Fareed Zakaria on Iran

Fareed Zakaria often has good insights on US foreign policy but he seems to get Iran totally wrong.  Recently he wrote (February 22) an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he asserted that a nuclear Iran could be deterred. He bases his argument on the shift in power inside Iran from the clerical elite to the Revolutionary Guards. He suggests that the Revolutionary Guards will act more rationally than the clerics. If deterrence is the question, then according to Zakaria, a military dictatorship based on the Revolutionary Guards will respond to a deterrent threat and Iran can be contained, even when it gets nuclear weapons.
 
There is only one problem with his analysis. The leadership of the Revolutionary Guards relies on the most extreme clerics in the Iranian system, like Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, who believes in the imminent arrival of the 12th Imam. Yazdi is a frequent speaker to the Revolutionary Guards as are other extremists who would not respond to deterrence the way that Zakaria suggests. As I have pointed out, when Ayatollah Khomeini decided to agree to a cease-fire with Saddam Hussein in 1988 after Iran was struck by dozens of Iraqi missiles, the only force in Iran that objected was the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards corps. Their officers are not to be compared to the officer corps in Arab states that once supported Arab socialism. They are even more dangerous than many of the clerics in Qom.