Iran War, etc: And the beat goes on ...

Ivo Daalder, Bush II - More of the Same, Hankyoreh Daily 11/08/04:

Now that George W. Bush has won the reelection victory that eluded his father, will we see a different American foreign policy? Many political pundits think so. They believe that the president's preoccupation with his legacy will lead him to soften his hard charging ways. They will be disappointed.

U.S. won't attend international conference on land mines by George Gedda, AP 11/26/04:

The United States will not attend a major review conference next week about a 1997 international treaty on land mines because of the cost of participation and disagreement with crucial elements of the pact.

In making the announcement Friday, the State Department said the decision should not be seen as a sign of U.S. indifference to the land-mine problem.

You mean there are people out there who might think such a thing?!?

The conference, starting Monday in Nairobi, Kenya, will review compliance with the Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel mines. Ratified by 143 countries, the pact bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines and stipulates that mined areas be cleared within 10 years.

The United States, China and Russia are among 51 countries that have not ratified the treaty. ...

Lincoln Bloomfield, the State Department's top official on land mines, said the administration decided it could not justify using tax dollars to support the Nairobi conference. The meeting, he said, "will have obviously a political platform that is not our policy."

Obviously.

U.S. needs to step in on Iran deal, some say by James Sterngold San Francisco Chronicle 11/27/04.  At least this story tells us who says that, unlike the way Fox News commentators use "some people say" to introduce some Republican Party talking point or the other.  One of those who say that is neoconservative publicist Max Boot:

"In my view, we are trapped in a no-win dichotomy with Iran," said Max Boot, a conservative military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "The Europeans can make all the deals they want, but Iran won't stick to them, and the military option is not really possible. Once they have a bomb, we have almost no options." ...

Skeptics like Boot argue that diplomacy is essentially a sham and military force unthinkable, so the United States should use every tool it has to overthrow the Islamic regime from within, supporting opposition groups, beaming propaganda into Iran and imposing sanctions to weaken the government economically.

"That's the kind of thing we ought to be supporting because I don't think anything else would work," said Boot. "I'm not sure you can stop them with air strikes at this point. The Europeans can pursue negotiations, but we ought to pursue our own policy of regime change."

I call this the "Contra option," after the ill-fated operation to support the rightwing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration.  Boot's strategy at this point seems to be to make "regime change" the official policy of the US government and to escalate militarily through proxy forces.  The ability of the US to intervene militarily is definitely constrained, as Sterngold's article explains:

Military force, the other choice, is hardly an option.

With 140,000 U.S. troops tied down in Iraq and no end in sight there, the United States does not appear to have the capability to launch a full-scale attack on Iran, even if it wanted to, or an invasion aimed at regime change. Experts say surgical strikes on suspected nuclear installations would not work either, because of the likelihood that Iran has spread out its nuclear facilities to ensure that some of them would survive.

I suspect that the need to show "credibility" in the face of this horrible, urgent Iranian threat will be the hook on which the Bush administration hangs its initial request to reactivate executive authority to impose military conscription, aka, the draft.

It will probably be lost soon enough in the fog of war fever against Iran, but its worth remembering that in 2002, when we were building up for war against Iraq, which had no WMDs, no WMD programs and no active connection with terrorists targeting Americans, it was well known - and publicly discussed, though not nearly widely enough - that Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program, and that they were the chief "state sponsor" of international terrorism, including groups that aimed at the United States.  Now we don't have the ability to make a credible military threat against them, because there was such an urgent need to invade and occupy Iraq - which had no WMDs, no WMD programs and no active connection with terrorists targeting Americans - and to fight a years-long counterinsurgency war there with no realistic hope of success.

U.S. Lacks Reliable Data on Iran Arms by Greg Miller Los Angeles Times 11/27/04:

Although convinced that Iran is "vigorously" pursuing programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. intelligence community has few sources of reliable information on any illicit arms activities by the Islamic republic, current and former intelligence officials and Middle East experts say. ...

The dearth of quality intelligence has complicated American efforts to convince other nations to more aggressively confront Iran, and accounts for the caution expressed by some U.S. intelligence officials last week when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he had seen important new evidence that Iran was pursuing ways to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile. ...

The combination of the hard-line U.S. diplomatic stance and the scant underlying intelligence has prompted comparisons to the United States' flawed case for war against Iraq.

Yeah, when you're relying on intelligence data from the pizza guy, it's a bit of a challenge to convince some obstinate countries to trust your information.

As Daalder writes in the article linked at the beginning:

[The] election results did not turn Bush timid. Quite the contrary. As he told reporters on Thursday, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." ...

Bush's ability to pursue his foreign policy preferences will inevitably be affected by economic events. Should the U.S. economy plunge into recession, say, because the historically high U.S. current accounts deficit becomes unsustainable or because oil prices spike to $100 per barrel, he could quickly find himself with no political capital to spend on foreign affairs.

But in the absence of such developments, American foreign policy during the second Bush term will be "more of the same." Of course, John Kerry meant that phrase as criticism. For George W. Bush, though, it is a badge of honor—and a good description of the foreign policy he intends to pursue.

