The Iraq redux on Iran that I find so disturbing
Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 12:52PM ANALYSIS: “Terror Group Assists in Struggle With Iran: Some in Congress See a role for Anti-Tehran Exiles in Push for Regime Change,” by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 22 May 2006, p. A6.
ARTICLE: “U.S. Rejects Direct Talks With Iran but Keeps Meeting With Europe, China and Russia,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 25 May 2006, p. A6.
OP-ED: "The Persian Complex: Iran's centuries-old quest for respect," by Abbas Amanat, New York Times, 25 May 2006, p. A27.
ARTICLE: "Powers Inch Ahead on Nuclear Deal With Iran," by Reuters, Washington Post, 25 May 2006, p. A23.
The rerun dynamic on Iran is kinda stunning: relying on somewhat slimy ex-pat group that’s easily designatable as a terrorist group itself, a lot of loose speculation on the ease of the take-down possibilities using air power, the poor intell on WMD acquisition and a ramping up of timelines (again, with the danger of Israel taking things into its own hands as an implied strategic backdrop).
Noting the similarities is not to routinely condemn all the strategic logic attached (especially on Iraq, which had multiple outstanding UN “warrants”), but rather simply to acknowledge that this administration seems to have only one approach in these things, and that given the lack of success in operation #1, it’s hard to see how either Congress or our allies would bite on operation #2.
Also just as clear is that the Big Bang argument cannot be repeated casually. If you cannot follow up on the first effort, what would make anyone think you’d do better on the second pulsing of the regional system? Furthering the perturbation previously unleashed can be done in a wide variety of non-kinetic means, but trying to sell military ops against Iran just comes off as a widening of the war-like conditions that still afflict too much of Iraq, simultaneously denying the U.S. key potential partners in lessening that conflict--first and foremost Iran itself.
In general, rerunning the Iraq sales job just smacks of an unwillingness to learn. Warren had me write the “Monks of War” because he was interested in showing how U.S. ground forces are learning rapidly in Iraq in an operational and tactical sense, despite the apparent lack of strategic learning going on in this administration. When I started to research the piece, I felt like his original argument was too sharply drawn (i.e., the ground forces weren’t learning that fast and the government wasn’t learning that slow), but the more time passes, the better that judgment looks.
And I think that’s a major undercurrent of the public’s anger toward Bush: not only does he not get it, but his team goes out of the way to avoid getting it. Everything is piled on top of everything else: tax cuts PLUS huge upticks in spending, the GWOT plus China is still threatening, Iraq PLUS Iran, ongoing war ops PLUS a long-term acquisition agenda.
For a group of CEO-types so celebrated for making tough decisions, this crowd never seems to make any. It all just gets added to the pile, the strategic overhang growing like the federal debt.
For all this talk of a new strategic environment, this largely Cold War crowd has simply added all the burdens of today on top of all the fears of yesterday.
There is this Republican strategy that says, We spend like crazy and then force subsequent Democratic administrations to deal with the resulting ceilings--in effect, they load up on their preferred spending packages, especially defense, and by doing so force the hard choices on others. Expressed in this way, it’s beyond any political gamesmanship that any rational actor would accept as reasonable. It’s just so amazing cynical, and to the extent that it accurately describes what this administration is doing in national security, it quickly moves beyond cynical to truly dangerous for the global system as a whole. More to the selfish point, though, it’s just so self-destructive for this nation. It’s simply unsustainable. You can’t get from this A to any Z worth attaining. Instead, you just set the country up for a larger correction.
Choosing to rerun Iran with Iran, while begging off on the far more important dynamics of our relationship with the China/Taiwan/North Korea nexus, for example, just tells me that this administration doesn’t really see the post-9/11 security environment that it claims to understand so much better than the Democrats (that’s not to say that the Dems get it much better, only that Bush and Co. reveal themselves to be disappointingly limited in their ability to move beyond their decision to take down Saddam as THE bold move of the first term).
