“A Catastrophically Bad Idea”: The False Debate About Attacking Iran
I wonder if we in the news media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this year.
There really isn’t such a debate. Or rather, it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change — credible experts are overwhelmingly on one side.
Here’s what a few of them told me:
“I don’t know any security expert who is recommending a military strike on Iran at this point,” noted Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University professor who was a senior State Department official earlier in the Obama administration.
“Unless you’re so far over on the neocon side that you’re blind to geopolitical realities, there’s an overwhelming consensus that this is a bad idea,” said W. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle East affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“Most security experts agree that it’s premature to go to a military option,” said Michèle Flournoy, who has just stepped down as the No. 3 official in the Defense Department. “We are in the middle of increasing sanctions on Iran. Iran is already under the most onerous sanctions it has ever experienced, and now we’re turning the screws further with sanctions that will touch their central bank, sanctions that will touch their oil products and so forth.
“So it has been bad for them and it’s about to get worse,” Flournoy added. “The overwhelming consensus is we should give some time to let that work.”
Granted, American officials are deeply alarmed about Iran’s nuclear program, although the fear is not so much that Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel or anyone else. Iran apparently developed chemical weapons to respond to Iraq’s chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq war, and it showed restraint with them. Rather, the biggest fear is that if Iran tests and deploys nuclear weapons, other countries will follow. These could include Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, setting off another round of nuclear proliferation.
Officials and security experts make several broad points about why a military strike on Iran anytime soon would be an abominable idea.
First, it would set back Iran’s program by only one to three years — and then it presumably would go ahead more covertly and with more domestic support than ever.
Second, this wouldn’t be a single strike but would require sorties over many days to attack many locations. And the aim would be in part to kill the scientists running the program, so there would be civilian casualties. Day by day, anger in the Muslim world and around the world would grow at Israel — and at America. The coalition pressuring Iran through sanctions might well dissolve.
Third, a regional war in the Middle East could result, sucking in the United States. Iran could sponsor attacks on American targets around the world, and it could use proxies to escalate attacks on American troops in Afghanistan.
Fourth, oil supplies through the Persian Gulf could be interrupted, sending oil and gas prices soaring, and damaging the global economy.
Fifth, sanctions and covert methods like the Stuxnet computer worm have already slowed Iran’s progress, and tougher sanctions and covert sabotage will continue to delay the program in a low-risk way.
Granted, everything I say here may be wrong. Israel’s 1981 attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq and its 2007 attack on a Syrian nuclear project both went smoothly, without retaliation. The attacks set back those countries’ nuclear programs much more than skeptics had expected.
Yet there’s good reason to think that Iran is different, partly because its program is so dispersed and protected. More broadly, war is inherently unpredictable, and Israel has often been horrendously shortsighted in its interventions. Its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 turned into a quagmire that helped lead to the emergence of Hezbollah, while its de facto support for Hamas in Gaza in its early days harmed everyone (except Iran).
Let’s also remember that as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bangs the drums of war, that may empower Iranian hawks. “The continual threat of a military strike is as likely to convince them to move ahead as to deter them,” Slaughter notes.
Whether Israel will attack Iranian nuclear sites is one of this year’s crucial questions, and people in the know seem to think the odds are about 50-50. We don’t know that the economy would be harmed or that a war would unfold, but anyone who is confident about what would happen is a fool.
So as we hear talk about military action against Iran, let’s be clear about one thing. Outside Netanyahu’s aides and a fringe of raptors, just about every expert thinks that a military strike at this time would be a catastrophically bad idea. That’s not a debate, but a consensus.
“Flawed Advice”: Usual GOP Suspects Beating The Drum For Another Ill-Advised Middle East War
It’s hard to believe, especially after the tragic decision to invade Iraq over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, that the Republican candidates for president and even the Republican candidates for Wisconsin’s soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat appear all to be on the same page — we’ve got to attack Iran to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon.
This, despite everyone from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the heads of this country’s intelligence agencies insisting that attacking Iran would be a foolish thing for the United States — or Israel, for that matter — to do.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, claims that despite all the rhetoric that emanates from Iran, “We are of the opinion that Iran is a rational actor.” But, if Iran is attacked, the results would destabilize not only that country, but the entire region, he said in a CNN interview.
An attack on Iran would “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent: an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon,” former CIA chief Michael Hayden commented last month, adding that the intelligence community isn’t at all sure that Iran is even trying to build an atomic bomb.
