The Desperate Hours
What better excuse could there be to cut and run from Iraq — and punish that brutalized nation’s ingratitude for our invasion — than to refocus the energies of our war machine on a more genuine threat to the security of the American people?
Now that Donald Rumsfeld has declared we are opting out of the Iraq civil war he insists doesn’t exist, the available Iraq options for our troops would seem to be futile suffering or dishonorable retreat.
But Iran is right there, right next door. So taunting. So tempting.
Distracting America with an attack on Iran would help George Bush evade condemnation by the tribunal in which he professes to set so much store — the judgment of history — as the American president in whom incompetence, dishonesty, and arrogance collided in a once-in-a-century perfect storm trillion dollar catastrophe in Iraq.
What better way to evade culpability by precipitously extracting our troops from the failed adventure not by parley and retreat, but through that favored military euphemism — strategic redeployment?
Strategic redeployment to free up forces to increase credible pressure on our enemy to the east — Iran — and to remove our troops from the retaliation that Iran’s Shi’ite allies in Iraq would be likely to unleash upon them if the war with Iran turned hot.
Militarily, discarding Iraq for Iran would not be difficult. In fact, it would be almost preordained. An attack on Iran would instantly and fatally compromise our (already fatally compromised) mission in Iraq, so there would be no point in keeping our troops in harm’s way over there as that nation went into terminal meltdown.
Why not make abandoning Iraq a welcome and inevitable feature rather than a flaw of our new and improved national security strategy?
The Iran war would probably be an air power/special forces fiesta, so most of our exhausted and embittered troops could come home instead of spearheading another dismal Middle Eastern ground war.
Given Bush’s unwillingness to admit error, his imperviousness to shame and public opinion, and his callous disregard both for military and civilian casualties in his search for political advantage, it would be completely in character for him to leave his Iraq-related difficulties in the rear view mirror as he sped into Iran.
The diplomatic groundwork has already been laid, with Condi Rice declaring Iran to be our gravest challenge. Bush recently floated the Iran/IED canard, and the State Department is making assiduous attempts to strip Chinese and Russian support away from Iran.
With the concept of pre-emptive war unrepudiated, there is little basis in U.S. law or policy for stopping Bush.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Democrats and liberals gave Bush another blank check.
And that’s because the political discourse has, thanks to the perfidy of the right and the gutless opportunism of the left, been fundamentally and perhaps fatally corrupted.
To me, a war with Iran would be the trifecta: a crime, a blunder, and unnecessary. That’s because I don’t accept the premise that pre-emptive war is an effective tool for advancing our nation’s interests or promoting its security.
Iraq should have been a teachable moment: that pre-emptive war empowers the worst nut-jobs in the American government, biases the system in favor of secrecy, coercion and dishonesty; and leads to dangerous and irrevocable as well as disastrous consequences.
Instead, America just learned that Bush is a lying dumbass. Not the same thing.
If America had repudiated pre-emptive war, Bush would be occupying Slobodan’s newly vacated cell in The Hague.
But I don’t think you’ll be hearing a lot of arguments against pre-emptive war in the Iran debate.
In the debased calculus of American politics, the case for Iran in 2006 is stronger than the case for war with Iraq in 2003.
Iran, unlike Iraq, is an intact, independent, and defiant Islamic state, no friend of the U.S. or Israel. Its clandestine support for insurgents and terrorists and its aspirations for nuclear weapons can be credibly asserted if not definitively proved.
Not only the Republicans, but the right/center wing of the Democratic Party as represented by Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton are on record supporting a policy of confrontation with Iran.
As I see it, the basic problem is that not only the conservatives and moderates but even the left wing of American politics is bereft of a clear ideological or political basis for opposing a war with Iran.
Not only centrist Democrats have drunk deeply and repeatedly of the national security Kool-Aid. In the contretemps over the Dubai port deal, even lefty bloggers were also pontificating about how they, and not George Bush, were the ones truly interested in national security. And of course berating Bush for his irresponsible disregard for the “true threats” from Iran and North Korea are a Democratic staple.
So pointing out Bush’s massive failings in honesty, capability, and leadership is not strong enough to stop a determined or desperate American president from dragging America into another war, or give the Democrats the “strong on national security” mantle and legitimate voice in war policy that they crave.
