The War Next Time

What to say about last Sunday's reports, in the New Yorker and Washigton Post, that the Bush administration is planning for a military intervnetion -- primarily by bombing (including nukes) -- in Iran?

The administration has repeatedly characterized these reports as "wild speculation" (see this, for instance), but just as repeatedly refused to take the military option "off the table." Sure, they say, contingency planning is going on, but "for now" the US is committed to diplomacy:

"We hear in Washington, you know, 'prevention means force,'" Bush told students and faculty at Johns Hopkins University. "It doesn't mean force, necessarily. In this case, it means diplomacy."

Bush joined aides in playing down prospects for military action against Iran, saying, "I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation."

But he asserted: "We do not want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon or the knowledge about how to make a nuclear weapon."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan reiterated earlier that military force remains an option while insisting the priority was for reaching a diplomatic solution.

That is what makes this all so maddening. No one would ask Bush to explictly take the military option off the table. And, of course the military is developing plans for that contingency. Who could object to that? But given their ideology (see this) and their history, you can't help but wonder whether, way down deep, the Washington national security apparatchiks wouldn't really prefer to "bomb 'em back into the stone age." Consider this, attributed to a former high-level intelligence official paraphrasing Rumsfled:

"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.

Would they really do it? I don't know. I certainly hope not. But, if they do do it, there will be no effort to first build support within the American people like there was in the run-up to the Iraq war. The attack will come, if at all, out of the blue. Why? Because the public is no more likely to be persuaded to support another foreign war than passengers on a plane are likely to persuaded to sit quietly by and let men with box cutters hijack their plane.

Moreover, since deploying ground troops is not something that can be done without some level of political support (and since we plainly do not have enough anyway), the attack, if it comes, will be much more like Clinton's cruise missle attacks on Afghanistan and Somalia or Reagan's bombing of Libya than like the invasion of Afghnaistan or Iraq. And, except for one horrible possibility, it will do as little to accomplish Bush's goals as the London Blitz did to accomplish Hilter's.

The "one horrible possibility" is nukes, and it is Bush's lack of other options that makes this so scary. Bush and his cabal have a near messianic conviction that the "war against terrorism"can be won by force of arms if only Western leaders had the guts to use it. They also believe, I suspect, that no subsequent administration, Republican or Democratic, can be counted on "do what it takes." Thus,they believe, if Iran can string this issue along for another two years, the battle will be lost for all time, and we will no more be able to keep Iran from going nuclear than we were able to prevent North Korea from doing so. Yet, they also understand that the only military option open to them is bombing and that conventional bombing alone will do the trick, if at all, only if it is sustained and repeated over a long time. The temptation, then, is going to be to use nukes, since that is the only option that has even the potential for putting an end to Iran's nuclear ambitions in the time they have left.

I think, in the end, that even Bush will shy away from nukes. But even if you aren't Paul Krugman, you have to wonder. True believers are always scary, but never more so when they have control over essentially unconstrained military power.