Geov Parrish
WorkingForChange.com
15-Feb-2006
In the last four and a half years since 9-11, critics of the Bush Administration’s aggressive foreign policy have been playing defense. The invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban, and subsequent near-abandonment of that country to its vicious warlords and drug barons (generally the same people) have been all but ignored. We’re approaching the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, an invasion that we now incontrovertibly know was sold with egregious lies and planned and executed with stunning incompetence. Even after three years of ever-escalating anti-American and inter-religious violence in Iraq, the White House is as divorced from reality in its public pronouncements as ever, and the domestic so-called opposition is as ineffectual as ever. Meanwhile, a host of other War on Terror failures — from the appalling escape of Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora to the U.S.-fueled rise of Islamist parties in elections across the Middle East to 9-11 itself — mark the Bush administration as perhaps the most incompetent managers of American (let alone global) security interests in modern history. What more could go wrong?
Plenty. Brace yourself for a big new war. And start working to prevent it.
As incomprehensible as it might seem to most Americans in the wake of its Iraq failures, the Bush cabal is pushing full speed ahead for a military attack on Iran, perhaps as soon as next month. For the last year, it has been diligently laying the groundwork, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to use the International Atomic Energy Agency as a bully pulpit to portray Iran as a country intent on illegally developing nuclear weapons. The IAEA hasn’t bought it thus far, due mostly to a notable lack of evidence, but the campaign has done two things: it has enraged and emboldened Iran’s hardliner cleric leadership, and it has planted the idea of Iran as an “axis of evil” rogue state firmly in the mind of the American public, the only audience in the world the Bushies really care about.
Even so, the IAEA/nuclear Iran rumblings have been background noise to most Americans, noise lost in a year of White House scandals and disasters. There has been no real groundswell of support for an attack on Iran — but there has also been no serious opposition so far. The topic simply isn’t on most Americans’ radar. But it is very clearly on Bush’s.
Domestically, we already know — because Karl Rove told us — that Republicans plan to make fear, terror, and national security the lynchpin of their midterm electoral strategy this year. It’s hard to imagine their doing so with the thin, familiar gruel of Iraq’s failures and a year-old NSA spying scandal. To make such a strategy work, Republicans will need a good, fresh example of their supposed stalwartness in the face of criticism. Like an attack on Iran.
Internationally, the Bush White House would like nothing better than to behead the rising Islamist tide that has swept through recent elections in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and, most explosively, now Palestine. The radical clerics in Tehran are not only the spiritual fathers to this revolution, but are directly tied to the new Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and to the Palestinian resistance; Washington wants regime change in Iran. It preferably wants regime change before Tehran follows through on its threat to convert the currency in which it sells its oil from dollars to euros — a precedent-setting move that could have dire global consequences for the dollar as the international currency of choice, and, hence, ugly long-term consequences for the debt- and trade-deficit-riddled American economy. Fortunately for Bush, the case for military action need not involve such inconvenient truths. Even after the embarrassment of Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, to the Bush White House Iran’s alleged nuclear program provides an ideal excuse for intervention.
At least initially, few expect the U.S. to launch an actual invasion of Iran. Much more likely is a strike by some combination of U.S. and Israeli forces, using U.S. intelligence, on some 40 sites identified as key to Iran’s developing nuclear energy (and possibly weapons) program. Such a strike wouldn’t be easy; the sites are widely scattered, often deeply buried, well-defended, and most are located in densely populated areas. Iranians learned from the Israeli strike on Iraq’s developing nuclear program in 1981. There is thus talk of the use of American “bunker-busting” bombs, hundreds of which were provided recently to Israel.
Any attack on Iranian facilities would surely be answered, and probably escalated. And if war escalates, there is another prize: Iran’s massive oil reserves, 90 percent of which are massed in one province along an Iraqi border crawling with U.S. troops.
The problem, of course, is that Iran is no Iraq, with a hated regime, crippled by decades of war, bombings, no-fly zones, and economic sanctions. The Tehran regime, for all its religious oppressiveness and rhetorical belligerence, has popular support, especially in the face of American (or Israeli) aggression. The savage American-installed Shah dictatorship (which was overthrown by the revolution in 1978) is still remembered and despised. Iran is a much larger, more populous, and more prosperous country. Its military is well-equipped; invaders cannot roam the skies unchallenged. Any attack on Iran would have even less international “coalition of the willing” support than the invasion of Iraq did. And Iran has links with terror groups around the world happy to target U.S. facilities.
Most importantly, Iran shares borders with both Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as it would be easy for American troops to cross from neighboring countries into Iran during any hostilities, Iranian and pro-Iranian forces could easily make U.S. forces’ lives hell in the already-tenuous situations of the two countries.
In other words, what Bush is playing with — practically unnoticed by the American public — is a conflagration that could involve Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and the entire Middle East, and perhaps beyond. It has the potential to dwarf (on all sides) the body count thus far in Afghanistan and Iraq; inspire further generations of terrorism and anti-Ameican jihadism; severely damage the American economy; and decimate an American military already stretched thin and reeling from a badly mismanaged, relatively low-intensity insurgency in Iraq.
Why risk it? Stopping Islamism, oil, short-term domestic politics, and Iranian regime change, in that order. With their PNAC dreams of remaking the Middle East, it just might be too much of a honey pot for Bush’s hawkish neo-cons to resist. The only minor complication is that such an imbroglio is not only by definition unwinnable, but is likely to be disastrous — to the point where it could end America’s status as a global superpower. (Which might well be a good thing, but for the horrific loss of mostly civilian life it would entail.)
How can such an outcome be prevented? The most likely scenario has nothing to do with political opposition at all — it has to do with the willingness of Asian countries that covet Iranian oil, especially China, to countenance another U.S. military adventure. The U.S. is now so badly in debt to countries like China, Japan, and South Korea that while a limited raid is simple enough, any massive new military expenditure would literally require the Asian countries to be writing the checks, and they’re not about to do so for a war that threatens their own strategic interests. Bush may well be finding out the limits of a global empire erected on other people’s money.
But that scenario relies on stopping hostilities from expanding. To prevent them entirely requires domestic popular opposition. For a country already palpably tired of the Iraq war and wanting troop reductions (if not total withdrawal) there, a military incursion leading to a broader regional conflict will be pure madness. The only way it can play out politically for Bush is if it unfolds in stages. If a “justifiable” U.S. attack on “nuclear weapon” facilities leads to Iranian retaliation (which we, in turn, just have to respond to), such a war might float. If the probability of a broader and disastrous war becomes an issue ahead of time, the question then becomes the advisability — or foolishness — of the original raid. And especially in an election year, such public perceptions just might derail the whole thing.
Iran needs to become a political issue. It seems like a tall order, given the lack of Democratic leadership on anti-war issues and the unending swamp of Bush administration scandals and cock-ups revealed on what is essentially a daily basis. But consider the consequences of not acting.
The Bush administration’s hostility to negotiation and the possibility of its attack on Iran, and the likely result, must be widely publicized. Now. Before it’s too late, and we’re stuck with another deadly disaster America will regret for generations.
Source: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20367
