If we don't bomb Iran, a terrorist might shoot you in the face with a shotgun
As I've been posting here, the signs that the Cheney-Bush administration is pushing for war with Iran are pretty grim. But first, the hopeful news. Kinda sorta.
Robert Dreyfuss, who has done some of the best reporting on intelligence issues related to the buildup to the Iraq War, is concluding that war is more likely "off the table" than "on" right now. In We're Not Going To Iran TomPaine.com 09/20/06, he writes:
After three years of bluster, after three years of menacing Iran with military options ever "on the table," after three long years of declaring forcefully that Iran will never gain access to nuclear technology, the president's stunningly mild-mannered comments on the topic yesterday — "we're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis" — may be a sign that the corner has been turned on Iran. It may be a sign that once and for all that the realists have won, that the international community has triumphed, that the opposition of Russia and China to sanctions on Iran has been victorious, and that Western Europe's far more level-headed approach to Iran has prevailed.
Dreyfuss is anything but a cockeyed optimist. So it's encouraging to see that he thinks that reality has imposed itself on the Mayberry Machiavellis.
Still, it's important to recognize the basis on which he draws that cautious conclusion, and the qualification he makes to it.
This is an important point, and one that oppenents of expanding the Iraq War to Iran have been making for a while:
Four years ago, of course, precisely the same diplomatic phalanx opposed Bush as he threatened Iraq. There are, I’ve written, many parallels: the Bush administration accusing Iran of harboring al-Qaida and building WMD, neoconservative analysts warning that time is running out, Pentagon task forces making contingency plans for war and so on. Back then, too, Bush smilingly promised to go to the United Nations to seek support for the crusade against Baghdad, only to launch a unilateral war of aggression on his own months later, after dismissing the United Nations as feckless and cowardly. Then, however, Bush had an army to invade Iraq. This time, that army is bogged down in Iraq, stretched to the breaking point, and the international community is both older and wiser. And the neoconservatives have been taken down a peg or two. (my emphasis)
The US Army has 147,000 troops (and increasing, it seems) in Iraq, with little capacity to reinforce them in the event of an Iranian attack in conjuction with Iraqi government forces and Shi'a militia, a likely consequence of bombing Iran.
Still, Dreyfuss' optimism on this point is a decidedly qualified optmism:
Suddenly, stabilizing Iraq - and minimizing the political fallout from Iraq at home — may be more important to the Bush administration than sparking yet another conflagration in the region.
We can only hope. True, we could wake up any fall morning to the news that American planes are conducting bombing raids on Iran’s dozens of nuclear facilities - raids that would be likely to expand to countless other Iranian military targets, from airports and missile installations to ports, military bases, government offices and beyond. Or, we could awake to hear that Israel, on a more limited scale, has initiated attacks of its own on Iran. But more and more, it's starting to look like the realists have won this fight.
This hope, though, assumes that the actual military capabilities and risks will produce something like rational prudence in the Cheney-Bush government.
Sam Gardiner reminds us of the possible fault in that thinking:
Unfortunately, the military option does not make sense. When I discuss the possibility of an American military strike on Iran with my European friends, they invariably point out that an armed confrontation does not make sense — that it would be unlikely to yield any of the results that American policymakers do want, and that it would be highly likely to yield results that they *do* not. I tell them they cannot understand U.S. policy if they insist on passing options through that filter. The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran.
For more on US military options against Iran, see What Would War Look Like? by Michael Duffy Truthout.org 09/17/06 (from Time magazine).
Sam Gardiner doesn't offer a very rosy picture of the likely results of a US attack on Iran:
At the end of the path that the administration seems to have chosen, will the issues with Iran be resolved? No. Will the region be better off? No. Is it clear Iran will abandon its nuclear program? No. On the other hand, can Iran defeat the United States militarily? No.
Will the United States force a regime change in Iran? In all probability it will not. Will the economy of the United States suffer? In all probability it will. Will the United States have weakened its position in the Middle East? Yes. Will the United States have reduced its influence in the world? Yes.
Billmon in Only the Beginning 09/21/06 discusses the strategic logic behind the idea of striking Iran with nuclear weapons. Yes, logic. Something can be criminal, vicious and unnecessary and still follow a certain kind of logic, however flawed. Billmon writes:
There is only one U.S. move I can think of that could possibly offset Iran’s natural advantages in this game of geopolitical chess - the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The objective of such a strike would not only be to destroy Iran’s nuclear plants more completely, but to demonstrate to Tehran that the old rules don’t apply, that America is prepared to commit even barbarous war crimes if that’s what it takes to deter hostile powers from acquiring, or even trying to acquire, nuclear weapons.
It would, in other words, take the logic of preventative war - and Cheney’s one percent doctrine - to their ultimate conclusion.
The Bush Doctrine notion of preventive war is actually a direct intellectual-political descendant of the ideas and arguments of those who favored a nuclear first-strike strategy against the USSR. The implications of this aren't discussed nearly as much as I would like to see them. The best analysis I've seen of this is in Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism (2005).
A lot of Republicans have a grim fascination for the fact that bombs kill lots of people. And nuclear bombs make the biggest bang and can kill large numbers of people more easily than conventional bombs do. It's entirely plausible to me that Dick Cheney would love to "validate" the use of nuclear weapons by using one somewhere. That's part of the huge risk for the United States in war with Iran. The negative consequences to the US of using one of *our* nukes on Iran are far greater than any current nuclear threat from Iran against the US, or even a future threat that can plausibly be projected from current conditions.
Robert Dreyfuss, who has done some of the best reporting on intelligence issues related to the buildup to the Iraq War, is concluding that war is more likely "off the table" than "on" right now. In We're Not Going To Iran TomPaine.com 09/20/06, he writes:
Sam Gardiner reminds us of the possible fault in that thinking:
