In the winter of 2002, a close friend, a liberal staffer on capital hill, asked me if I thought the crazy fulminations of the neocons and the tough-guy rantings of an insecure President [1] could result in a war with Iraq? My answer was something like ‘read the Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and you will get a good idea of how these pressures can take on a life of their own and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.'
President Obama — perhaps inadvertently — is playing the same game with regard to Iran by trying to neutralize his political opposition at home with a dangerous mutation of Bill Clinton's cynical triangulationstrategy. In this case, the goal of the triangulation strategy is to pull the rug out from under the Republican warmongers like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. If he can co-opt the domestic political pressures for war against Iran, Mr. Obama may well think he can better position himself for the upcoming presidential election. But in so doing, he would be running a real risk of starting yet another ill-conceived war, whether he wants to or not. (Patrick Seale explains one way the march to war could spin out of Obama's control at this link.) To make matters worse, Mr. Obama is a man who has demonstrated that he talks a good line but fails to deliver on his promises when under pressure — just ask the Arabs about his Cairo speech or progressives who believed his promises about health care reform and “change your can believe in.” Whether or not triangulating questions of war and peace is a question of Obama's free will is quite beside the point: a malleable man is playing with the most dangerous kind of fire.
My last post, Beating the War Drums in Versailles on the Potomac, described the buildup of domestic political pressures to launch an attack on Iran in the name of prempting Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the fact that there is no solid intelligence proving the Iranians have embarked on a program to acquire those weapons. This aim of this post is to alert interested readers to another analysis in the same vein, but analyzed from a different angle. In The Winners and Losers of US policy on Iran, an op-ed that appeared in Al Jazeera (English) on 23 December, Jasmine Ramsey provides a useful insight in to the warmongering pressures on a president prone to appeasing his opposition for domestic political reasons.
The new year is shaping up to be a very dangerous one, because appeasing an external aggressor, like Adolf Hitler, is not the only kind of appeasement strategy that leads to war.
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[1] Any president who feels it is necessary to brag about being “The Decider” is insecure by self-definition.
The same week Obama declared an end to the Iraq War, Congress brought the US closer to confrontation with Iran
Jasmine Ramsey, Al Jazeera, 23 Dec 2011
In the same week that President Obama declared an end to the Iraq War, Congress brought Americans closer to confrontation with Iran. The whimper with which America's presence in Iraq ended was also drowned out by Republican presidential hopefuls beating war drums. This is America nearly four years into Obama's leadership. The President may have begun his term by trying to pursue a different path with Iran, but his acquiescence to domestic lobbying has made the results of his policies indistinguishable from his predecessor. Ironically, his attempts to appease pro-Israel advocates have only invited more onerous demands while leaving would-be supporters disillusioned.
On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran. Now, in a 21 December essay [also attached below], Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures — in this case, via the profoundly flawed pro-bombing analysis, Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option, penned by Matthew Kroenig in January/February 2012 issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs.
One would think that our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and our growing strategic problems in Pakistan, not to mention our economic problems and political paralysis at home, would temper our enthusiasm for launching yet another so-called preventative war. But that is not the case, as Kroenig's analysis and the growing anti-Iran hysteria in the debates among the the Republican running for president show (Ron Paul excepted) show. Moreover, President Obama’s Clintonesque efforts to triangulate the pro-war political pressures of the Republicans, while appeasing the Israelis, may be smart domestic politics in the short term, but they add fuel to the pro-war fires shaping the popular psyche. Finally, as I wrote last January, lurking beneath the fiery anti-Iran rhetoric are more deeply rooted domestic political-economic reasons for promoting perpetual war — reasons that have more to do with sustaining the money flowing into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex in the post-Cold War era than in shaping a foreign policy based on national interests.
While it is easy to whip up popular enthusiasm for launching a new war, our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that successfully prosecuting wars of choice are quite another matter. Nevertheless, as my good friend Mike Lofgren explains in his recent essay, Propagandizing for Perpetual War, devastating rebuttals like Walt's are likely to have little effect on the course of events.
One final point … a surprise attack on Iran would trigger a far tougher war to prosecute successfully that either Iraq or Afghanistan. If you doubt this, I suggest you study Anthony Cordesman’s 2009 analysis of the operational problems confronting Israel, should it decide to launch a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
If you'd like to read a textbook example of war-mongering disguised as “analysis,” I recommend Matthew Kroenig's forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option.” It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy, all the more surprising because Kroenig is a smart scholar who has done some good work in the past. It makes one wonder if there's something peculiar in the D.C. water supply.
There is a simple and time-honored formula for making the case for war, especially preventive war. First, you portray the supposed threat as dire and growing, and then try to convince people that if we don't act now, horrible things will happen down the road. (Remember Condi Rice's infamous warnings about Saddam's “mushroom cloud”?) All this step requires is a bit of imagination and a willingness to assume the worst. Second, you have to persuade readers that the costs and risks of going to war aren't that great. If you want to sound sophisticated and balanced, you acknowledge that there are counterarguments and risks involved. But then you do your best to shoot down the objections and emphasize all the ways that those risks can be minimized. In short: In Step 1 you adopt a relentlessly gloomy view of the consequences of inaction; in Step 2 you switch to bulletproof optimism about how the war will play out.
Such is the self-referencing nonsense produced in contemporary American political discourse shaped by a perpetual election cycle that disconnects debate from the real world and stifles rational governance, but keeps the masses entertained and distracted, much like the circuses did for the Roman masses in the waning days of the Empire. With American politicians are arguing endlessly how great a victory we achieved in Iraq, a natural question remains unasked: What does the rest of the world — particularly the Arab world — thinks of our ‘success'?
Attached, FYI, are two thoughtful alternative points of view on this question.
