Playing Chicken in Iran

As I was reading the latest news about the Bush Administration’s current vitriolic rhetoric about Iran, I had an epiphany. I was thinking to myself, “Wow, it makes no sense, at all, to attack Iran. You’d have to be crazy!”

That’s when it hit me! I had thought exactly the same thing about Iraq, right up until we invaded. There is this great game that political scientists play called “chicken.” (Actually we don’t play it, we just watch other people play—we’re kind of voyeuristic that way.) The old-fashioned way to play is to drive two hot-rods at each other, or racing towards a cliff as fast as a lemming, and the first person to stop or swerve loses. Peculiar, isn’t it? This game, which falls into rational-choice theory, seems kind of a stupid thing to do. And the person who behaves more rationally in a larger context, loses.

So only stupid people play this game. OK, that makes sense. Bush was playing chicken, I was thinking. But still, the objective is to make the opponent swerve, and not crash. We can all see now that we crashed into Iraq. Not only did we crash there, but we’re still looking for more people to crash into!

But here’s an irony about the rational-choice theory game of chicken. To win, you have to make your opponent think you are crazy. Start screaming in tongues as you mash the accelerator. Blast Abba full volume on the radio. Stick your head out of the window and let your tongue flap in the breeze. Steve Martin on his first comedy album said that if he were mugged he immediately would wet himself. Mugger thinks, “This dude is crazy! I’m out of here!”

Which is why Ronald Reagan was brilliant. In his little game of nuclear arms escalation with the old USSR (do you ever miss it?) he started ranting about evil empires, and using lasers to blast incoming missiles from a string of satellites. They even called it Star Wars. Gorbachev thinks, “That Americanski is crazy! I’m out of here!”

So I was thinking in the run-up to Iraq that hey, Bush and Cheney must have studied some rational-choice theory at Yale and Casper Community College. Sure they were acting crazy, but that’s just how you do it! Then WHAM!

Now it’s Iran’s turn. Maybe it was always Iran’s turn. Maybe Iraq was just to let Iran know how insane we are. These guys are brilliant.