“Even as we speak, Ayatollah Razmara and his cadre of fanatics are consolidating their power.” – Homer Simpson
There is an understandable but overblown fear going around that we are moving toward an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you’re worried about this, I’ve got good news: it ain’t gonna happen.
There are certainly people in an around Washington D.C. who would like to attack Iran. But their insider positions don’t matter a damn when weighed against their political unpopularity. They are in no position to convince the American people that we need to attack Iran at all, much less in the short time before Bush the Younger leaves office. Any public argument in favor of an attack on Iran is dead on arrival because of domestic American politics.
(Anyone seriously thinking about attacking Iran given the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan probably has very little use for the inevitable and vehement objections of the United Nations, the European Union, or any other international institution. So let’s just skip them.)
There are two ways to lead the American Republic to war, either the people must feel legitimately threatened or they must be lied to. Of our two current wars, Afghanistan is (arguably) the former and Iraq is definitely the latter. Let’s take a quick look at how we got there, shall we?
On the evening of the mighty day itself, CNN had a live webcam[1] from Kabul where bombs were already falling. Speculation was rampant that this was the beginning of our counter attack. It wasn’t, our bombs didn’t start dropping for six weeks, but that was the mood of this country. People in Afghanistan were responsible for bringing fear to America. Our response was appropriate and legitimate; the entire world was with us.
(There is a case to be made that the whole adventure was unnecessary, especially as that misbegotten land slides back into the miserable condition it was in before we invaded. It goes something like this: we were at least partly responsible for the fact that it was a basket case country in the first place, and if we’d leaned on the Taliban harder we could’ve gotten them to cough up Osama bin Laden in exchange for international recognition and drawn them out over time. I don’t entirely agree with that, but we’ll save it for a different post.)
Things were a lot different for the Iraq campaign. The first public rumblings about striking Iraq began in the fall of 2001. By summer of 2002 it was obvious that Iraq was on the mind of the Administration and it was September of that year when Andrew Card made his famous, “from a marketing point of view, you don’t roll out a new product in August” quip to the New York Times. From the first rumblings to that idiotic vote in Congress in October of ’02 was almost a year. It was a year in which there was great debate over whether or not we should go to war. Bush the Younger had to make a case; he had to convince us and the rest of the world that this was necessary.
It was comic right from the beginning. The “Coalition of the Willing”, Powell’s ridiculous U.N. presentation, the kabuki theater of Hans Blix and the fig leaf of giving inspections a chance to avert war. It took a year and change to get it off the ground and it was still a controversial decision. The popularity of the war soared after the deceptively quick march on Baghdad and a lot of people forgot that it was a controversial war from the get go. After those first few weeks it felt like the Gulf War all over again, cowardly Democrats had balked, but our troops had won handily despite dire predictions from some quarters.
Those were heady days for people who would solve the world’s problems with American troops. Now they seem all the more foolish. The infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo op gets lampooned a lot, but what rarely gets mentioned is that the insurgency was well under way as the S-3 touched down. [2] Bush the Younger couldn’t claim “victory” in his speech because even then our boys were still getting killed; he had to settle for the euphemistic “major combat operations”. The idea that the same people would be believed again about the need to attack is laughable.
Even if their credibility wasn’t completely shot, the Administration simply does not have enough days left to deceive us into Iran. Relative to Bush the Younger’s first term, the time to start really making the case would’ve been last summer.[3] Now we’re only a few months away from the true silly season of presidential campaigning. It is a poor time to start politicking for another war.
The overall political situation is vastly different as well. That quote from Andrew Card was published 07 September 02, four days from the first anniversary. The House was solidly Republican and the Senate was in its last days of Jeffords/Democratic control. Today that pesky, equal branch of government is firmly controlled by a newly empowered Democratic majority. The posturing rhetoric of presidential candidates aside, there is no way in hell that this Congress signs off on another war. Quite the opposite, this Congress would take action to prevent our involvement in another war.
That leaves us with the more paranoid scenario of a pre-emptive strike without prior public debate which is just as laughable. Again, there are certainly people who would have no problem with skipping the debate and moving right to the air strikes. I do not doubt their intentions; I do doubt their ability to keep it quiet. Any attempt to ready even a modest air assault would involve, at a minimum, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Some of the people in those cubicles are the same ones who were intimidated into silence the last go round. They’ve had front row seats to our government’s inept Iraq war management and they won’t take it lying down again. Some of them will pick up the phone and start calling all kinds of troublesome people: senators, representatives, and reporters (many of them with much wider audiences than Seymour Hersh).
Then we’ve got the Army and the Marines. They aren’t stupid and they know through experience that they’ll be the ones who have to go in and clean up the mess when the laptop bombardiers from the Navy and the Air Force can’t deliver on their outlandish promises of disarming Iran from the air. The ground pounders are just as capable of dialing a telephone as their civilian counterparts. A few days of warning or a credible report that the planes were standing by would be more than enough for public outcry and Congressional reaction.
We’re already two wars deep, which is at least one (and probably two) more than the electorate is willing to tolerate. Even with their proven ability to lie and spin with reckless abandon, any attempt to win a debate over an attack against Iran is doomed to failure. Forgoing the debate and attempting an attack in secret will leak. Either way, Congress and the public will find out, and we don’t attack.
[1] They kept apologizing for the quality of the picture. I was impressed that there were any live images at all.
[2] Though the word “insurgency” was not yet being used by our government.
[3] Which they sort of tried but which went nowhere.
