More Iran
If you're interested in the Iran issue, I would recommend the entire latest episode of BloggingHeads.tv which features Jaqueline Shire who has bona fide expertise in such things. In this section she makes an important point that I think too often gets neglected in this talk which is that if the United States starts a war (and, yes, bombing another country's nuclear plants is starting a war) we don't get to unilaterally decide on the scope of the ensuing conflict. If we bomb, presumably Iran will retaliate. Those retaliations will, in turn, tend to increase pressure for us to counter-retaliate. And so on and so forth. Limited wars are possible, but "spiral out of control" scenarios are possible, too, and at the moment neither country is being run by sober-minded even-keel types.
Just saying that 'It is unacceptable for Iran to have nukes', as Bush has said, makes a war very likely. Once he has stated a hard position, he will never back down.
See my comments on Max's post at TPM today for reasons why we should rely on containment and MAD, not a pre-emptive air attack.
April 10, 2006 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Matt, your Prospect article regarding wingnuts and Iran lays out in some measure the political insanity of a US military strike against Iran. And I agree that Iran would presumably respond using whatever means. Iran, after all, is not some vague terrorist network, but a sovereign nation.
But there is also a moral/historical dimension to this issue:
Quoting Chomsky:
"No sane person wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons. However, it's hard to disagree with the conclusion of one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, that Iran would be insane not to develop them, surrounded by hostile and threatening nuclear powers, including the global superpower -- which ... has a history in Iran that Iranians are unlikely to sweep under the rug as is done here.
Another part of that history is that as long as the tyrant it imposed was ruling Iran, the US was providing material and diplomatic support for the very same enrichment programs that it now demands that Iran terminate."
Given that, bombing Iran will only breed more anti-US/Israel sentiment among Islam, and will doubtless result in even more damage to long-term US foreign policy vis a vis Islam and the Middle Oil East. $5 at the gas pumps, notwithstanding the eventual nuclear attack on US soil within a few years. To say nothing of the resulting chaos in Iraq.
April 10, 2006 6:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
The objectives of the US in the ME - vis colonising Palestine and controlling oil revenuews - are only possible with absolute military dominance. Powerful organised groups who benefit from the small-group-bias of US politics demand those objectives. So we are stuck with Michael Scheuer's point that either we give up those objectives or prepare for permanent hostility with the Islamic world to ensure the persistance of that military dominance, of which the Iranian case is only the next example.
April 10, 2006 7:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tacitus on Newbold
"Instead, we must look to admonitions of this type, wherein military personnel are urged to go to the very threshold of rebellion, and see in them all the danger and hazard that the Founders would. We shouldn't kid ourselves and assume that those touting Newbold today will note the manifest flaws in his work. It is enough that a senior member of the United States military has broken ranks and spoken his mind against the war in Iraq's beginning, if not its continuance. That's a point worth airing in itself. But let us not be overgenerous: there is incoherence here, and in it, no small peril."
This is why it is worthwhile reading Trevino. Being connected in Washington, and unable to keep his trap shut, he is is often one step ahead, speaking oracularly and pre-emptively. He must be interpreted.
Bush wants to attack Iran, and much of the career officer corps is attempting to prevent it.
April 10, 2006 9:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed. There is no solution to this situation as long as US foreign policy is dictated by oil companies, neocons and other statists, and assorted other special interests, including Israel.
As for the air strikes causing an out of control situation, I think that's almost a given. Certainly if Iran ratchets down its direct military response - and it might in order to conserve its military resources for an actual US invasion to seize the Khuzestan province - it will still engage in SOME sort of retaliation. They aren't simply going to sit there and say, "No foul, we screwed up! We're stopping nuclear enrichment forever right now!"
No, they're going to ratchet up HizbAllah and they're going to start the Iraqi militias shooting at Americans.
Does anybody really believe Bush and the neocons are going to sit there and take that without responding? It's insane to even contemplate.
So Bush will go on to demand regime change, just as he now excuses the Iraq war, originally based on WMDs, as necessary because of the need to remove Saddam.
And once you threaten the clerics with the complete elimination of their power in Iran, what have they got left to lose? They can afford to back down slightly on nuclear weapons (if not nuclear energy, due to their economic needs), but they can't afford to just give up.
So the end result HAS to be one of two things: 1) the US bombs Iran from the air and imposes sanctions for the next ten years until the clerics surrender or are overthrown - a reprise of the '90's Iraq policy - which didn't work; 2) the US invades Khuzestan, seizes the oil, then tries to fight off an Iranian guerrilla war (along with aerial bombing) for the next ten years or until the clerics are dead or overthrown - the present Iraq "strategy."
Meanwhile the rest of the Middle East hardens against the US (if it can harden any more than it already has), terrorism expands ten fold worldwide, the US and world economy gets trashed due to the oil price spike (the US will never get the Khuzestan oil flowing again any more than they will the Iraqi oil), and so forth.
The only beneficiaries of this policy will be Israel (Iran will be tied down for the next ten years), and the oil companies (profits will soar) and the military-industrial complex war profiteers (ditto).
Funny - these are just the people that aren't running for election in November...So exactly how will the Democrats putting a hawk like Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman - or the numerous ex-military Dems apparently running who are likely to be hawks on Iran if not Iraq - into power change this scenario - especially if the war is started BEFORE the elections?
The Dems have only ONE chance: they need to get everybody on the left on the one simple page - Congress must pass a resolution explicitly forbidding Bush from doing any of this without an express Declaration of War by Congress. It's that simple - and then try to prevent Clinton and Lieberman from getting that Declaration of War.
Richard Steven Hack
www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com
April 10, 2006 9:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
The m.o. of this administration is to do the opposite - imagine the best possible outcome if we bomb Iran ("They'll welcome us with flowers! Really! That's what Chalabi told us, an he knows Iran much better than he knows Iraq!") And the worst possible outcome if we don't ("Dirty bombs that they... I don't know, they're too evil for us to understand their unknown unknowns! But they are very very bad.") But even these are useful only as propoganda. In evaluating the decision, they separate the outcome from the decision completely - "If you don't support the bombing you are on the side of the Islamofascist bad people! That's all you need to know."
The only hope is that bombing Iran polls badly enough for congressional proto-lobbyists Republicans that they raise a fuss.
April 10, 2006 11:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have finally gotten around to reading John Lewis Gaddis's new history of the Cold War, and it's both excellent, and astonishingly relevant. I haven't gotten very far in it yet, but last night I was reading about Eisenhower, and how he insisted that the United States only prepare for all-out, world-destroying nuclear war, rather than the "limited" nuclear war that all his advisers wanted to plan for. Everybody thought he was crazy, but in retrospect, he was the only one who was being realistic: he had been in combat, and he knew that there is no such thing as "limited" war, and any war plan that depended on all parties acting rationally was a doomed plan. So if we were going to have nuclear plans, he demanded that they recognize reality, however unpleasant it might be, so that nobody might be tempted to start a nuclear exchange based on false optimism about the results.
I was going to follow this with a pointed contrast to our current president, but it's so obvious that it seems like a waste of bandwidth. All I'll say is, maybe next election cycle, we should stop doing polls about which candidate people would like to have a beer with, and start doing some about which candidate people trust with NUCLEAR WEAPONS. For God's sake.
April 11, 2006 8:05 AM | Reply | Permalink