In a report last week in The New York Times, U.S. intelligence analysts say they continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon. Yes, the country seems to be preserving its options to build a bomb, they admit, but that decision has been put off for sometime in the future, they believe.
Ron Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that “the agency assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or provoke a conflict.” Even Meir Deagan, who headed Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad until last year warns that attacking Iran “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.”
Peter Beinart of the Web magazine the Daily Beast remarked: “I’ve never seen a more lopsided debate among the experts paid to make these judgments. Yet it barely matters. So far, the Iran debate has been a rout, with the Republican presidential candidates loudly declaring their openness to war and President Obama unwilling to even echo the skepticism of his own security chiefs.”
Yes, the usual suspects are all there, from Elliott Abrams to John Bolton, the same neo-cons who sold us on Iraq, pounding the drums to once again attack another Mideastern country, apparently not learning anything from the a 10-year war that cost America trillions of dollars and many thousands of dead and maimed young people.
“How can it be, less than a decade after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that the Iran debate is breaking down along largely the same lines?” asked Beinart.
What would make it worse is if the country once again accepts their flawed advice.
By: Dave Zweifel, Editor Emeritus, The Capital Times, March 9, 2012
Republican “Field Of Hawks”: Apocalyptic And Less Than Forthright Rhetoric
Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.
No other conclusion can be drawn from parsing the candidates’ public remarks. Paul, of course, is basically an isolationist who believes it is none of our business if Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. He questions even the use of sanctions, such as those now in force. But Paul has about as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as I do.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all sought to portray President Obamaas weak on national security — a traditional Republican line of attack. They have tried to accuse Obama of being insufficiently committed to Israel’s defense. In the process, they’ve made bellicose pledges about Iran that almost surely would lead straight to conflict.
Santorum’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran practically takes for granted an imminent clash. Gingrich would essentially abdicate the decision to Israeli leaders, giving them the green light for an attack whenever they choose.
Romney, the likely nominee, has been somewhat more circumspect — and less forthright. He published an op-ed in The Post this week blasting Obama’s foreign policy as “feckless” and promising that, under a Romney administration, things would be different. He then went on to outline the steps he would take in dealing with Iran — most of which turn out to be steps Obama has already taken.
“I will press for ever-tightening sanctions.” Check. “I will speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents.” Check. “I will make clear that America’s commitment to Israel’s security and survival is absolute.” Check. “I will buttress my diplomacy with a military option.” Check.
Romney’s only new initiatives would be to make Jerusalem the destination of his first foreign trip and to deploy an additional aircraft carrier group in the region. I imagine the intent would be to show Iranian leaders that they are isolated and under siege, but I think they get that already.
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a pro-Israel lobbying group — Romney was much more specific in establishing his bottom line: “We must not allow Iran to have the bomb or the capacity to make a bomb.” It is difficult to imagine how this statement can lead anywhere but to war.
U.S. policy under Obama — and previous administrations — has been that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to have nuclear weapons. The clear implication is that, while military force is an option that could be employed at any time, including the present, force will be employed if Iran tries to make a bomb.
To say that Iran must never have “the capacity to make a bomb,” as Romney does, is to draw a line that has already been crossed.
Does capacity mean having the fuel for a bomb? Iran knows how to produce the enriched uranium that would be used in a bomb, and while U.S. air power alone — unsupported by ground troops — could destroy or damage most of the enrichment facilities we know about, the Iranians could have the program back up and running within a few years.
Does capacity mean the expertise necessary to construct a bomb that would actually explode? If so, will Romney order an attack whenever intelligence agencies report that a librarian at some Iranian university has ordered a textbook in advanced metallurgy from Amazon.com?
The truth is that every nation with sufficient wealth and scientific infrastructure has the capacity to build a bomb if it really wants to. An attack is likely to increase the Iranian regime’s resolve, not lessen it. Bombing Iran every few years is not a realistic option and in any event would not be effective in the long run; when the Iranians rebuild their facilities, they will surely do a better job of hiding and bunkering them.
The United States and its allies should seek to eliminate the Iranian government’s will to make a bomb, not its capacity. I hope Romney realizes that, while sanctions and diplomacy may not be working as well as we’d like, they’re the best tools we have — and that an attack at this point gets us nowhere. But if he believes his own rhetoric, this election may be about more than the economy. It may be about war and peace.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
“Fundamental Dishonesty”: When Do Reporters Start Calling Mitt Romney A Liar?