As I’ve said before: we’re seeing the limits of strategic imagination with this crowd. I felt we were close enough in 2004 that I was very confident in arguing that Kerry would have been a better choice then--that we truly needed to switch that horse right in the middle of the race to connect the Middle East. What stuns me now is not that I was right in that gut instinct (hardly a bold move for a life-long Democrat who’s yet to vote Republican in a national election), but how much that lack of strategic imagination would end up costing us nationally and internationally in a second Bush term.
In short, I think we’re just beginning to realize the price tag.
So if I were a Republican, I’d start running for president more openly against Bush and stop trying to position myself merely as the Hillary alternative. I think the 06 elections may feel an awful lot like the 94 seismic shift, and that it will be a public feeling fed up with this White House’s inability to learn from its mistakes that will constitute the prime force behind this backlash.
I don’t argue any of this easily: I don’t want to see us strategically sidelined, much less isolated, for the next three years. I fear globalization is simply put too much at risk in the meantime, and that none of us realize exactly how dangerous that may end up being for the planet as a whole.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to see how the current tack on Iran will get us what we want either. The Europeans are getting fairly explicit on what the solution set needs to be: a security guarantee if we expect Iran to give up the bomb. This administration won’t offer that guarantee, because it’s more interested in regime change than proliferation. The problem with this strategic approach is that it pushed Iran down this path in the first place.
There is a definition of stupidity (I think from Einstein) that says it’s expecting different results despite doing things the same way over and over again. I think we’re witnessing some strategic stupidity on Iran, and I just don’t get the lack of confidence to try something else that seems to permeate this crowd.
Frankly, we should be a more confident global superpower. I compare our assets to anybody’s, including China, and I trade this nation for nobody. We should act like that’s the case, instead of responding with so much fear to everything around the planet. The confident superpower cooperates with others, the fearful one resists everybody and pretends that’s strength displayed.
Iran wants respect, which it defines as security from our aggression. In a perfect world, Iran would have no oil or gas, and then we'd be able to get acquiesence from Russia, India, and China. But that scenario is not in the works, despite all the polite responses we get.
Meanwhile, none of this approach taps the one asset we need to tap most: the Iranian people and their dissatisfaction with the mullahs and the current government. Instead, we force a choice between perceived self-respect and humiliation, between a sense of identity and a none-too-veiled threat.
Here is Amanat's warning:
If the United States resorts to sanctions, or worse, to some military response, the outcome would be not only disastrous but, in the long run, transient. Just as the West did with Iran's railroad and oil industry, it can for a time deny Iran's nuclear technology, but it cannot wipe out Iranians' haunting memories. And no doubt the Islamic regime will amply exploit these collective memories to advance its nuclear program even as it stifles voices of domestic dissent. Even more than before, Iranians will blame outside powers for their misfortunes and choose not to focus on their own troubled road to modernity.
I see this pathway as the death of the Big Bang.
Reader Comments (11)
Is it not possible that we are at a disadvantage when trying to deal confidently with totalitarian regimes such as Iran?
Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush basically repeated the Democrat talking points and went out of it's way to mock Bush. Why? Because he knows that Bush is under fire from the press, the opposing party, and from some in his own party. He knows that in a few years someone else will be in the White House and he's hoping that someone will be a lot more accommodating.
Yes, we are very powerful both militarily and economically but Iran doesn't care. They have their faith to guide them. I am convinced that they believe, much as the Communists believed, that they are in the vanguard of history.
You may be right that direct talks with them could lead to something useful. Or they could be a means for Iran to continue to stall while they work on their bomb.
Amil Imani, an American-Iranian, has a post up at The American Thinker blog:(http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.phparticle_id=5524) in which he explains how he sees the situation. If he's right things are going to get a lot worse no matter what we do. It might be well to be prepared for that.
You are worried about Israel acting against Iran. So am I, but if I lived in a neighborhood where someone was threatening to wipe me out, my guns would be loaded and readily availble at all times. Most assuredly, if I got information indicating the attack was imminent, I would protect myself anyway I could. Wouldn't you?
