It is often said that the leaders of Iran's revolutionary Islamic regime possess a tactical craft in their many negotiations: the craft of brinkmanship. That is, going out to the last rock on the last cliff face, standing there on one leg, and waiting for the adversary to give ground — the alternative being a fall from the heights.
Is this true? Perhaps. But what is the purpose of it? To fortify the system against concession, and to frighten the adversary with a madness managed by a calculating mind.
Again, perhaps. But in the end there is a supreme interest, and all this calculated madness is done in order to preserve it.
So, what is that supreme interest? The survival of the system, the survival of its ideology, or the survival of the persons of its leaders? The last answer is not the right one, as proved by the system's ability to live with the killing of its senior leaders, foremost among them the supreme leader himself.
The first answer may well be right, but it is not certain, for these people behave like those prepared to see the system annihilated as an offering for the survival of the idea. So what is the idea?
Earlier, US President Donald Trump described Iran's leaders as madmen, and said he did not understand how they think. But what escaped the American bulldozer businessman, the embodiment of the American utilitarian philosophy, is that there are motives driving political systems and groups — some of them — other than the customary practical ones.
Intellectual closure is more dangerous than madness, for the man afflicted with it sees the world through his own particular spectacles and does not see it as the rest of humanity does.
Here, addressing such a closed mind with logic and with the calculation of profit and loss as human beings understand it becomes impossible. He holds his own criteria of profit and loss, according to the idea and the exemplar in which he believes. When the new and absent Supreme Leader, Mojtaba, issued his first message after the killing of his predecessor and father, Ali Khamenei, in the notorious strike, his opening sentence rested on doctrinal ground.
There are many parallels to this, more than there is room for here, that speak to this same ground.
Setting out from doctrinal ground is not peculiar to the ideologues of the Iranian regime. There are many like them among Sunnis, and there are others like them among the millenarians of the Christian and Jewish worlds.
But our discussion here is confined to explaining, or attempting to explain, this rigidity — incomprehensible by the ordinary instruments of understanding — on the part of most of those who hold decision-making power in Iran today. Most, not all.
And this even as the harshest American and global economic war against Iran is about to begin.
Is this madness? The answer depends on where you stand and on the spectacles through which you see the world.
