One of the less considered but important goals of U.S./Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership is to change the adversary's decision-making process. The Iranian leadership is regarded as fanatical, characterized by a fixed commitment to destroy Israel and the Great Satan at all costs, even at the price of its own destruction. Until that quality is banished from the field, the nightmare will never be over.
Fanaticism is a problematic decision-making process because it cannot be deterred. The foe may not behave as a rational actor who can be deterred, for example, from using nuclear weapons if it had them. Those who do not know fear or who seek martyrdom may endure extreme, longterm privation that would deter conventional actors, fighting even when victory is impossible. That attitude historically made the Islamic Republic a tough foe. Like a zombie, it could be shot but still come on, heedless of the bullets that would have dropped lesser foes. But hit it in the zombie brain, and it will flinch. It might even stop. Is there any way of un-fanaticizing the foe?
Destroying the zombie brain is part of the rationale behind the decapitation strategy applied against it. Eliminating the leadership of the Islamic Republic repeatedly changes its "brain" through a kind of evolutionary process. The hope that the operation of strike selection will result in the replacement of the fanatical character of its leadership by normal people. The reasoning behind this is that just as pathogens were thought to always evolve to be less virulent, so it might be possible that if fanatics were constantly eliminated, the total population of fanatics would be exhausted, leading to their final replacement by moderates.
"According to the avirulence hypothesis put forward by Theobald Smith (Smith 1904), virulence is expected to decrease to zero in the course of evolution. It is not in the interest of a pathogen to harm or kill its host, only to replicate itself." In Smith’s view, the extreme should always evolve to be less virulent. By analogy, fanatics, if continually attritted, would cause the terror leadership would evolve to moderation. But experimental data showed this was not always the case with pathogens. Diseases did not always become less virulent over time. For example, certain HIV variants (such as the VB variant in the Netherlands) evolved higher virulence alongside increased transmissibility. Marek's disease virus in chickens has become markedly more virulent over the past century. On the other hand, many respiratory viruses (e.g., some that cause common colds) appear to have attenuated after long adaptation to humans. Evolution could go in both ways.
Modern evolutionary biology favors the virulence-transmission trade-off hypothesis: there's often an optimal intermediate level of virulence, which can shift up or down depending on conditions. There is no inevitable tendency toward milder or more deadly disease. This means that the U.S./Israeli decapitation campaign can lead to either a more or less radical residual after defeat, depending on things besides the ordnance dropped on it. Israel, which has defeated many military challenges to its existence over the last decades, has yet to solve the problem of radicalization, a psychological process whereby the bitterness of serial defeat is transformed into an atavistic hatred that survives every rational, economic or social attempt at reconciliation. The beaten foe, rather than reflecting on the mistakes which led to his defeat, feels wronged by events, as if he were the victim of history itself, and the victor were in league with some kind of diabolical agency that almost requires almost supernatural redress, because only in that framework can his woeful condition be explained.
The one thing that neither bomb nor missile will reach is the hard core of hatred. There’s a 90% probability that the US can smash Iran’s physical military force, but is there even a 10% chance that it can excise hatred from the hearts of the Islamic radicals? For this, we need other tools. It is useful to recall that the long peace following World War II was not entirely due to crushing Berlin and Tokyo, but in finding some way to bring German and Japanese people into a new way of life. It could be done with Nazis and militarists. But can it be done with Islamists? Extremism persists where governance fails, grievances fester, or victory is incomplete. Recent developments such as the weakening of Iran/Hezbollah proxies and Assad's fall suggest that the decline of extremism is possible, but not guaranteed. Jihadism adapts — shifting to local/regional focus, low-tech attacks, or new safe havens. Jihadism might even move to the West, evolving a strategy of infecting the organism which swallowed it, mingling its ideological DNA with socialism and Green movements, leaving the West strong enough for its facade to remain standing, while eating it out from within. If so, then the downfall of virulent Islamic movements such as ISIS, the Iranian Islamic Republic, Hamas and Hezbollah might actually lead it to greener pastures, there to prosper another day.
As in the horror movies, the trick is to adapt faster and to realize that even when it seems over, it may have just begun. Wars are ultimately affairs of the mind; they are about which idea imposes its will in history. Because ideas, as Albert Camus observed, never die, unless you are careful, the zombie will rise up again.
“And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good . . . and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague
