Four weeks after the President rolled out his plan for escalating the Iraq War, it has proven, politically, to be an utterly predictable disaster (as predicted right here!.Why all the hype over a surge?.) While those of us opposed to the war might wish Congress would pursue de-escalation more aggressivley than it has, even what little that Congress is doing now would have been impossible so early had the President not galvanized anti-war sentiment right across the political spectrum with his plan to escalate after the country told him in November to go in the opposite direction. And, as also predicted right here, war with Iran suddenly looms large. But the difference from what I expected four weeks ago, is that we seem to be easing gradually into this new war, rather than with a bombing campaign right off the bat.
To recap my earlier diaries on the subject, as above, plus Surging into Iran... The President's sudden shift away from the expectation that he would respond to the ISG findings and the loss of Congress last November by at least some public show of moderating the conduct of the war away from a maximalism of aims increasingly at odds with everyone else's view of reality, is hard to understand without assuming that some important factor not obvious to the rest of us has entered his thinking. Even in the unlikely event that he actually thought escalation would work on the ground, it seems hard to understand why he would not have chosen to just move forward with this escalation without the totally unnecessary publicity and hype about it that his administration has engaged in. This hype has quite predictably further lowered approval ratings that already hovered dangerously close to a point-of-no-return threshold below which his own political machine starts to turn on him. The only reason I could see that the President would be willing to take the immediate hit to his already deeply compromised credibility involved in moving to a more hawkish position just when everybody else in the country was moving dovish, was that he knew something the rest of us didn't about events soon to occur that would make hawkishness seem prescient instead of backward-thinking, tough-minded instead of foolish. War with Iran, or rather, the retaliation Iran would deliver upon us for whatever provocation the President had first ordered against them, seemed the only plausible candidate for this factor that would make resolute hawkishness once again seem the right course. After all, to fit the Churchill mold, he would have to spend some time being dismissed as a fool by all the "sensible" people for concerns, about Hitler in Churchill's case, about Iran in Dubya's, later proved to be all too justified by subsequent events.
What I hadn't foreseen is that the surge would be organically tied to the initiation of hostilities with Iran. Escalating with more ground troops into Iraq didn't seem to have a direct bearing on operations the administration might contemplate against Iran, which would presumably involve air and naval forces only, with perhaps some Special Ops folks as the only ground forces in Iran. The part of the Iraq escalation talk was to play in this charade, I thought, was simply to provide a means to contrast the President's toughness and prescience, as opposed to the craven softness of the Dems and Republican weak sisters, by advancing a proposal that would predictably draw fire from everyone less hawkish than his administration. And they didn't seem to need any fresh rationales for hostilities with Iran, because the administration and its many mouthpieces have long been nurturing the supposed threat of Iranian nukes as a handy throw-down weapon to be available whenever hostilities with Iran might be required for the domestic political purposes that drive everything this administration does. So, the bombing campaign to take out the Iranian nuke program would start, thousands of Iranian civilians would be killed as "collateral damage", but before this fresh war-mongering madness could be brought under control by our Congress, Iran would retaliate, perhaps killing only hundreds of Americans in a vain attempt to de-escalate, the US casualties of this retaliation would then make it impossible to "blame America first", opposition to revenging our dead would crumble, and all would unite in agreement that Dubya was some latter day Churchill for urging toughness against these subhuman savages back when the rest of us were all for cutting and running.
While war with Iran is now front-burner in their propaganda effort (no longer entirely the stuff of conspiracy theorists such as myself and Sy Hersch), they don't seem to be headed for initiation of hostilities under this rationalization of the supposed danger of the Iranian nuke program that they have long worked on, but rather by way of Iran's supposed support for the insurgency in Iraq. This shift in rationalization apparently cannot be explained as a legitimate concern for a real emerging threat. It would be truly bizarre for the Iranians to be arming the Sunni groups who are responsible for the overwhelming bulk of insurgent attacks against coalition forces, and only somewhat less surprising if they had supplied significant arms to the Mahdi Army, the one major Shiite group with a history of anti-US insurgency, but which is a rival to Shiite groups more closely aligned with Iran. To be sure, the Iranians have certainly supplied arms to some Shiite militias, but this stretches back to the days when Saddam was still in power, and the Badr brigades were an anti-Saddam resistance group. The point is underlined by the delay in releasing the Congressionally mandated intelligence assessment of this Iranian support for the insurgency, reportedly because it showed low-to-no such support. So, why the shift in rationalization, when shifting rationalizations could only serve as yet another inopportune reminder that we've been down this road before, of "fixing the intelligence around the policy", in the run-up to invading Iraq?