What would the situation in Iraq and Iran be if: 1. The majority of the MSM had been solidly behind the Iraq effort? 2. The Dems had taken the position that they did not think Iraq was a good idea, but they kept their criticisms to constructive ideas/suggestions? 3.The majority of Americans were solidly behind the Iraq effort? And they showed their support with welcome home rallies for troops returning from battle as well as holding public rallies to show support for the families of deployed soldiers? 4. Preident Bush had instituted a War Bond program in which citizens could show support by buying war bonds? IMO, the Islamists would realize that they can't wait out the administration. That it isn't just a short term president they have to deal with but the entire country. They see our divisions and they still believe we are a "Paper Tiger."
I agree with you that the level of pork barrel spending by Congress during this time of national trial is unconscionable.....by both parties! I've been disappointed that Bush has not vetoed some of it. I also agree with your thoughts about military spending. It was irrational and wasteful when I was on active duty (1955-1975). Some things just don't change.
Iran wants respect? Come again? Aren't you conflating the Iranian people with the Iranian Administration?
No, China wants respect. India wants respect. What Iran wants (because my eyes are firmly on the Iranian Administration) is something fundamentally different -- and you might as well quit blinking (sorry, but it really appears that way to me) when coming to this aspect of the problem. Isn't it high time we take that government at its word? Isn't it high time that we learn from the race previously run by Pakistan, Iran and Iraq to be the Big Dog in the Islamic world that beats back the non-believers?
I realize that since 9/11 we're operating at hyperspeed, relatively speaking, in the international arena but I analogize your approach (and Greg Djerejian et al.) to Tigerhawks recent post on the President Carter / Stansfield Turner restructuring of the CIA in the mid-1970s. Y'all are taking that role (it seems to me) with all of this obsessive discussion about "mistakes" in Iraq and a re-run in Iran. Far too European in operation for my tastes.
You (apparently) see something approaching a chaotic disaster in Iraq and I see something fundamentally different. I love reading you and readily admit you could be right but . . . your impatience is startling -- along with your ability to honestly believe that what the Iranian government wants is respect. Where, pray tell, in Iran's concept of Islam is there a place for this idea of "respect" that you insist they simply want? I assert that it doesn't exist, TPMB, and no amount of "hoping" is going to generate it.
Fortunately, the Bush Administration recognizes that sad fact and is dancing on the slippery slope that must be danced. I give the Iranians their due, they've made things more difficult in Iraq than that job should have been -- but that's not about Bush Administration mistakes. Iran would have been just as mischievous (and successfull) regardless of America's strategy.
That's the way this hack sees it. Charge hard, Dubya. Iranian sponsorship of international terrorism is well-documented. America should hold firm. Damn the costs.
re: your points, Jim:
1. the media's job is not to be 'behind' the war effort. that's not what the press is for. reportedly, most MSM reporters, et al. are liberal. that may be. and they may have focused on the negative in Iraq more than they should have. but hey, if that's the case, then it's a free market and a free press and we need to let the market go to work on it. in any case, if the MSM was 50 or 100 % Republican, their job would not have been to be 'behind' the war effort.
your points 2 and 3 are totally unrealistic, in my opinion.
2. if President Bush needed indefinite, unaccountable, bipartisan support for the war in Iraq, then he never should have sent our troops, because that is not going to happen. the Democrats lean anti-war all the time.
3. we have to deal in realities. wanting the American public to act differently is a tall order. i think there was majority support before the missing WMDs. and there may have been had we gone in with a good, strategic explanation instead of trumped up charges.
RG: are you conflating Khamenei with Ahmadinejad?
lots of times, religious nut-jobs who get power turn to wanting things like respect. Tom bets on those who get power wanting more power. that's a lever we can apply.
criticism of the Bush Administration's handling of the occupation of Iraq is not the same thing as obsessing about mistakes. they made a lot of mistakes. and Tom is impatient with mistakes that cost the lives of our military personnel. do you damn those costs?