Two days ago, Barack Obama went before AIPAC (which is commonly known as “the Israel Lobby” but would be better understood as the Likud lobby, since it advocates not Israel’s interests per se but the perspective of the right wing of Israeli politics, but that’s a topic for another day), and said, among other things, the following:
“I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power: A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency. Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”
This didn’t surprise anyone, because it’s the same thing Obama has been saying for a while, in scripted and unscripted remarks alike, in both speeches and interviews. Yet later that day, Mitt Romney went out and said the following:
“This is a president who has failed to put in place crippling sanctions against Iran. He’s also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it’s unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
So here’s my question: Just what will it take for reporters to start writing about the question of whether Mitt Romney is, deep within his heart, a liar?
Because he does this kind of thing frequently, very frequently. Sometimes the lies he tells are about himself (often when he’s trying to explain away things he has said or done in the past if today they displease his party’s base, as he’s now doing with his prior support for an individual mandate for health insurance), but most often it’s Barack Obama he lies about. And I use the word “lie” very purposefully. There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama’s head to tell you what Obama really desires, like turning America into a militarily weak, economically crippled shadow of Europe (not the actual Europe, but Europe as conservatives imagine it to be, which is something like Poland circa 1978). But there are other occasions, like this one, where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously. In this case, there are only two possibilities for Romney’s statement: Either he knew what Obama has said on this topic and decided he’d just lie about it, or he didn’t know what Obama has said, but decided he’d just make up something about what Obama said regardless of whether it was true. In either case, he was lying.
The “Who is he, really?” question is one that consumes campaign coverage, but in Romney’s case the question has been about phoniness, not dishonesty, and the two are very different things. What that means is that when Romney makes a statement like this one, reporters don’t run to their laptops to write stories that begin, “Raising new questions about his candor, today Mitt Romney falsely accused President Obama…” The result is that he gets a pass: there’s no punishment for lying, because reporters hear the lie and decide that there are other, more important things to write about.
To get a sense of what it’s like when reporters are on the lookout for lies, remember what Al Gore went through in 2000. To take just one story, when Gore jokingly told a union audience that as a baby his parents would rock him to sleep to the strains of “Look for the Union Label,” everyone in attendance laughed, but reporters shouted “To the Internet!” and discovered that the song wasn’t written until Gore was an adult. They then wrote entire stories about the remark, with those “Raising new questions…” ledes, barely entertaining the possibility that Gore was joking. Why not? Because it was Al Gore, and they all knew he was a liar, so obviously if he said something that wasn’t literally true it could only have been an intentional falsehood.
That is not yet the presumption when it comes to Mitt Romney. There’s another factor at play as well, which is that reporters, for reasons I’ve never completely understood, consider it a greater sin to lie about yourself, particularly about your personal life, than to lie about your opponent or about policy (I wrote about the different kinds of lies and how the press treats them differently here). Because Romney is lying about his opponent and about a policy matter, reporters just aren’t as interested. But at some point, these things begin to pile up, and they really ought to start asking whether this dishonesty is something fundamental in Romney’s character that might be worth exploring.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 6, 2012
“Mount Up For More Republican Swagger”: Conservative Hobbyhorses for 2012
Traditional Republican concerns—opposition to domestic spending and gender equality—have dominated the Republican presidential campaign thus far. But there are some new conservative fixations that will be important in the months to come. Generally, they have all been invented—much like opposition to an individual health insurance mandate—in reaction to President Obama’s moderate and generally successful policies and political strategies. Here’s a guide to five of them.
Election fraud: Ever since the paranoid fringe of the right, by which I mean most Republicans, convinced itself that ACORN stole the 2008 election, conservatives have been trying to pass laws to prevent voter fraud. Republican-controlled state legislatures all over the country are passing rules that risk disenfranchising large numbers of voters, especially the poor, minorities and people with disabilities. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, earlier this month, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former member of the Federal Elections Commission, told a panel what he thinks are “three best things your state can do to prevent voter fraud”: require presentation of a photo identification when voting, require proof of citizenship when someone registers to vote and “tighten up the rules on absentee ballots, so [for example] when you request an absentee ballot you have to put in a copy of your driver’s license.”
As Laura Murphy, Washington Legislative Officer of the ACLU noted Thursday at the National Press Club, “There is a long history of efforts to restrict the right to vote to gain partisan advantage.” Murphy says laws requiring proof of citizenship or photo identification at the polling place, along with restricting early voting or eliminating same day registration, are all examples of these Republican vote suppression tactics. People who lack mobility due to disability or inability to afford a car may be disenfranchised. “These anti-fraud laws are the real threat to our constitutional rights,” says Murphy.
