviet Union and the United States. Among other differences, this newer balance could need to be implemented amid regional chaos.
Chaotic disintegration is already an evident fact of life in the Middle East and parts of North Africa. Today, substantial and sudden extensions of this corrosive condition to still other sectors of our planet are plausible. Indeed, even with assorted arms control and disarmament visions, including President Obama’s purposeless fantasy of "a world free of nuclear weapons," it is reasonable to expect, somewhere, an eventual fusion of mass destruction weapons with irrationality and/or madness.
In this connection, current fears center on Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea, but there are certainly other, and as yet unforeseen, areas of prospective danger.
From Israel's especially imperiled standpoint, the dangers may be starkly unique. Confronting not only a growing security threat from existing enemy states, but also the more or less simultaneous appearance of a new enemy state of "Palestine," Israel could soon find itself engulfed in mass-casualty terrorism, and/or in unconventional war. Beleaguered by both Shiite (Hezbollah) and Sunni (ISIS/IS) terror-armies, Jerusalem reluctantly understands that fighting one set of Jihadist foes could simultaneously help the other. It is not an enviable security position.
And as to any long-promised security assistance from the United States, President Barack Obama could offer little more than seemingly compassionate American help in burying the myriad Israeli dead.
While not really ascertainable, the probability of Middle East chaos could be enlarged by any future instances of enemy irrationality or madness. If Israel should begin to face an irrational Jihadist adversary that values certain presumed religious expectations more highly than its own physical survival, Israel’s deterrent could then be immobilized. Subsequently, unless Israel can offer aptly convincing alternative threats to Iran's expressly religious preferences, this could imply a heightened threat of nuclear or biological war.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” prophesied the poet W.B. Yeats, “and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Now, assembled in almost two hundred armed tribal camps politely called nation-states, virtually all peoples coexist insecurely on a visibly anarchic planet. The historical origins of this recognizable anarchy lie in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which had put an end to the Thirty Years War.
Over time, even Yeats would now agree, there will be no safety in arms, no rescues from political authority, and no reassuring answers from science. New wars may rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and until all things human are leveled in a vast and utterly primal disorder.    
Plus ca change....In history and world politics, anarchy is really an old story. Chaos, however, is not. There are meaningful distinctions.
Although counter-intuitive, chaos and anarchy represent opposite end points of the same continuum. Mere anarchy, or the absence of a central world authority, is quite “normal.” Chaos, on the other hand, is sui generis. It is thoroughly “abnormal.”
Since the seventeenth century, our anarchic world is best described as a system.  What happens in any one part of this world, therefore, affects what happens in some or all of the other parts.  Whenever a deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one nation to another, the destabilizing effects can undermine regional and international security. When this deterioration is rapid and catastrophic, as it would be following the start of any unconventional war or unconventional terrorism, the associated effects could be correspondingly immediate.
These effects would be chaotic.
Aware that even an incremental collapse of remaining world authority structures would impact its friends as well as its enemies, leaders of the Jewish State will first need to advance certain decipherable and plausible premonitions of collapse, in order to chart fully durable paths to survival.
Today, Israel’s leaders are wasting precious time with their too-polite considerations of "friendly" designs, including, most plainly, the lethal cartographies of "Palestine." Soon, moreover, they will need to look even beyond Iran, and begin to consider how best to respond to life in an increasingly plausible global state of nature. Indeed, the specific triggering mechanism of the world’s precipitous descent into chaos could actually originate from a variety of assorted mass-casualty attacks launched against Israel (ISIS/IS, for example, looks to Jerusalem as venue for its obligatory "final battle"), or from similar attacks against other western democracies.
The United States would not be immune to this starkly remorseless form of vulnerability.
Any chaotic disintegration of the world system would transform the Israeli system. Such a transformation could involve various reciprocal forms of  destruction. In anticipation, Israel should quickly orient its strategic planning to a variety of worst-case prospects, thereby focusing far more deliberately on a wider range of self-help security options. 
The PLO (now Palestinian Authority) was founded in 1964, three years before there were any "occupied territories." Jerusalem's persistently stated willingness to surrender indispensable Israeli lands, its long-mistaken reluctance to accept once still-timely preemption imperatives, and its periodic terrorist "exchanges" which inevitably generate new acts of anti-Israel terrorism, may never bring about direct national defeat. Taken together, however, these inter-penetrating and synergistic policy errors will have a cumulatively weakening effect on Israel.
Whether the principal result here will be one that “merely” impairs the Jewish State's commitment to endure, or one that also opens up the country to a devastating missile attack, and to corollary acts of major terror, must necessarily remain unclear.
Such lack of clarity is irremediable. It exists because rendering any true assessments of probability here would make no logical or scientific sense. True probability inferences and judgments must always be extrapolated from the known frequency of past events. They can never be meaningfully determined for obviously unique events, including those particular enemy attack prospects now being discussed.
For Israel, anarchy and disorder are inevitable; chaos is lurking not far behind. What might still be avoided is national or even regional mega-destruction. To successfully prevent such dire harms, especially as they could concern Iranian nuclear weapons, Jerusalem must first understand the incomparably vital distinctions between rationality, irrationality, and madness.
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LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on war, terrorism, and nuclear security matters.  Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, and Chair of Project Daniel (Israel, 2003), he is the author of many major books and articles on international relations and international law. Dr. Beres' tenth book, Israel's Nuclear Strategy: Surviving Amid Chaos, will be published later this year.


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