Sean,
You make a thoroughly valid point with regard to wanting to deal realistically with a fickle American public and a newsmedia with the attention span of an MTV brat, yet I think you almost obviate that point by suggesting that there was no casus belli before the acronym WMD came into the common parlance, in September of '02. Indeed, I would suggest, there was a casus belli that not only made sense, but was based on much-derided international law and consensus: that Iraq had defied international consensus one too many times, and it was time to put teeth into UNSC Resolutions 968 and 981, and hold them to their obligations under the cease-fire agreement worked out in 1991. The only problem with that case was that a) 90% of the American public didn't understand it, and b) of the 10% that did, half of them hated the idea of going to war based on international obligations that they personally would never have undertaken.
Thus, we wound up with a new case for war about four months later (the Res. 968/981 case was floated in July of '02) based on flimsy, and possibly outright (though probably unknowingly) false, evidence of a massive covert weapons-development program in a country that nobody trusted not to use a nuke, or nerve gas, or whatever else they managed to come up with.
Yes, it turned out to be nonsense. But don't blame the administration's corruption, or whatever the politically-expedient term is this week in the power-hungry left. The reason, I would suggest, was the power-hungry right needed a way to unite the American public behind a deadly threat to national security, so the dog could be properly wagged. They started out arguing that the reason already existed, and only later were forced to come up with a justification that the American public would both understand and properly fear.
Sean,
I assume you are not old enough to remember WWII. or Korea.
During both of those wars there were people who were not in favor of fighting. There will always be those.
What was different was that the MSM realized that we needed to win and they were not constantly critiquing every move and mistake. And yes, there were many bone-headed mistakes made in those wars. Most of them much worse than anything that has happened in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Politicians of both parties voiced their concerns/criticisms in an adult fashion, recognizing that politics ended at the waters edge.
The general public, in spite of many sacrifices that were required, supported the war effort.
I was a lad during WWII and got in on the end of Korea so I saw those things and I know that it isn't always true that there will be a lot of anti-war sentiment nor that the MSM's job is to be "unbiased" about our war efforts. Challenge the administration all they want to on domestic issues, but recognize that constant carping aids the enemy by showing him the division and uncertainty among us.
It was Vietnam that changed things. IMO the gradualism of Johnson's appraoch lead to a stalemate of attrition and when the MSM, notably Walter Cronkite, turned against the war the die was cast. We didn't lose miltarily, we just lost the will thanks to an MSM that kept up a constant drumbeat of negativity. I'm a Vietnam vet and those memories still rankle, deep down.
"i think there was majority support before the missing WMDs. and there may have been had we gone in with a good, strategic explanation instead of trumped up charges."
I could send you hundreds of quotes from members of both parties talking about Saddam's WMDs and how dangerous they were. Bush's charges were not trumped up. They were believed by all and the result of the best inytelligence estimates. (Which we all know now were WRONG!) I supported the Iraq war because I had read TPNM and understood the need to sometimes use force to transform the Gap. And if you will re-read some of Bush's speeches leading up to the war that intent was definitely in there. Few listened to it, but I assumed that Tom and his cohorts would have noticed.
Yeah, I'm an unrealistic old fogey that remembers when this country was united and accomplished big things. (Winning WWII and Korea, rebuilding Europe and Japan.) IMO we are slouching down the trail to another major war. Undoubtedly between the West and the Islamic world. Our inability to come together and work toward accomplishing the hard tasks that would head that off is very disconcerting to me. I'm not going to be around much longer but I have children and want a better world for them and their kids.
Yes, the parallels between the rhetoric on Iraq and Iran are frightening, to say the least. 50% of my brain says, rationally, that they can't possibly try to do something militarily against Iran--it's counter to most of our interests and the interests of our allies and we're already stretching ourselves in Iraq too much.
But there's still that other 50% that notes how similar everything is up to this point and thinks "My God, they're really planning on doing something militarily." And those two pieces of my brain form one big discontinuity, diverging on separate paths so much that it almost hurts to think about it.
As much as I am wary of your sometimes-boundless optimism, Mr. Barnett, I sincerely hope that your views on the matter prevail in the end. Otherwise, we're in lots of trouble.
