Drawing Red Lines in the Desert, or How (Not) to Bluff a Martyr - Part II

In March 2003, attempting to enlist allies in our war with Iraq, President Bush implied he would call France's bluff in a Security Council vote on whether to support an invasion. "It's time," he said, "for people to show their cards." CNN's Bill Schneider called Operation Iraqi Freedom "Texas political poker, the ultimate high-stakes gamble, because President Bush has put everything on the line with this war." In the opening months of the war, his generals deployed desert-camouflage decks to target the 52 most-wanted Baathists.



Since then, the situation in Iraq has spiraled out of control, and many of us also wonder whether Mr. Bush has artfully countered the bargaining chips in Iranian and North Korean arsenals while playing "Plutonium Poker." (The term is Fred Kaplan's, in Slate.) Pyongyang, Tehran, Al Qaeda, and Iraqi insurgents all may remind us of what the Texas oilman Crandall Addington said during the 1981 World Series of Poker: "Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art. In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back at you."



The Bush administration's credibility, and thus its ability to bluff, was also undercut when its claims that Saddam Hussein had WMD and was seeking uranium from Niger both turned out to be false. Iran, for its part, has been cited by the International Atomic Energy Commission for hiding enrichment activities since 1985. The question became, did the current regime want to join the nuclear club mainly to generate electricity, or to wield a nuclear club of its own? One clue was provided when Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate in Iran's current political spectrum, observed that "a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel." He and other mullahs even issued a fatwa sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons. Iran's vast oil reserves also undercut its claim to need a peaceful source of new energy. Much more revealing, however, was the admission by A.Q. Khan, godfather of Pakistan's bomb, that he smuggled into Iran both a spherical warhead design and P-2 centrifuge technology capable of quadrupling its nuclear enrichment capacity. Poker players call such things halogen tells. Altogether they comprise persuasive – some would say foolproof – evidence that Iran's goals are measured in megatons rather than kilowatts. "Do not press a desperate foe too hard," Sun Tzu counsels. Why not? Because a wounded animal is often more dangerous than a healthy one, which can run for its life. Likewise, a desperate human may act spitefully rather than pragmatically, choosing a martyr's death (and taking others down with him) over a lifesaving retreat. So if your opponent has been getting pushed around of late, it's probably best not to bluff him.



Iran thinks the West has been pushing it around since the Mossedegh government was overthrown in 1953 and the Shah was installed. More recently, Javad Vaeidi, deputy head of the Supreme Security Council, admitted that giving up the enrichment program would be a national humiliation. To keep from losing face, the regime might be willing to go down in flames, taking with it as many infidels as inhumanly possible.



In Big Deal, Anthony Holden brilliantly illuminated the importance of face during the most perilous nuclear showdown to date. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Holden writes, "can be analysed in almost uncanny detail as a slowly developing hand, involving bluff and counter-bluff, with stakes as high as they go." Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, like "all the best poker players, was playing the man rather than his hand. He and Kennedy had played an earlier game at their Vienna summit, where the Russian leader had 'read' the new American president as young, inexperienced and easy to push around." Khrushchev therefore believed that, despite America's superior nuclear arsenal, Kennedy would prove too weak to keep the Soviets from basing missiles on Cuba. When the 45-year-old president boldly blockaded the island, writes Holden, Khrushchev "folded his hand and conceded the pot." But with submarine-based Soviet missiles capable of hitting American cities, Kennedy needed to let Khrushchev save face, so he privately agreed not to invade Cuba once the Russians dismantled the bases. "The true cunning of Kennedy's route to victory," Holden concludes, "was to enable his opponent to lose without being humiliated. The alternative might have proved a decidedly pyrrhic victory." [195-97]



Once this crisis had passed, the United States and the Soviet Union continued to threaten each other with Mutually Assured Destruction, a Strangelovian variety of all-in, unwinnable side bet that luckily neither side called. With an opponent committed to martyrdom, however, we have all the more reason not to humiliate him. We need to understand his identity in order to know which of his buttons we can and can't push. How do the atomic ayatollahs feel, for example, about being publicly dressed down by females? The Security Council's position is represented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. After saying the US would negotiate face to face only if Iran suspends enrichment, both women warned that "further steps" would be taken should the offer be refused. Might not the sex (or race) of our secretary of state make American demands even harder to swallow? What self-respecting white-bearded mullah backs down from a petite Mozart-playing black woman?



