Some have opined that modern social sciences - especially political science, economics, and communication - have been rendered manifestly silly by the urge to reduce human interactions to numerical methods. Those opinions are quite sound. But all but the most churlish humanities scholars would agree that there is something to be learned from the discipline imposed by very basic numerical methods. For instance, game theory can often describe in very broad terms what negotiations are or are not likely to yield satisfactory results. Now that Rumsfeld is gone and the State Department realists are back in control of the Defense Department, there's talk of dropping piles of gold on Iran. We have a very fundamental question:

Q: Assuming that there is nothing that Iran wants more than the bomb, what can the US give them to get them to give up the bomb?
A: Nothing. There is nothing that the US can offer Iran that they will take instead of building nukes, because there is nothing they prefer more than nukes.

There. Now you have mathematical proof that negotiating with Iran is doomed to foot-dragging, nuke-developing failure. Although of course, we could be wrong about our assumptions. Maybe there's a secret code that only nuanced and sophisticated anti-Semiticish thinkers like Walt and Mearsheimer can crack, wherein Arab and Muslim states that commit themselves to successful civilizational conflict mean something else.

We've heard something like that before. For a decade, Arafat said that he was committed to destroying Israel no matter what. The State Department, the Clinton Administration, and political science academics said that he was just saying those things to shore up public support, and that secretly he was ready to make tough concessions. People opposed to Oslo (unsophisticated, uneducated rightwing lunatics, according to many press outlets) made the opposite claim - hey, maybe Arafat actually means what he says. Bibi was among those totally unreasonable rejectionists that the Clinton administration had to bulldoze out of the way so that Clinton could try to achieve his Nobel Peace Prize. Here's what Bibi is saying today about Iran:

What Netanyahu doesn't realize is that he's just not smart enough to understand that Ahmadinejad is just kidding about all that. He should go have a talk with New York Times staffers and State Department Arabists. They'll explain to him that Arab and Muslim leaders never mean what they say. And that military-modernizing lunatics who threaten to wipe out millions of Jews never mean what they say either (h/t for Bibi article: MR reader Joel)

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Previously: Iran Baffles World By Refusing To Give Up Nuclear Ambitions, Iran, Much of the World Kind of Anti-Semitic, Reuters: Problems With North Korea Began In 2002 Under Bush