Re: strategic imagination in Bush Admin. They are on the way out. I believe you're right that something big is coming in '06 and '08. We're right at the normal time for a national "upheaval" in politics, the end of one long cycle and the start of the next. New political and economic cycles typically start every 70-80 years (social cycles, as you acknowledge in another post, are somewhat shorter)... and right now we're in the middle of that range. '06 and '08 will see major changes. I'd lay good odds on them being in a positive direction, though the possibility for a real crisis is always there.
J Ragland: you misread my post. i only said the WMD charges were trumped up. i do believe we had plenty of cause for war, not least of all the many relevant UN resolutions. i wish the war had been presented in those terms and a strategic goal (anything in the neighborhood of Tom's 'shrinking the gap' would do) instead of 'imminent threat'. as Tom says, we haven't faced in imminent threat in 50+ years.
i personally find your disdain for the American public ('MTV brats', 90% too dumb to understand UN resolutions, etc) very disturbing. if we're that far gone, why not give it up and move offshore? using the tail to wag the dog, whatever your motive, is almost never justified in my opinion, and certainly not in a case like this.
Sean Meade - I disagree that it is not the media's job to be behind the war. It is there job. They should be honest and evenhanded, and hold up a mirror to the US and the West so that we can correct the inevitable mistakes as fast as possible at as little cost as possible. They are not doing that.
They have emptied the newsrooms of veterans to the point that the milbloggers are regularly finding elementary errors of fact that are downright embarrassing. They are all too often functioning as propaganda arms for the enemy by minimizing our accomplishments and maximizing the enemy's accomplishments. They give much more credit to enemy propaganda officers than our own. In short, knowing or unknowing, they are not doing their job and they need to be called on it. Even handed, neutral coverage would be a distinct improvement.
TPMB - I think that absent the nutbars pursuing a millenarian, deviationist, Shia Islam in the form of Khomeinism, I don't think that we have a fundamental objection to Iran's pursuit of nuclear power. It would certainly free up oil for further export, stabilizing the world energy market.
I think that Iran could look forward to a lot of support on the civilizan nuclear front if it weren't so obvious that they were looking for the bomb. Pitch the mullahs out of the halls of day-to-day political power and we can get to the vital compromise point, drawing Iran into a collective security arrangement so that somebody else's bombs are guaranteeing their security. At that point, as long as Iranian nuclear scientists just keep their bomb making knowledge theoretical, we've got a solution. Iran gets a nuclear umbrella without the pain of maintaining its own bombs and it gains scientists who can quickly make bombs if Iran is ever betrayed by the great power it enters into that security web with.
From our perspective, Iran ceases to be a proliferation problem and we can move on to repairing our relationship with it.
Jim: no sir. not old enough to remember those wars. i was born in 72.
with all due respect, i just don't think that's the kind of environment we live in anymore (basically bipartisan support for, or at least reticence on, expeditionary wars).
(i believe there was Executive pressure on the intelligence to be interpreted as WMDs/imminent threat, but that point is not central to my argument.)
i certainly did not intend to imply that you are 'an unrealistic old fogey'. and i hope i am not being an impertinent, young upstart. we live in a much more complicated world now, where the President cannot say 'we have to hold Korea' or 'Saddam is a threat' and people will line up behind him. in fact, this more complicated, networked, 'globalized' world is one that Tom's thinking obviously embraces. but with it come many more opinions about our international conduct (not least of all on weblogs!).
i do not think it means we can't accomplish great things. America came together well after 9/11. there was still a lot of public support for the war on terror well into the Iraq occupation. but this support has eroded through the mismanagement of the occupation by the Bush Administration and the stark realities. these unintended consequences should be taken into account in any future military expeditions. i'm not talking about a new Powell Doctrine, but sober assessment of the objectives along with likely pitfalls.
TM: you can call me Sean ;-)
we apparently disagree on the the technical definition of the media's role relative to war. i have no problem agreeing with you that the MSM has unfairly portrayed the situation in Iraq and that they need to be called on it. again, the media is mostly a business. if we agree that they're performing poorly, let's apply market pressures to them. i feel we are doing some of that with alternative media, including information that can be garnered on the internet, including weblogs.