Saber rattling and Iran

As one political observer commented yesterday on the radio the administration wants to distract the public from the disaster in Iraq to Iran, which is not yet a disaster.

Make no mistake about it, Iran, particularly under the leadership of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a problem. The repercussions of Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear program are of concern to the entire international community. Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel and the recent hosting of a conference of Holocaust-deniers are a clear signal of hostility to the region’s Jewish communities. And whether or not one believes the extent of meddling in Iraq it is accused of by U.S. officials, given its history of use of proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the proximity of Iraq, it is extremely difficult to believe Iran is not flexing its muscles in the area.

But none of this is really new. What is new is the intensity of the rhetoric coming out of Washington in recent weeks aimed at Iran. As mentioned here before, President Bush and President Ahmadinejad have a common interest with their respective citizenry to play up the threat posed by the other. Of course, a cynic might conclude that the administration is preparing the public for a third war in the region it has already decided to pursue.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are already going poorly and the reasons have little or nothing to do with Iran. Iraqi Prime Minister Malaki has expressed concern about the United States and Iran using Iraq as a battlefield against each other. There is the possibility Iran could play a positive role in both of those conflicts yet this administration eschews diplomacy. Obviously this administration has less interest in winning wars than in fighting them.

Joe Conason has this assessment in today’s New York Observer:

Whatever George W. Bush may tell us about his intentions toward Iran, every action and order indicates that he will seek to expand the war eastward from Iraq. Despite the warnings voiced by wiser military and diplomatic advisors, the President still seems to be listening to the same discredited neoconservatives whose fantasies and falsehoods drove us into the Iraqi quagmire.

If their plotting succeeds in provoking military conflict with Iran, the resulting carnage could indeed make Iraq look like a “cakewalk,” to quote one of the more stupid predictions that preceded the current war.

Imagine firefights erupting along the Persian Gulf and violent uprisings among the Shia masses in the Baghdad slums and southern Iraq—and then imagine the entire region convulsed by ethnic and religious conflict. The potential consequences could be catastrophic, from the closing of the Gulf straits and a new oil crisis to ruptured political alliances and terrible American casualties.

Yet regardless of these risks, the Bush administration’s urge to provoke Iran is as unmistakable as its preparations for a wider war. Nearly every day, the White House sends obvious signals of belligerence to Tehran, with the same drumbeat heard during the months that led up to the invasion of Iraq.

The President announces that he will deploy Patriot batteries to the region, which can only be useful in shooting down Iranian missiles. The President sends another carrier battle group to the Gulf, with an air wing poised to strike Iranian nuclear sites. The President replaces the four-star Army officer running Central Command, the Middle East region, with a Navy admiral whose specialty is naval air combat. The President orders an armed raid on an Iranian diplomatic office in northern Iraq, which nearly results in a shootout with Kurdish troops.

With great fanfare, the President issues a military directive allowing U.S. troops to kill Iranian agents discovered in Iraq, even though those same agents are often guests of the Iraqi government we support. And without a hint of irony, he declares that the Iranians—whose diplomatic relations with Iraq seem more durable than ours—will be held “accountable” for meddling in their neighbor’s internal affairs.

As in the march toward war with Iraq, the justification for military action against Iran is the looming threat supposedly posed by the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. But according to Mohammed ElBaradei—the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose assessment of Iraq’s feeble nuclear program proved correct—the Iranians have no hope of producing an atomic weapon within the next five years. So the rush to war seems premature—and those who now insist otherwise were wrong and dishonest about Saddam Hussein’s phantom arsenal.

If the Bush administration’s policies are meant to diminish the power and influence of Iran, they have been a dismal failure so far. Encouraging Israel to fight a proxy war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, for instance, only increased Iran’s prestige throughout the Middle East, while weakening more moderate Arab regimes, which
rightly fear the aggressive extremism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Is there an alternative to military confrontation with the mullahs? Only three years ago, the predecessors of Mr. Ahmadinejad secretly tried to open negotiations with the United States. According to a recent BBC report, Iranian leaders offered to reduce their support for armed Lebanese and Palestinian militants to help stabilize post-Saddam Iraq, and to open their nuclear program to full inspection; in return, they wanted diplomatic relations and commerce with the United States. But former State Department officials confirm that the White House, under the baneful gaze of Vice President Dick Cheney, spurned that olive branch as an unacceptable compromise with “evil.” (He didn’t consider those Iranians quite so evil back when his foreign subsidiaries at Halliburton were doing lucrative business in Tehran.)

By rejecting Iran’s tentative offer of improved relations, the Bush administration abetted the rise of Mr. Ahmadinejad, a populist and fundamentalist who argued for confrontation instead of compromise with the West. But that policy has entailed severe costs for the Iranian people, who are suffering from inflation and sanctions as well as from fear of war. The Iranians increasingly despise their own government, which faces constant rumors of its own fall.

What sustains Mr. Ahmadinejad against both his own people and world opinion is the prospect of military aggression by the United States. Americans are not the only people who feel the “rally effect” that brings us together in times of external attack. The more we rely on such threats as the basis for U.S. policy, the more we bolster our enemies—and the closer we come to pulling the trigger, with incalculable consequences.

President Bush insists that he has no plans to attack Iran, but of course he promised that war on Iraq would be a last resort. Let’s hope he is telling the truth this time.