Is Iran a Martyr State?

Andy Grotto wrote a piece in the Fall/Winter issue of World Affairs out of Brown University [the article is not yet available on their site] that does important work. It's a resounding dismissal of the notion that Iran is - or could be - a martyr state: willing to sacrifice itself in a suicide attack on Israel. I've always felt this was a silly claim (see, for instance, the Op-ed I wrote for the Chicago Tribune) but Grotto has done the work necessary to definitively knock it out of the discourse - at least, for anyone who is interested in evidence.

He points out, for starters, that "no government in recored history has willfully pursued policies it knows will proximately cause its own destruction." He talks at some length about Shi'a beliefs and what they actually say about the return of the Mahdi. He carefully pursues the sources of various people who promote that Iran or Ahmadinejad might be willing commit national suicide and shows that the references cited for support of this notion are inaccurate, mistaken or specious.

The bulk of the "evidence" used to portray Ahmadinejad as a radical Mahdiist is otherwise based on non sequitor, innuendo, and hearsay.

And he points out that when the Iran/Iraq war was going badly Ayatollah Khomeini took decisive action end the war and preserve the Iranian state rather than let it be torn apart by continuing to fight. 

By 1987, the Islamic Republic's economy was in shambles as a result of the war with Iraq but efforts to address these problems were in a state of gridlock as the Majlis, Iran's parliament, sought to enact socioeconmic laws that the Guardian Council rejected as un-Islamic. Khomeini worried that the government's failure to address the country's mounting economic and social problems could threaten the Islamic Republic, and instructed then-President Khamenei in a January 1988 letter that the government could suspend the pillars of Islam, including the hajj pilgrimage, if required to protect he Islamic Republic.

It's outstanding work: factual, careful, treating wild claims seriously and then demonstrating that they are not connected to any real evidence. He's measured and careful. It is, as far as I'm concerned, the definitive dismissal of this argument.