It does not seem that the rallying cry “We can’t let Bush fight another war in Iran” or a few million people hitting the bricks in anti-war marches would generate a resolution of opposition in the Congress, let alone put the brakes on an administration that is unscrupulous and fanatical about expanding and employing the prerogatives of presidential power.
Nothing but impeachment could stop Bush, and I don’t see Republican or Democratic politicians taking that political risk on behalf of sanity, morality, or the Iranian people.
The Democrats’ stated objection is not to pre-emptive war. They declare they mainly have a problem with the last pre-emptive war that George Bush happened to fight in Iraq.
To paraphrase the financial press, past disasters are no guarantee of future calamities.
Especially if Bush markets the Iran war as “we’ve learned from our mistakes in Iraq”.
The Iran war strategy would probably openly and convincingly eschew the conquest and occupation angle that doomed our effort in Iraq. It would be a simple war of destruction: to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, degrade its military capability, shatter its infrastructure, and destabilize its society.
No occupation. No nation building. No construction. Not even creative destruction.
Just good old-fashioned destruction, something our military is quite good at.
I don’t think anybody could convincingly argue that George W. Bush could not fuck up a country on purpose.
And the worst-case national security mindset that the Democrats and the blogosphere have bought into — with its hectoring about who’s the most sincere, ardent, and capable lover of national security — leaves the Democrats little grounds to oppose another war by presidential fiat except spite and envy.
In fact, Bush’s incompetence has created a morally and politically lazy out for the Democratic opposition. You could call it the Bush moral hazard. It allowed Democrats to compete for the national security jewel in Bush’s political crown, instead of pointing out its dangers and questioning its value.
If Bush calls for war with Iran, then the political bill comes due for those who seek to oppose the President. And the Democrats will probably lack the political capital to pay it.
If Bush was determined to attack Iran, even if he remained at 34% in the polls, even if the Democrats won control of the House and Senate in 2006, I wonder if the Democrats could stop him.
National security based on pre-emptive war is probably something too seductive for Democrats to reject, and too scary to repudiate. I read somewhere that national security is the crack cocaine of politics: so powerful, so addictive, and so destructive. It certainly seems to be for Democrats as well as Republicans.
Democrats were unwilling to take a stand against pre-emptive war after 9/11. They bought into the calculation that the American people would punish principle and reward callous practitioners of a militarized foreign policy that would certainly err on the side of injustice.
In other words, they acquiesced to a pre-emptive national security uber alles regime that would virtually guarantee the suffering of innocent victims and enhance the nation’s security only theoretically and unprovably (memorably encapsulated in Bill Clinton’s observation that “strong and wrong” trumps weak and right).
That lack of political courage has cost us dearly.
It’s not just that most of the Democratic leadership is caught in the foolish contradiction of worshipping Mars, the God of War, while struggling mount a credible opposition to Mars’ most enthusiastic and committed acolyte — George Bush.
Buying in on the “we’re at war” mindset that justifies pre-emptive wars has also cost our country dearly.
Since we’ve accepted and spout the “wartime” rhetoric, is it any surprise that “wartime exigency” has eroded our rights and left us with a few revocable entitlements in their place — entitlements that the government views not only with suspicion but outright hostility?
Is it any surprise that the government spends more time, effort, and ingenuity defending its right to wiretap, classify, and leak than it does to restoring the basics of life and human dignity to an entire American city destroyed by natural disaster?
In wartime, individual rights become notional and abstract and government prerogatives are oppressively real, concrete, and immediate.
When the Democrats surrendered on the principle that, even in times of great perils, our nation should practice the virtues of honesty, forbearance, and mercy against our real and supposed enemies, is it any surprise we have forfeited our right to demand these virtues be applied to us?
It may be a stretch, but is it so surprising that in an age when our government and people denied sovereignty to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that women are losing sovereignty over their bodies as abortion rights are attacked?
In pre-emptive war the casualties are everywhere and the victors are nowhere to be found.
In the past, domestic and international pressure have prevented Bush from expanding the Middle East war into Syria and Iran. But now, with his political fortunes cratering and his own party ready to treat him as a disdained lame duck, will Bush shed his inhibitions and start another war in order to regain the political initiative?
And if he so chooses, does America have the will to stop him?
Copyright 2006 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the antiwar satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