The role of women in society isn't officially on the table, of course, but no issue more succinctly engenders the chasm between radical Islamism and the liberal West. If Iran's leaders shared more of our values – as Israel's, India's, Brazil's, and South Africa's do – we'd be much less adamant about keeping their hands off the bomb.



Ahmadinejad's ideal is the caliphate of 1,100 years ago, when Islamic civilization was at its most advanced and virile. Meanwhile, women are forced to wear chadors and long skirts, ride segregated buses and elevators, and receive inferior educations and medical care. People celebrating International Women's Day in Tehran were beaten by Revolutionary Guards and handed over to the dreaded Ministry of Intelligence and Security. A woman who stabbed to death one of three men attempting to rape her and her niece was sentenced to be hanged.



Ahmadinejad and like-minded heads of state have made it illegal under Shariah law to even own a deck of playing cards, let alone gamble with them. Last year an Islamist judge in the Indonesian province of Aceh sentenced four women to be publicly beaten for participating in a card game involving 65,000 rupiah – about $7. More than a thousand people gathered after Friday prayer sessions to watch the women receive seven fierce blows apiece across their backs with a long rattan cane. Another judge blamed the tsunami, which took 25,000 lives and destroyed much of the Acehnese economy, on women who didn't wear the chador.



Like most young women playing in the WSOP, Chicago artist Shawnee Barton favors short tops that either go or clash with her pink-tinted ponytail. With 10 players left in event No. 15, her lime green tank top helped determine where she would finish. The action had folded to her on the button. Even though she had nothing but an unsuited 10-7, she tried to steal the antes and blinds by raising three times the big blind. Sitting in the big blind, Laurie Scott had the largest stack of chips at the table. As Scott called the raise, she asked Barton, "You're not trying to steal the blinds, are you?"



"She had called me out and both of us knew it," Barton told me later. "My move was just too obvious. But when the flop came down K-5-2, I still bet about 60 percent of the pot because I wanted to stay in control of the hand and because I knew she'd either fold or go over the top of me. She was a really aggressive player who rarely just called. If she raised, I would fold. She stared me down for what felt like a couple of hours, but she finally mucked. I took a deep breath. 'You could probably beat my jack, couldn't you?' she asked me. I told her I probably could."



During the next break, the male dealer, breaking protocol, came up to Barton and said, "Ooooh, Chicago, I like your game, girl. I saw you bluffin' and I thought, 'That girl's got balls,' but I was hoping the other woman didn't call, 'cause I knew you were beat. Your heart was pumpin' and your stomach was goin' up and down. I knew you were bluffin'. You gotta put on a big sweatshirt, girl." Barton dug through her backpack and began draping herself with what she calls the "frumptastic outfit" she wore for the rest of the tournament. Flesh duly covered, she got mind-bendingly unlucky on the final three hands but still finished second and took home $123,178. This would have been worth 11.44 billion rupiah and 7,000 lashes in Aceh, to say nothing of the punishment for her day and a half in the tank top.



Bottom line? Cover up those tummies and pulse points, ladies. Unless, that is, you're purposefully deploying warm smiles and décolletage to distract your opponents from the issue at hand.



More general bluffing guidelines include bluster = weakness. If Ahmadinejad claims to already have "the full gamut of nuclear technology," a pokeraticious diplomat will infer that he doesn't. She'll put him on a much weaker hand and reraise. If he tries to stare her down, she'll remain serenely confident that leaders holding powerful cards tend to downplay or even – the Israelis again come to mind – deny the existence of a nuclear arsenal.