The first headline is from Rami Khouri's. He is a columnist for the Lebanese Daily Star and is syndicated by the prestigious Agence-Global. The second headline is from Patrick Cockburn's, writing in the Independent [UK]. He is one of the most well informed western reporters now writing about the Middle East.
The United States under President George W. Bush drew on a deep well of nonsense, lies and fantasy when it entered Iraq in 2003. President Barack Obama continued this bipartisan American tradition when he said Monday that the departure of American forces from Iraq left behind a country that can be a model for other aspiring democracies. On the other side of the Arab world on the same day, the Tunisian people elected a new president, providing a more credible example of how Arabs can aspire to become democratic without foreign armies destroying their national fabric. Read more.
World View: For all its military might, the US has failed to get its way in Afghanistan and Iraq, severely denting the prestige of the world's only superpower
Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Cockburn's article contains one major assumption, to wit that the US Government will not attack Iran nor condone an Israeli attack on Iran. We disagree. Now more than ever, Israel is bent on attacking Iran and drawing the US in–the deployment of US/NATO troops all around Syria, the plans for major NATO air operations ostensibly against Syria (long billed, falsely, as an Iranian puppet state) all point to precisely the opposite: a cresendo joint US-Israel mega-attack on Iran and Syria together.
In summary: US took ten years to make an issue of two Pakistani fertilizer factories that are the primary source for all Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) killing and maiming in AF. Taliban gets what it wants in AF school programs, Iran makes progress in AF, SY and on the side with Saudi Arabia.
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) rose to prominence in an era of uncontested budget growth (including a borrowed trillion dollars a year) and uncontested airspace. That era is now over.
There will still be a place for mico-UAVs, especially in direct support of small unit operations, but neither the US military nor the US secret intelligence world consider infantry solutions to be “expensive enough” to be worth doing well.
For those who lack the sophistication to hack control over a UAV and force its undamaged landing, Electromagnetic Pulse rays remain the generic counter-measure that will proliferate rapidly.
NIGHTWATCH:
Point and Shoot...
Pakistan: Any unmanned aerial vehicles, including US UAVs, entering Pakistani air space will be treated as hostile and shot down per a new defense policy, a senior Pakistani official said on 10 December.
Comment: Pakistani forces lack the capabilities to execute the directive as announced, but the loss of one or two drones would be enough to curtail the program because of the expense from multiple aircraft losses. The program is not sustainable in contested airspace. This declaration has been coming for a very long time.
Algeria-US-France: For the record. US and French unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) will not be allowed to fly over Algeria's southern airspace to counter weapons smuggling from Libya, according to El Khabar newspaper. Algeria will increase its reconnaissance of UAV air surveillance operations.
Comment: The Iranians will be quick to disseminate any insights they developed in downing a US reconnaissance drone. Algeria might not yet have Iran's insights but it is showing that it is open to Iranian help.
The arguments for attacking Iran are crazy, like those for attacking Iraq in response to 9-11. But that does not mean such an attack by the American and/or the Israelis will not occur.
Indeed, I think the political pressure for such an attack is increasing. My reasons for saying this are as follows:
On 11 October, Patrick Seale wrote a very important essay, Will Israel Bomb Iran. Seale described secret internal deliberations in the Israeli government over the twin questions of (1) how short a time window existed for Israel to launch a sneak attack on Iran and (2) how to suck in the United States into supporting such an attack, even if an Israeli attack was launched without US approval or if the US was kept in ignorance beforehand? Seale, who is extremely well connected and very knowledgeable on the Middle Eastern affairs, also reported the Americans knew of the Israeli discussions, and the idea of Israeli decision makers thinking their window of opportunity was closing was causing alarm in Washington.
The below report by Patrick Cockburn, one of the best reporters now covering the Middle East, describes the growing tensions in Iraq over the question of sharing its oil wealth among its constituent regions. Although his report is important in its own right, its contents become even more ominous when they viewed in a larger historical context:
The long view of history is likely to record the greatest ‘sins' of Iraq, Iran, and Libya prompting interventions by the West have been related to the control of oil — not nuclear weapons; not any communist leanings during the Cold War; not support of worldwide terrorism.
Each country committed the unforgivable sin of being governed at one time by nationalistic leaders who believed the oil under each country belonged to that country and should be controlled by the government of that country — therefore, these leaders had to be removed:
Iran – Mohammed Mosaddegh, a popularly elected Prime Minister of Iran and social reformer, removed by a CIA/MI6 coup in August 1953.
Iraq – Saddam Hussein, a murderous neo-Stalinist dictator and social reformer (e.g., major achievements in women's rights and education), removed by military force in 2003.
Libya – Muammar Qaddafy, a quirky tribal dictator and social reformer (e.g., major achievements in women's rights and education) removed by military force in 2011.
Click on Image to Enlarge
One short-term common denominator in these imposed regime changes was that the nationalist leader was replaced by a more compliant government that agreed to an opening of that country's oil fields to exploitation by privately owned western oil companies.
While history does not repeat itself, memories of the past condition events in the future. Over the longer term, perceived wrongs are not forgotten, and such interventions can provoke blowbacks, which in turn provoke counteractions that enmesh the intervener in a welter of increasingly complicated conflicts. In the case of Iran, for example, the 1953 coup eventually backfired in 1979, when Reza Shah Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini then established a regime retook control of Iran's oil fields, among other things. But the Iranian game is not over, and the historical pattern of move and countermove is in play, with the nationalist (Islamic) regime of Iran again in the West's crosshairs, allegedly because of its nuclear ambitions and support of international terror. Nevertheless, the glittering temptations of re-privatizing Persian oilfields are lurking in the background, attracting the private oil capitalists of the West like flies to honey.
Finish long comment from Spinney, plus reference, plus See Also.
