Ajami on the NIE

Like a document that doesn't want to die, the NIE is still bedevilling pundits and politicians. Faoud Ajami knows the Middle East better than most intel experts, and finds much to fault in this document and how it is being used:

It is odd, and ironic, that the intelligence agencies that had been mocked by liberal opinion for their reporting on Iraq before the war have now acquired an aura of infallibility.

That's a point I had also made. This is a flawed document and trying to make something of the document based on clipped portions is as bad as reading tea leaves and trying to divine the nature of the Middle East.

Ajami also notes the following:

For their part, the Iranians will press on: The spectacle of power they display is illusory. It is a broken society over which the mullahs rule. A society that throws on the scene a leader of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's derangement is not an orderly land; foreigners may not be able to overthrow that regime, but countries can atrophy as their leaders--armed, here, by an oil windfall of uncertain duration--strut on the world stage. Iran's is a deeper culture than Iraq's, possessed of a keen sense of Persia's primacy in the region around it. What Iranians make of their own history will not wait on the kind of society that will emerge in Iraq. On the margins, a scholarly tradition in Najaf given to moderation could be a boon to the clerics of Iran. But the Iranians will not know deliverance from the sterility of their world if Iraq were to fail. Their schadenfreude over an American debacle in Iraq will have to be brief. A raging fire next door to them would not be pretty. And, crafty players, the Iranians know what so many in America who guess at such matters do not: that Iraq is an unwieldy land, that the Arab-Persian divide in culture, language and temperament is not easy to bridge.

Totalitarian regimes have a life of their own, and can not only strangle opposition, but the groupthink that is forced upon the leaders and decision makers is tough to crack. While the military exercises and tests that are being touted regularly by the Iranian military may be part of the puffery Ajami notes, but I don't see the regime being strangled by atrophy. What may doom the mad mullahs may be their overreaching - taking risks well beyond what their regime can handle. They very nearly miscalculated in dealing with Hizbullah and Israel, and their nuclear program may well prove to be another miscalculation. The Iranian regime is on the razor's edge and the slightest miscalculation might spell disaster for everyone involved.

We needn't give credence to the assertion of President Bush--that the jihadists would turn up in our cities if we pulled up stakes from Baghdad --to recognize that a terrible price would be paid were we to opt for a hasty and unseemly withdrawal from Iraq. This is a region with a keen eye for the weakness of strangers. The heated debate about the origins of our drive into Iraq would surely pale by comparison to the debate that would erupt--here and elsewhere--were we to give in to despair and cast the Iraqis adrift.

Again, that's a point I had made, though not nearly as eloquently. What happens in Iraq will have consequences around the world. Our allies will see us in a different light if we pull up the stakes too soon, and our enemies will see us as a nation that is incapable of fighting the long fight and will adjust their tactics and strategies accordingly.