The fact that the administration can't or won't go straight to a bombing campaign is, by itself, a hopeful sign that they are at last facing appreciable constraints on their behavior. One such constraint might be that the military simply refused to start yet another pre-emptive war, just on the President's say-so and without specific mandate of Congress, and on grounds they know full-well to be as flimsy as the Iraqi WMD scam. The generals need not, probably didn't, simply reject plans to bomb Iraq. Theirs is a passive-aggressive relationship with their political masters, whereby they can deep-six a proposed operation by making it sufficiently clear that their Congressional testimony will prove grim for the administration, and embarrassing leaks will flow unchecked to the press. Even if the generals were no obstacle, perhaps it was felt that Iranian nukes was a rationale so uncomfortably close to Iraqi WMD, especially with the Libby trial ongoing, that the resemblance might make the ploy transparent. After all, if the point of maneuvering the Iranians into killing Americans is to get the electorate to rally around the Commander-in-Chief so that the nation will face down unprovoked aggression with a united front, etc., the provocation can't be too obviously a ploy to trigger the Iranian attack on Americans. The whole thing can't look too obviously like Wag the Dog. But perhaps the strongest reason to not bomb right away, was the fear that the Iranians might have the good sense to hold back from retaliation, no matter how seriously provoked, that would only help a drowning Dubya regain his footing. Most likely, it would be a combination of all of the above, reinforcing each other. The generals feel freer, and see more benefit, of dragging their feet doing something they believe to be foolish anyway, because the President's popularity drop and credibility gap with the media and electorate means that there is no longer any inevitability to his getting his policy through in the end anyway. Less unquestioned support from the generals leads in turn to even lower credibility with the media and public. The Iranians see this dynamic at play, and become more likely to try to ride out any attack without immediate retaliation, in hopes that the madness of the administration's policy will bring it down much more effectively than any retaliation they could launch, which would actually help the President recover credibility.
The downside to this apparent shift away from immediate bombing, and toward justifying war with Iran on the basis of their supposed support of Iraqi insurgency, is that it will require considerable broadening of our ground war against the insurgents. The new approach will require US soldiers and Marines to start getting themselves killed in ways that can be laid at Iran's doorstep. Initially, at least, this would not involve combat against actual Iranian armed forces, none of which are presumably in Iraq. The first step will be to get US forces killed by Iraqis using Iranian-supplied weaponry. At least some weaponry of Iranian origin has undoubtedly made its way into Mahdi Army hands, which means an assault on Sadr City. This will have to be bloody enough to provoke the SCIRI and Dawa sponsored militias, which more clearly have Iranian weaponry and political backing. Their militias are strong in the south of the country, astride our supply lines, which will probably be attacked if the destruction our "liberation" of Sadr City creates is sufficiently horrendous. Something that even approaches Fallujah levels of indiscriminate destruction would do nicely. These militias in the south that attack our supply lines will have to be attacked in turn. Our move into the south, in an attempt to crush Iran's most closely sponsored Iraqi parties, will definitely produce massive US casualties clearly inflicted with Iranian-supplied arms, and plenty of caches of such arms. As more and more of our troops are killed, it will become less and less relevant for media commentators to point out that these arms were, in many instances, supplied by Iran back when the Badr brigades were on our side against Saddam. In an added grace note, the administration had the foresight to fail to take the elementary precaution of recording serial numbers of weaponry we handed out early in the occupation to Iraqi forces we were training. They probably weren't looking this far ahead, they probably simply didn't want these weapons to be embarrassingly traced back to the CPA when many of them quite predictably fell into the hands of the Sunni insurgency, but this foresightful lack of foresight will allow them to claim Iranian origin even of weaponry the US taxpayer actually paid for. But if things go badly enough for the Shiite militias, the administration won't have to settle for linking the killers of Americans to old weaponry, because the Iranians will find themselves under increasing pressure to supply their allies with the latest, most effective, weaponry, indisputably of recent Iranian origin. By this point, our generals will probably be willing to go along with bombing the "sanctuaries" across the border in Iran itself where the weaponry is passed on, perhaps with training, to Iraqis. This bombing will be subject to creeping escalation, with increasingly promiscuous "collateral damage" killing of Iranian civilians. Sooner or later, the Iranians will retaliate in ways that will seal in the electorate's mind the validity of an uncompromisingly tough approach to these barbarians.
