Networked and lethal

Former CentCom commander Gen. John Abizaid says after mastering land, sea, air and space, the United States must master virtual space where al Qaeda now operates with impunity in recruiting, proselytizing, plotting and planning. “Al Qaeda’s organizing ability in cyberspace is unprecedented” and “it takes a global network to beat a lethal global network.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who once denied the World War II Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews ever took place, has had his wings clipped by his superiors. Iran’s most popular TV series tells the story of an Iranian diplomat in Paris in 1940 who falls in love with a French Jew and then helps her and some 500 other Jews escape to what was then Palestine, with forged Iranian passports.

Titled “Zero Degree Turn,” watched by millions Monday nights, the series is clearly on the side of the Jews’ plight in the World War II. It is also designed to soften the leadership’s anti-Semitic image. Some 25,000 Jews still live in Iran, the largest Middle East community left outside Israel. One deputy in parliament represents them.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who today will put in his third appearance in three years before the U.N. General Assembly, has little power in Iran’s theocracy. The key levers are in the hands of Supreme Religious Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Everything from media to intelligence and including the armed forces and parliament is in his hands. And former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005, was elected chairman of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, the body that elects the supreme spiritual leader. Mr. Rafsanjani defeated a hard-line cleric who was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s friend and protector.

Unlike Mr. Ahmadinejad, who would seem to welcome a military showdown with the United States, if only to force the entire Middle East to side with Iran against the U.S., both Messrs. Khamenei and Rafsanjani are apparently worried about the voices calling for the bombing of Iran’s estimated 23 widely scattered underground nuclear facilities.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a socialist, appeared to side with America’s neocons, Vice President Dick Cheney, the Israeli government and its right-wing opposition, when he said sanctions did not seem to be working and that war now appeared to be the next phase of the crisis. The ebullient Frenchman, founder of Doctors Without Borders, was told to pipe down by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Yet Mr. Sarkozy, following his meeting with President Bush in the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, last month, said with diplomacy and sanctions failing, either the West learns to live with Iranian nukes or Iran would be bombed.

Former CentCom commander Gen. Abizaid, who speaks fluent Arabic and whose command extended from Afghanistan to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East and took in a large chunk of Africa from Egypt to the Horn of Africa down to Kenya (27 countries), said bombing Iran would be catastrophic. It would set the entire Middle East ablaze and bring millions more recruits to al Qaeda’s anti-U.S. bandwagon.

Gen. Abizaid, now retired, says: “We can stop Iranian expansion. We contained the Soviet Union with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in missiles targeted against the United States. But we kept talking to Soviet leaders throughout the worst of the Cold War. And we blocked Soviet expansionism and we also learned to live with China after President Nixon restored diplomatic relations.”

Iran, the general explains, is a dangerous power that seeks weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to dominate its neighbors much the way the Soviet Union developed satellite and client states. The United States should deliver clear messages. One or two Iranian nukes should not rattle us. If they fired them, Iran would be instantly vaporized.

“The ayatollahs are heirs to a great civilization,” he said in a colloquy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “and they are not in the business of collective suicide. Using suicide bombers against Western or pro-Western countries is one thing, but committing national suicide quite another. They aren’t mad.” And we should talk turkey with Iran at the highest level as soon as possible.

But Gen. Abizaid does see a long struggle ahead on a planetary scale. “Trouble is we work and think in five-second sound bites while our self-avowed enemies are into 500-year sound bites. A 360-degree war is upon us. And our military forces are not designed to fight it. We have to stabilize Iraq over the next three or four years. Also Afghanistan and the Afghan-Pak border while avoiding a military showdown with Iran.”

The four major challenges, as Gen. Abizaid sees them, with global dimensions:

(1) Sunni al Qaeda’s networked and lethal global extremism.

(2) The rise of Shia extremist power with a hegemon in the Gulf.

(3) The continuing corrosive nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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