Down with the EPA: Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the leading climate change denier in Congress, spoke at CPAC this year, the first time he has done so in five years. He proudly restated his famous assertion that climate change is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” receiving big cheers.
What happened in the intervening years? Republicans flirted with reality. Their 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain, supported taking action against climate change. But Barack Obama won the election. As soon as he did, Republicans dropped their concern for the environment in favor of rigid partisan opposition. The energy magnate Koch brothers have largely funded the rise of the Tea Party movement and other current Republican campaigns, and the grateful beneficiaries in the new Republican Congress have introduced reams of legislation to repeal or prevent actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
It has become a conservative shibboleth, repeated by Republican presidential candidates on the campaign trail and at conferences such as CPAC and the Americans for Prosperity “Defending the American Dream” summit in November 2011 that the EPA is preventing economic and job growth. With Republican candidates promising that increased oil drilling would reduce rising gasoline prices, you can expect to hear a lot more of this argument in months to come.
Keep out the immigrants: Republicans and conservatives typically claim that their concern about immigration from Mexico is in no way racially motivated; it’s supposedly all about border security. But when conservatives speak to each other, they sometimes admit the truth: they’re afraid that more Latinos will mean a diminution of the cultural and political power of non-Latino whites. “After Obamacare, immigration is the most important issue [in this campaign], otherwise the whole country goes the way of California and we never win again,” Ann Coulter told CPAC.
When I interviewed anti-immigration leader and former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo in South Carolina last month, he was even more blunt. “Santorum has actually taken a step in the right direction, and did so in a pretty gutsy way, by saying we need to reduce legal immigration,” said Tancredo, when I asked why he hasn’t endorsed Romney, as he did after dropping out in 2008. “One of the biggest problems with immigration today is lack of assimilation…. we are trying to actually stop [assimilation]. All the crap about multiculturalism is just that, crap.”
Tancredo’s sentiments were echoed at an anti-multiculturalism CPAC panel that featured notorious xenophobes such as Peter Brimelow, with a guest appearance by Representative Steve King (R-IA).
Obama is bad for Israel: “If you want to see how to treat an ally, look at how Obama has treated Israel and do the opposite,” declared former UN Ambassador John Bolton at CPAC, to big applause. “He has pressured Israel mercilessly not to attack Iran.” The presupposition that it would be in Israel’s interest to attack Iran is debatable at best, but it’s one that conservatives share.
Obama’s position on the Middle East peace process has been no less favorable to Israel than his predecessors’, including George W. Bush. But Republicans have been attacking him repeatedly for imaginary infractions, such as supposed rudeness to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They also complain that Obama called for a two-state solution that begins with the pre-1967 borders with land swaps to follow. This has always been US policy, but that hasn’t stopped Republican presidential candidates from complaining that Obama “failed to stand for Israel.”
This is, of course, all about politics rather than Israel’s security. Evangelical Zionists want Israel to steal the entire West Bank and eject its Arab residents to fulfill a biblical prophecy. By supporting Israeli expansionism, Republicans are hoping to excite that element of their base and, if possible, win over a few Jewish votes in Florida. It also helps keep Sheldon Adelson’s money flowing.
Obama kowtows to America’s enemies. Given that Obama has done a much better job than Bush of finding and executing members of Al Qaeda, Republicans will have a hard time painting Obama as weak on national defense. But they’re trying to find a way. Since Obama has been more effective at taking out the organizations and regimes that have actually attacked the United States than President Bush was, Republicans are reviving the cold war menace from China and Russia, and fear-mongering about Iran.
Bolton and National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, among others, repeated this theme frequently at CPAC. “The Obama administration has forgotten that American strength is not provocative to our enemies, American weakness is,” said Bolton, “and Obama specializes in that…. What are we doing about Russia and China? Zip.” Specifically, Republicans such as Romney complain that Obama has failed to confront China for manipulating the yuan. They also argue that Obama was mistaken to try to sooth tensions with Iran and Russia, and that those efforts have gone unrewarded. While some of the specific accusations may be debatable, the overall theme—that Obama is endangering American security through cowardice—is preposterous. But since Republicans equate foreign policy strength with boisterous swagger, it’s fair to assume they actually believe it.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, February 27, 2012
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