Tethered Swimming

The “Bomb Iran” rumors have been making the rounds again lately and while I share the opinion that nothing whatsoever can be considered beyond the pale for Bush the Younger and friends I still think this one is too much, even for them. Their intentions cannot be doubted, bellicose rhetoric accompanies the topic of Iran like an overactive puppy. (Cheney feels so strongly about not negotiating when it comes to nuclear weapons that he left a briefing in a huff over the recent deal with North Korea.) However, there are simply too many checks on their power for them to act in the short time they have left in office. Some of these are political, some aren’t, but the bottom line is that bombing Iran would be tremendously expensive (in every sense of the word) and those costs are plainly evident to the people who would bear them. George Bush and Dick Cheney may have wrapped themselves in fact repellent cloaks of self righteousness, but they cannot act alone and the people on whom they depend can see beyond January.

The prevailing theory is that hard line elements within the Administration, lead by Cheney and his sidekick David Addington, are determined to put a stop to an Iranian nuclear program before the end of Bush the Younger’s term. In their view only military force can accomplish that goal. They are countered by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and much of the Pentagon brass who, given our current military difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, consider any attack on Iran a certain disaster. Atop it all sits Bush the Younger and the great unknown between his ears.

Seymour Hersh is the leading journalist on the Bomb Iran story and his article in this week’s New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield” has done a lot to put the specter of an attack on Iran front and center. He credibly describes how American special forces and spies are already in Iran, with grudging if uncomprehending Congressional approval. Their mission is to improve the likelihood that an air assault could successfully halt Iran’s nuclear program and to cause general trouble for the government in Tehran by stirring up ethnic problems. Senior military officers, including the recently fired commander of American forces in the Middle East, Admiral William Fallon, and the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, are said to be resisting these plans tooth and nail. The Pentagon has said the article contains a lot of errors, but I find all of this utterly believable; ill conceived American wars show little respect for national borders (ask anyone from Laos or Cambodia).

Writing in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers explores that last point in more detail. Back in 1998 an Army Major (now a colonel and possibly soon a brigadier general) named H.R. McMaster published a book, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. Powers describes the book’s thesis and impact:

McMaster’s argument, stripped to its core, was that against their own best judgment the joint chiefs passively acquiesced to White House pressure to expand the war. Johnson, with his eye on a second term, did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, and the joint chiefs did not want to run their careers aground. Despite the harshness of McMaster’s conclusion his book was widely read in the Pentagon and made a deep impression on a generation of rising officers, many of them now of flag rank and in positions of responsibility.

These men now have the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq as a fresh reminder of the correctness of McMaster’s point. Just this week Admiral Mullen was quoted all but begging that force not be used against Iran. Powers’ conclusion deserves to be highlighted because it’s about as succinct a summary of the Bomb Iran worries as you’re going to get:

The intensity of Bush’s desire to crush this final opponent is evident in his words and his body language, but does he retain the power to carry out his threats?

From one point of view the answer seems obvious. It is too late. With the exception only of the neoconservative faithful, every close observer of the American-Iranian standoff says that the administration’s threats are empty, that the United States does not have the military resources, or the political support at home, or the agreement of allies abroad, to carry out a full-scale air attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, much less to invade and occupy the country. Two of the skeptics, Gates and Mullen, are running the Pentagon, and their cautioning remarks, only a step this side of insubordination, would seem to make attack impossible. But if attack is impossible, why does Bush talk himself into an ever-tighter corner by continuing to issue threats? Does he believe Iran will cave? Are these the only words he thinks people will still listen to? Is he hoping to tie the hands of the next president? Or is he preparing to summon the power of his office to carry out the last option on the table? One hardly knows whether to take the question seriously. It seems alarmist and overexcited even to pose it when the realities are so clear. But it is impossible to be sure-Bush has a history.

That’s really all there is to it, he has a history. But let’s not forget another history, the one constant of this Administration above all others has been its concern for domestic American politics. They blithely sacrifice untold human lives and uncountable amounts of money for their harebrained schemes, but they always do it with an eye to the polls. And right now the one thing they want more than anything else in the world isn’t to attack Iran, it is to see John McCain elected in November.

Absent an event a lot more spectacular than the Gulf of Tonkin (and from this Administration who would believe it anyway?) it is impossible to build even half the political support they’d need. The obvious counter argument to that is that public sentiment is always with Americans in combat and bombing Iran. But there is no time for an Iraq level sales job. It took a long time to get the public enthusiastic for war with Iraq and a lot of that was based on the public’s false belief (relentlessly encouraged by the Administration and its surrogates) that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of 11 September 2001. No one is (yet) making that claim about the Islamic Republic and while Iran is generally lumped under the heading of Bad Guys in the public mind their great trespass, the hostage crisis, is almost three decades old.

There is also the matter of Congress. They did authorize the war in Iraq. They aren’t going to authorize any war with Iran, certainly not between now and January. Is Bush willing to risk flouting Congress so brazenly when the word “Impeachment” is already in the air? Those wouldn’t be the only risks he’d need to run either. Is Bush willing to fire Mullen to attack Iran? Is he willing to fire Gates? I don’t know that he would have to, but Mullen all but came out and said this week that we couldn’t do it and Gates is known to oppose the idea pretty much down to his skeleton. Are those who would bomb Iran willing to go through another Saturday Night Massacre to get it done? And what would the public and Congressional reactions to it be like?

That’s a lot of obstacles and political penalties right there and we haven’t even talked about what the economic effects would be. $4 per gallon gasoline would become a pleasant memory, to say nothing of a stock market over 10,000. Even as spineless and yellow as most of the members of Congress are, if word leaked out that Bush was giving an attack order (and it would leak out) they’d have no choice but to act. I don’t know what form that action would take but just the Democrats plus Republicans up for re-election would be more than enough in both houses for some kind of a delay measure, some kind of funding related moratorium on military action against Iran until “Congressional study”. That seems appropriately cowardly, but whatever the minimum is all it would really take is a few days of serious rumors about imminent attacks to send the price of a barrel of oil skyward and prices at the pumps not long after. And that’s before any actions are taken.

It’s just too much, even for them. I mean to disparagement of Seymour Hersh or his work here. He is an excellent reporter and has been one for a long time. I certainly understand where he’s coming from, nothing can be put past Bush, Cheney and their cadre of fanatics, and I’d probably be a lot more nervous about this if I had administration and military officials calling me and telling me all these dire things. But I don’t have those people calling me, I can take a step back and look at it from more of a remove than he can. And from that remove I remain confidant that we’re not attacking Iran.

On Wednesday Juan Cole posted video of an interview Hersh gave on Aljazeera:

There is one point Hersh makes in that interview which isn’t in his New Yorker piece and it’s one that makes me a lot more nervous than commando teams in Iran. Asked by the anchor about whether a strike is more likely with the election of Obama or McCain Hersh replies, “If Obama is elected that makes any thought they have about doing a strike before they leave office much greater.” (It’s at the 2:40 mark of the video.) Now that is something to be nervous about. There are 77 days between 4 November 2008 and 20 January 2009. Assuming Obama is elected that will be a time of potentially dire uncertainty. But we’re not there yet and making any predictions about what will happen during that interregnum is useless. The outcome of the election will determine the politics of that time.

Side note: I also don’t buy the “Israelis could do it” line of thinking. First and foremost, Iran is not some pushover nation. It’s a paranoid country flush with oil wealth and I’d be willing to wager that they’ve spent at least some of that money on pretty decent air defenses. Second, the Israelis have to live in that part of the world, a fact which gives them much greater cause for caution than the supposedly pro-Israel war enthusiasts living in northern Virginia.