The Road to War, Part II

Today the administration is casting Iran as America's biggest bogeyman on every front. National missile defense? Once Kim Jong Il of North Korea was identified as the target of this expensive project. No longer. In a speech Tuesday at National Defense University, Bush declared that "the need for missile defense in Europe … is urgent" because "Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles." Mideast peace? Never mind that the Palestinians are mixed up in a civil war of their own making and blaming the Israelis. Much of it is really the fault of "Iranian aggression," as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared on Wednesday. "To see Iranian actual penetration now of these more radical elements of the Palestinian terrorist groups is really quite troubling," she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. U.S. generals are now routinely trotted out to blame Iranian interference and arms shipments for the continuing Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, though Tehran plays at best a minor role there.

While some Europeans fear the new sanctions will be a slippery slope leading to war, administration officials counter that they may be the only way to avoid war. In other words: talk tough, make martial noises and the balky Russians and Chinese—fearful of another armed conflict—will approve sanctions in the Security Council. Then the Iranians will surely cave at the bargaining table. But let's understand something. The Bush administration seems singularly uninterested in truly bargaining—that is to say, compromising, which is what real negotiation is about—with a regime it wants to see replaced. That is why it refuses to discuss all outstanding issues at once—nukes, Iraq, Tehran's support of Hizbullah and Hamas, Israel and the Palestinians—which is what Iran would prefer. Instead the administration pretends that it can hold ambassadorial-level talks with Iran over Iraq in one place (Baghdad), and back European-led talks in another place (over the nuclear issue), while the president and his top aides demonize Tehran in every speech they give.

For their part, the Iranians are now so certain that the U.S. goal is regime change that they believe any concession would be seen as a sign of fatal weakness. And as the stalemate goes on, the Iranians are getting closer and closer to gaining "the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," as Bush says. Whether they decide to make a bomb is another question: that may be negotiable. Many Iranians hint that they would be satisfied with being technically ready to build a bomb, without actually making one, as a sufficient strategic deterrent. But these nuances no longer seem important to the Bush administration.

Let's think about all this for a moment. World War III? Is that really what would result if Iran gained the "knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon"? Not if you listen to one of Bush's former top generals, recently retired CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid. "There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran," Abizaid said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last month. "I believe nuclear deterrence will work with the Iranians," Abizaid said. "I mean, Iran is not a suicide nation. They may have some people in charge that don't appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear weapon … Let's face it: we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with [other] nuclear powers, as well."

But that's the realist line, and Bush is taking the Israeli line. For the Israelis, angered by Ahmadinejad's lunatic rhetoric about wiping them off the map, an Iranian bomb would seem to portend World War III. And indeed, an Iranian bomb, followed perhaps by several Arab bombs, would put Israel in mortal danger. But the same isn't true of the United States. Even many Israelis know that what Israel needs most to survive is a strong United States, not an overzealous friend in the White House. "Israel benefits when America performs well, when it is respected and succeeds in the world," Uzi Arad, Likudnik Bibi Netanyahu's adviser, told me. "If on the other hand the U.S. is in trouble, is in distress, it is little consolation the president has tremendous sympathies for Israel. President Bush by predisposition is clearly such a man, but the fact that he is in such difficulties is affecting the substance of the relationship."

War with Iran would be, in the best case, disastrous. Even the neocon hawk Norman Podhoretz, who is advising Rudy Giuliani and says he "hopes and prays" that Bush attacks Iran, admits that with such a war "we'll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a lovefest." It would also guarantee Ahmadinejad's continuance in power. The Iranian president is currently unpopular at home; a U.S. attack would almost certainly rally his country around him and silence the pragmatists in Iran who are looking for a negotiated solution. An attack would also guarantee that Iranian interference in Iraq would escalate. There are no doubt hard-line chauvinists in Russia and China who would actually like to see such a war, because they know it would weaken the United States further. But Bush and Cheney seem to be following the logic of war right now, and unless something changes it will take them all the way to the bloody end.

© 2007