Anatol Lieven addressed the problem the public faces with trying to understand Bush's Iran policy in an article last month (Liberal Hawk Down The Nation 11/25/04; also available at the Carnegie Endowment site) in which he reviewed some of the positions associated with "liberal hawks":

The American government today has no lack of Middle East experts in the State Department and the CIA; indeed, many predicted the disaster in Iraq well before the invasion. The problem is that the ranks of the US intelligentsia are packed with pseudo-experts who are willing to subjugate the most basic historical facts to the needs of their ideological or nationalist agendas. ...

Speaking of the failure of many of these intellectuals to distinguish between crucial factors such as the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, Lieven says:

It is bad enough that most of the American public is incapable of making this distinction, without the error being actively encouraged by so-called experts. In consequence, the Bush Administration may be stumbling toward an attack on Iran's nuclear program that could have the most disastrous consequences for Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire American position in the Middle East--without even a truly serious national debate taking place in the United States on the subject of US-Iranian relations.

Iran is predominately Shiite, as are most Iraqis and a large number of Saudis.  Al Qaeda and his sort of jihadist groups are Sunni fundamentalists, though Al Qaeda has given some aid to Shiite groups on occasion - and has even had some operational cooperation with Iran, unlike Iraq under Saddam.  The Baathist regime in Iraq that was overthrown by the American invasion was Sunni-dominated, so at least the Shiite Muslims can see some positive element in the Iraq War, since Iraqi Shiites now have the chance to have representation in the government closer to their weight in the population.  But an American invasion of Iran could quickly squander even that sliver of good will, as Lieven warns:

Given the threat posed by Al Qaeda and its Sunni extremist allies to virtually every state and elite in the Muslim world, and given the savage divisions between these forces, the Shiite tradition and secular Arab nationalists like the Baath, there was a cornucopia of opportunities after September 11 to seek Muslim allies in the war on terrorism. From this point of view, for the Bush Administration to have succeeded in uniting Shiite radicals, Baath die-hards and Sunni extremists in Iraq; to have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq while simultaneously threatening Iran and Syria; and to have alienated both Turkey and Saudi Arabia--this almost defies description.

As Daalder says, we are seeing some analysts raising the possibility, even likelihood, that the second term will see a more moderate foreign policy.  Governing Against Type by Edward Luttwak New York Times 11/28/04.  Luttwak argues that "while re-elected presidents who no longer have to face the voters are theoretically free to pursue their wildest dreams, in practice they never do."

But from what we've seen so far, such expectations seem to fit the cynical definition of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.  And even Luttwak's supposedly reassuring look forward envisions Iran and Syria meekly backing down before threats of war against them, based on their fear of American resolve or some such thing, as supposedly demonstrated by the invasion of Iraq.

Flashback

Prior tothe 9/11 attacks, we didn't know, and maybe Bush himself didn't know, to what extent the Bush administration would embrace the "neoconservative" notion of wars of liberation in the Middle East.  But Bush's arrogant, unilateralist approach was already clear in his cool-to-negative attitude toward our democratic allies in Europe and in his scorn of international agreements, from land mines to chemical weapons nonproliferation.

This 2001 column from Joe Conason, who certainly proved to be one of the most astute observers and analysts of Dubya's first administration, reminds us of a now-nearly-forgotten incident, a realtively minor diplomatic flap in retrospect, but one which showed the risks of the unilateralist approach.  It was the outster of the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Commission,  Bush league by Joe Conason Salon 05/08/01:

What this incident demonstrates, among other things, is how lamely the Bush administration is managing foreign policy -- despite the supposed competence of the president's courtiers. Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters he believed that the U.S. had locked up 43 votes, enough to ensure its reelection to the human rights body.

But that anticipated support evaporated, at least in part because the Bush White House disdains multilateral diplomacy, and consequently neglects U.N. business (including the payment of back dues). Moreover, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is no longer a Cabinet-level position, as it was during the Clinton administration. And at the moment we don't even have a fully accredited representative at the United Nations because John Negroponte, the dubious Bush nominee, has yet to be sent up to the Senate for confirmation.

That would be the same John Negroponte who is now the US Ambassador to Iraq and therefore the de facto civilian proconsul there.

Instead, this vote ought to be taken by policymakers in the White House as a rather mild warning. The advancement of human rights and democracy around the world, while never a Republican priority, is certainly in our interest. So is the maintenance of alliances with other democratic nations. This latest fiasco only indicateshow poorly such vital interests have been served by the people who now wield power in Washington.

The erratic Howie Kurtz - it seems to be an informal requirement on liberal blogs that Kurtz's name has to be preceded by a derogatory adjective, e.g., the "loathsome" Howie Kurtz - did a roundup in June of 2001 about the anti-Europe ideology pouring from conservative Republican sources: Pundits Take Up Arms Against Europe by Howard Kurtz Washington Post 06/14/04.

Bush definitely faces more obvious and urgent foreign-affairs problems than a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission going into his second term.  But his unilateralist orientation was alarmingly evident even in his first few months in office.  They've obviously intensified by several degrees of magnitude, almost unaffected it seems by the outpouring of sympathy for the US across the world in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

We can expect more of the same arrogant unilateralism for the next four years.

Tags: anatol lieven, iran, iran war, ivo daalder, landmines