Isolate your opponent, since one player is exponentially easier to bluff than two or three. This is why Dr. Rice tries to isolate Iran by accepting Chinese and Russian demands to limit sanctions against their affluent client.

Project strength. After defeating Saddam, our failure to create a stable peace in which democracy could thrive makes us look weak. So does Israel's failure to disarm Hezbollah. So does our failure to capture Osama bin Laden.



Expect duplicity. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who also negotiated for the release of American hostages in 1979, warns that Iranian negotiators will deploy "bazaar behavior" resembling that of "a Middle Eastern marketplace, with outlandish demands, feints at abandoning the process and haggling over minor details up to the very last minute." [New York Times, 6/13/06] He counsels our current negotiators to remain steadfast but realistic. Or as Doyle Brunson, winner of a record 10 WSOP bracelets, has noted, "Luck favors the backbone, not the wishbone."



Make sure your holecards remain facedown. Pyongyang has never shown its hand by conducting a test, but is widely assumed to have nuclear weapons. Ditto, in spades, for Tel Aviv. It's safe to assume this is why Tehran bars IAEC inspectors from several key sites.



The most spectacular upside of a nuclear bluff is avoiding warfare, not to mention the destruction of earth's economy and ecology. If we or the Israelis can make Iran's leaders believe Natanz and even a city or two will be nuked if they don't halt enrichment, we might short-circuit their quest for weapons-grade material and avoid having to kill a single Iranian. The downside, of course, is increasing the risk that we'll overplay our hand and push a desperate opponent too hard, unleashing a whirlwind of suicide bombers.

On Aug. 10, with six players left of the 8,773 who entered the WSOP main event, Jamie Gold raised to $750,000. Richard Lee called from the small blind and Paul Wasicka called from the big blind. The flop came Q Q J. Check, check, check. The next card was the J. Lee checked and so did Wasicka. Gold bet $800,000 into the $2.3 million pot, representing a queen or a jack.



As a film agent, Gold had represented James Gandolfini, Lucy Liu, Jimmy Fallon, and Felicity Huffman. With his dark hair and irreverent manner, he naturally calls to mind Ari Gold, the agent played by Jeremy Piven on Entourage. But earlier this year, the real agent Gold changed careers, beginning to make his way as a producer.



The question for Lee and Wasicka remained: Did Gold have a queen or a jack in his hand, or at the very least an ace? Both scanned Gold's face long and hard for a tell, and both folded. Before pulling in the Sierra of chips, Gold showed them his hand: 3 2, a stark-naked bluff. With his share of good cards and a number of similar bluffs, Gold went on to win the $12 million first prize.



Sixteen days later, Iran reraised the Security Council by announcing it would ramp up enrichment activities. Ahmadinejad italicized the point by inaugurating a new heavy-water reactor, the kind that specializes in weapons-grade plutonium rather than electricity. This belligerent gesture came during large-scale war games named after Zolfaghar, "The Sword of Ali." (Ali is revered by Shiites as the successor of Muhammad.) Ayatollah Rafsanjani declared: "We hope America has learned a lesson from the war in Lebanon and refrains from getting involved in another conflict." Underscoring this veiled threat with violence, state television showed troops firing live ammunition from helicopters, dropping large bombs in the desert, and launching medium-range radar-evading missiles, called saeghah, which means thunder in Persian. Brig. Gen. Muhammad Hassan Dadrass took pains to emphasize that Iran was not revealing "the major part of its military capability." By alluding to vastly more serious thunder, was he saying Iran has a nuclear ace, maybe two, up her sleeve – or, a la Jamie Gold, just a trey and a deuce?



And now it turns out that when Mr. Gold [allegedly] promised a new friend they would split whatever prize money he won 50-50, he may have been bluffing as well.