In yesterday's post I used the Indian legend of the Blind Men and the Elephant to suggest that many of our disagreements stem from our limited vision of the situation in Iraq, including how the Iraq War might fit into a greater War on Islamofascism. It is possible to look at some news reports and conclude that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war and will never be a stable democratic nation; it is equally possible to look at other news reports and conclude that the sectarian violence is much more directly political in nature than in the past and is a necessary part of forming a democratic government. In any event, we will not and can not know for quite some time which view is the closer to reality. My preference is to remain cautiously optimistic about Iraq.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to maintain any optimism, cautious or otherwise, about the other giant rogue elephant in the room, Iran. The news from Iran is almost universally disturbing, yet the signs are already in place that taking action against Iran will be monumentally more difficult than the war in Iraq.
Glenn Greenwald posts on Fighting all the Hitlers today and worries that the Bush administration is preparing the way for an attack on Iran by using the same arguments we used against Saddam Hussein:
To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don't like is Adolph Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.
He attempts to deconstruct the Saddam = Hitler meme that was advanced as part of the preparation for the current war:
To be sure, Saddam Hussein was a brutal thug who murdered and oppressed his citizens with virtually no limits, etc. etc., but the notion that he was ever in a league with Adolph Hitler in terms of the threats he posed, the capabilities he possessed, or even the ambitions he harbored, was always transparent myth.
I am uncertain what to make of this. Saddam Hussein admittedly has turned out to have been less of a threat than successive Administrations believed, and his capabilities were less than we believed as well (though his ability to reconstitute his WMD programs, including the poor man's nuclear weapon, Biological weapons, has not been disputed) the idea that his ambitions were somehow limited is hard to justify. He wanted to control the entire Middle East oil supply and was not above murdering millions to do so, including bu using WMD in his possession; Saddam was quoted as saying that if he had Nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait, the United States would never have repelled him. In this case Glenn's hypothesis is based on the hope that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who had modest goals (which doesn't explain why he kept trying to invade his neighbors.) The most simplistic statement Glenn makes is his conclusion about Iran:
This equivalence is even more fictitious with regard to Iran, which -- although saddled with a highly unpopular president who is clearly malignant and who uses nationalistic rhetoric to boost the morale of his base – is a country that is, in fact, ruled by a council of mullahs which has exhibited nothing but rationality and appears to be guided by nothing other than self-interest.
How anyone can feel so sanguine about Iran is puzzling. The current President constantly escalates his rhetoric, as if to show even skeptics like Glenn Greenwald that he means it when he says he wants to kill the Jews. The former President said that a nuclear exchange with Israel was in Islam's best interests because the Jews would be exterminated while Islam would survive.
The comment thread is perfectly illustrative of the problem we face with Iran. Some believe Bush = Hitler, some imagine the Mullahs to be perfectly rational actors only interested in deterring conventional attack; almost none of the supporters of Glenn's article give any credence to the words of the Iranians themselves. The prescription of backing off and tolerating Iran building a nuclear program (designed, in their words, to produce hundreds of bombs) is a triumph of hope; it doesn't constitute a policy.
A couple of points that should be kept in mind. One commenter minimized the risk from Iran by pointing to the Apocalyptic language and beliefs of some American Christians. As far as I know, even the most fundamentalist of American Christians do not see their mission in life creating chaos in order to usher in the Apocalypse. For those who haven't been paying attention, this is exactly what Ahmadinejad has said he would do. Another insisted that Ahmadinejad had no real power and was actually a reasonable response by the Iranians to American threats. Just to remind people, Ahmadinejad is the creature of the Mullah's council and is their agent.
I do not know of any good options for dealing with Iran. The ideal outcome would be for the Iranians to become convinced we are going to attack them and take steps to back away from creating nuclear weapons. With the opposition at home already working to undercut our ability to make credible threats, this option appears to be fading.
I have little confidence that even an extensive, targeted, bombing campaign can stop or delay for long Iran's nuclear program.
An invasion is so unlikely as to be a waste of time to consider.
An uprising in Iran is almost certain to fail; successful "people revolutions" require a regime that would hesitate to shoot its own people; Iran is not such a regime and the Basij are true believers.
Which means the choice is to stick with diplomacy, with veiled threats of a stick to back it up, or a bombing campaign designed to destroy Iran as a functioning society. Absent a major provocation, I do not believe Bush or any other American President would make that choice.
Once they have a nuclear weapon or two, the danger to us and our friends escalates off the charts. My growing suspicion is that we will not respond until a nuclear explosion takes out a city somewhere in the Middle East or Europe and then Iran will cease to exist.
Recent Comments