The Zong

Harper’s Washington Editor Ken Silverstein is out with a sobering and well-constructed piece about our potential war with Iran. While recent developments in Korea seem promising, last week the Guardian reported that U.S. planning of airstrikes against Iran are at an “advanced stage.”

I guess it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead, but this is kind of getting stupid now, isn’t it?

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Is there someone, anywhere, who actually has some evidence that going into Iraq was a good idea? Are they really still peddling the idea that things are better than when Saddam was in power? Are they still telling me that in 50 years everyone in Iraq will be farting sunshine and shitting tulips? As Dick Cheney says, “Go fuck yourself.”

Silverstein asked for responses from three prominent foreign policy experts, and their assessment of the situation is, to put it mildly, dismal. Here’s A. Richard Norton, who was part of the Iraq Study Group:

Surveying U.S. history, one is hard-pressed to find presidential decisions as monumentally ill-informed and counterproductive as the decision to invade and occupy Iraq; however, a decision to go to war against Iran would arguably surpass the Iraq war as the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.

Goddamn hippie! Let’s see what Wayne White, former Deputy Director of the State Department’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (under George W. Bush), has to say:

If military action is taken against that infrastructure, there would be nothing “surgical” about the proceedings. The airstrikes associated with contingency planning suggest that such maneuvers, in addition to hitting a number of widely dispersed atomic-development targets, would have to take out much of Iran’s air defenses in order to clear paths to the targets. It would be a very large operation, probably spanning many days. In addition, Iran would strike back with whatever it could—for example, by attacking U.S. fleet elements and commercial ships with any anti-ship missiles that escaped destruction during the first wave of air strikes. It might also launch whatever ballistic and medium-range missiles survive the U.S. assault at various targets in the Gulf region, countries Tehran would likely view as complicit in such an attack. This would generate a major crisis in the Gulf—and, perhaps most importantly, one without a clear endgame.

No clear “endgame”, he says. Sorry, but we discussed chess up in this last week, brah.

What about bachelor #3? He’s Bahman Baktiari, who is director of academic and research programming at the William S. Cohen Center for International Policy and Commerce. No big whoop:

If the United States attacks Iran, the consequences would be disastrous. It would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the world, especially among Muslims. Within Iraq, Bush’s policy has led to an increase in sectarian fighting, so an attack on Iran would be seen as anti-Shiite as well as anti-Iranian. As of last year, for the first time, a majority of Iraqi Shiites support armed attacks on U.S.-led forces, and if the United States attacks Iran, Iraqi Shiite militias will direct their anger at American soldiers and military personnel.

That all sounds pretty crappy, assuming it’s not hogwash. I’ll admit that Harpers isn’t exactly a bastion of moderate or conservative viewpoints, but these cats have some bi-partisan cred, and their collective meow seems pretty dead set against any major military wrangling with Iran.

If all the military preparations are supposedly a deterrent, then that’s all well and good, but doesn’t that just increase the chances that something bad will happen? What about a little more hard-nosed diplomacy, like the kind we just engaged in with Iran’s old ally on the Axis of Evil?

- M.G.