The key dynamic in allowing the President to push an initially unpopular escalation, will be that Americans, like any other people, will never be able to view what an adversary does to it, no matter how extreme our prior provocation of that enemy, with anything approaching objectivity and balance. It is heartening that the President has so lost the trust, and justifiably lost that trust, of the American people, that he judges the outright bombing of Iran to be too big a hurdle, so obvious a provocation that he feels he must adopt an incremental strategy of gradual escalations if he is to get away with this crime. He will start with small steps that he can get away with, because they seem merely slight extensions of the war already in progress. He will have to rely initially on hyping "pre-programmed" Iranian responses, which are not really fresh acts, or really acts of any sort of aggression, to hold up the Iranian end of the spiral of escalation. Things they did years ago, like arming the Badr brigades, long before they could imagine that these arms would end up killing the American troops who invade the south to clear our supply lines to Baghdad, will be presented to a public angry and fearful at the stepped-up American losses, as part of Iran's long-term plot against us. The President will thus work his way with American public opinion up to the point where he can get away with escalations against the Iranians that they actually will respond to with their own real escalations. These escalations are likely to include things that, while trivial compared to what we will have done to Iran by this point, will be great enough to inspire fear in the American people as great as 9/11, and thereby restore the President to approval ratings near those he enjoyed following 9/11. We can only imagine what the second version of the Patriot Act, that will follow the second 9/11, will look like, but it's a fair bet that he will make sure that he never again risks a free domestic political opposition putting him and his party back to where it is now.
The only way to prevent this catastrophe is to prevent this dynamic of the escalation spiral from getting off the ground. Once it has progressed far at all, once very many Americans at all have been killed by Iranians, it will become unstoppable until many years and many lives have been wasted. The erosion of public trust in the President, however, is such that the spiral can be strangled in its cradle. He does not dare escalate all at once against Iran, because he fears that this will be too transparently a Wag the Dog maneuver. We must harness this mistrust, this credibility gap, to shout down every small increment of escalation as a Wag the Dog maneuver. We must be ready to use every advantage of Congressional majority, to include shutting down the government, because even that is well justified by the gravity of the peril we face from another unprovoked war in the Gulf. The narrative must no longer be that the President is incompetent, or stubborn, or some such mild and foregiving rubbish that is no longer adequate to the danger this country faces. He is a criminal. He knows exactly what he is doing in provoking a war with Iran that he knows will prove disastrous to this country he has sworn to protect and defend. He seeks to exploit disaster to insure his political survival. He seeks to get American soldiers and Marines killed so that he can corner Iran into killing so many American civilians that people will be too terrified to let him or his party leave office in 2009. He committed the same crime before -- just look at the Libby trial -- starting a pointless war with Iraq to win the 2002 and 2004 elections, and now seeks an even greater crime to create a terror among the people that he hopes will save him from the deserved punishment his crimes will surely meet if honest and sane government is restored to the White House in 2009.
Yes, this sounds extreme. Yes, this is extreme. But to accuse this President of treason is to do no more than what his party has done to us for years. The difference is that we are right, and have the right, while they are cynical manipulators, liars and criminals, who shouted treason on us in guilt over their own crimes. If we are not willing to speak plain truths in defense of our country, its soldiers and Marines, or even our own honor, and take actions as stark as our words, we will never prevail. When this President rejected the safe and sensible course of compromise after losing the election and the release of the ISG report, and opted instead for escalation when the nation cried for de-escalation, he put us on notice that he planned to abandon the safe and sensible to risk his political survival on a mad gamble staked with the blood of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis. He is crossing the Rubicon even as I write these words. If we fail to admit the truth of what he is doing before our eyes, we will have already lost our republic.