Taking military action against Iran could put President Bush on a collision course with Congress, leading Democrats and a Republican lawmaker cautioned Friday following Bush's threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq.
It's been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike.
But the authorization would be no easy sell. Two knowledgeable U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iran is highly classified, said that the administration so far doesn't have "smoking-gun" evidence that could be used publicly to justify an air attack.
The presumed target of an attack would be camps in Iran where officials believe the Iranians are teaching Iraqi Shiite fighters how to fashion bombs that can destroy American armored vehicles.
An attack on Iran would be a very distinct action in terms of initiating open warfare against another country. But it would also be a major expansion of the Iraq War. Despite the arrogance of the administration's war planners, it's also likely to be the implementation of what I've been calling the Untergang Option.
But this is a disturbing sign from Stearns' report: "Many on Capitol Hill said the reaction would depend largely on the provocation used as a rationale for an attack."
That's a potentially disastrous position for the Democrats to take. Because whatever the pretext, it will sound hairaising and urgent, and anyone who criticizes the war plan will be subject to the standard Republican noise machine blasts for being unpatriotic, weak on defense, unfaithful to the War on Terror, and yadda, yadda.
"Who shot first" never determines the character and nature of a war. Much less the ability to fight it. The United States, despite the vast sums being spent on a military that squanders huge amounts of it in boondoggles like Star Wars and no-bid, irresponsibly supervised contracts to Halliburton, is not prepared for a war with Iran.
And it's not a matter of dropping bombs on a far-away country and then taking extra precautions against terrorists attack they might try in the United States or isolated military facilities. The US Army and Marine Corps are right there next door in Iraq and Kuwait, already fighting in a war that most of the world outside the American Republican Party can see is lost. And our main allies in Iraq are the pro-Iranian, Shi'a-majority Iraqi government and the Shi'a parties and militias associated with it. A war with Iran works directly against the main goal of the war we're currently fighting in Iran.
It's would also be irresponsible in the extreme for Congress to allow this administration to go to war on whatever pretext without forcing them to make public the broad outlines at least of the covert war they are currently waging against Iran. Seymour Hersh has reported on Special Forces being inserted into Iran to carry out prewar surveillance as well as acts of sabotage. There have also been reports of terrorist groups being run into Iran from the east. And the anti-Iran MEK terrorist group is being supported by the Cheney-Bush administration.
Neither Congress nor the public can respond in a responsible without those covert-war operations being brought to light. If Iran responds to sabotage operations being carried out by the US in the covert war, that's a quite different thing from an unprovoked attack.
We should also not play the standard Serious Foreign Policy Expert game of talking about Iran policy in the abstract, as though we were talking about a generic American government implementing it. We don't have a generic government. We have a government run by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. They are incompetent, dishonest and irresponsible. They shown in Afghanistan and Iraq that they do not just a poor job but a spectacularly bad job with wars.
It is impossible for me to imagine any remotely likely scenario in which Cheney and Bush could conduct an overt war against Iran without the results being disastrous for the United States.
Stearns also quotes a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying about the notion of attacking Iran, "I think you'll find a lot of skeptical Republicans, no less Democrats, on the Hill."
There may be a few Republicans that will ostentatiously wring their hands about their "deep concerns" and whatnot as they vote to support any attack on Iran that Cheney and Bush want to make. There may be one or two in the Senate that would even vote against an Iran war, though I see that as extremely unlikely, given their performance on the Iraq war and the massive abuses of Executive power. Joe Lieberman, of course, is already claiming that Iran has declared war on us.
The Democrats in Congress need to find a way to block this. Period.
(Drawing from José Guadalupe Posada)
