My stacks of non-fiction reading material have shrunk by four-and-a-third books over the past couple of months. Topic: Iran.
Since the American hostages were freed after the revolution 25 years ago, I’d read only cursorily about Iran until a year ago October when I blogged here about Israel’s
acquisition and conversion of German submarines to fire nuclear-tipped missiles and its contingency plans for taking out six Iranian nuclear sites. Nuke talk in the land of Armageddon always captures my attention.
As do the views of folks like NeoImp guru Michael Ledeen. At the American Enterprise Institute website, inspired directly by Machiavelli’s
The Prince, Ledeen wrote in a summary of his exasperatingly Ramboesque
The War Against theTerror Masters a list of ways the U.S. should behave post-9/11:
Strike decisively, get it over with. Don't listen to the diplomats, who will always say that we can achieve our goals with a little bit of nastiness and a whole lot of talking. …
We can lead by the force of high moral example ... [but] fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once we show that we are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to our enemies, our power will be far greater."
As for Iran,
specifically, he writes:
Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah, and the backbone of Hamas. So clear was Iran's major role in the terror universe that the Department of State, along with the CIA one of the most conflict-averse agencies of the American government, branded the Islamic Republic the world's number one terror sponsor. As it still does.
To be fair, Ledeen has repeatedly called for supporting internal opposition in Iran, not for a direct invasion. But I like to be able to read between the lines.
So, since September, in addition to cruising foreign policy journals and defense and security sites in Blogolia, I’ve read William Shawcross’s
The Shah’s Last Ride, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr’s disputatious
My Turn to Speak, the extraordinarily well-crafted and highly disturbing memoir of Azar Nafisi,
Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Steven Kinzer’s
All the Shah’s Men. I recommend any and all these, but if you want a quick overview of the Iranian situation, with links,
Liberal Street Fighter and Simian Flogger
Soj has two Daily Kos Diaries with maps and other stuff tailor-made for you
here and
here.
Bookmarked on the floor by my bed is liberal hawk Kenneth Pollack’s latest sloggy work,
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America.
As many Kosopotamians will recall, Mr. Pollack, a former CIA agent with two stints at the National Security Council under Clinton, previously distinguished himself in 2002 with
The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, which argued in nearly 500 pages that it would be better to take out the nasty, duplicitous, reckless, megalomaniacal Saddam sooner than later. After some of his justifications – notably WMD - didn’t pan out, Pollack approached but didn’t quite engage in a little
self-criticism of his unequivocal call for an invasion when he evaluated what had gone wrong for
The Atlantic:
"Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore, or trusts the Bush Administration to tell the truth. The only way that we can regain the world's trust is to demonstrate that we understand our mistakes and have changed our ways."
In a subsequent panel discussion with other liberal hawks, Pollack said that while he opposed the manner and timing of Dubyanocchio’s Iraq Attack, if he had known in January 2003 what he knew by January 2004, he would have still
opted to invade.
That’s the kind of view that bends some of us toward cursing and another hit of the Cuervo. Nonetheless, one would be remiss to ignore what Pollack says about Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.
In a blogbrief called
"Groundhog Day," Atrios weighed in yesterday:
I'd forgotten Ken Pollack has a big new book out warning us about Iran. I'm sure we can look forward to his numerous appearances on chat shows saying diplomacy is the best solution, but absent that war is probably a better choice than doing nothing. Rumsfeld will deny that there are any "war plans on his desk," giggling as our press fails to note that he neither bothers to make any plans nor does he actually use a desk. Andy Card will comment that one waits until after Labor Day to roll out any new product. Judith Miller, the current Queen of All Iraq, will develop exciting new sources within the new Iranian National Congress. With any luck, the balsa wood drones of death will reappear, as will scary plans for weapons of mass destruction which look like they'd been scribbled by a 5 year old. And, it'll all hit the fan right before the midterms as the Dems once again run and hide.
Wake me up, please.
...oh no, it's going to be worse. We'll have endless weepy tributes to "Iranian college students" who will overthrow the government by Crazy Andy and Tom Friedman. Friedman will write endless "soul searching" columns about "Tom Friedman's war." Oh Lord, it goes on and on... the last two years really did righteously suck. I don't want to do them again.
Daily Kos alum
Steve Gilliard straight out told Pollack to “shut the fuck up” after reading his Op-Ed saying the
U.S. Is Needed to Defuse Iran.
Ken, I don't care what your job is, or how much "experience" you have. Your ideas suck, and people die behind them. How come you missed the war Tony Cordesman predicted? Or any sentient person would have gleened from Iraqi history and oh, the constant history of rebellions against Saddam's rule in places like, uh, Fallujah, the 40 year war against the Kurds, and the ongoing Shia rebellion, which didn't end in 1991. Saddam didn't drain those marshes for no reason.
Groundhog Day, my ass. This time, we're gonna call you on your bullshit and nail you.
But
is Pollack’s latest tome merely déjà vu Baghdad-cum-Tehran? Did he, in
Praktike’s words just exchange
q’s for
n’s?
Praktike thinks not:
If anything, the book is meant to forestall a foolish course of action such as a military invasion (he's got a section aptly named "The Case Against Invading Iran") or a covert regime destabilization campaign (there's another section called "The Ghost of Kim Roosevelt").
Pollack's nuanced case is duly replete with qualifiers and caveats, but the bottom line is that, as "our least bad option," he favors a "Triple Track" approach consisting of the following elements:
• Hold Open the Prospect of the Grand Bargain
• A True Carrot-and-Stick Approach
• Preparing for a New Containment Regime
He says on p. 385:
[J]ust because the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons does not quite justify the extraordinary price of an invasion does not mean that it is not a threat or that it would not justify other actions by the United States that might not be as costly as an invasion but could still require considerable sacrifices. Foreign policy is rarely an all-or-nothing activity--that either a threat is great enough to justify paying any price, including invasion or nuclear strikes, or else it is not a threat at all and therefore does not justify paying any price. Most foreign policy problems fall somewhere in between, and the Iranian nuclear threat still falls toward the higher end of the spectrum.
Failing to succeed would meaning learning to live with a nuclear Iran, which would be pretty bad but not the end of the world.
Pretty bad is definitely not how Israel
sees it.
Increasingly concerned about Iran's nuclear program, Israel is weighing its options and has not ruled out a military strike to prevent the Islamic Republic from gaining the capability to build atomic weapons, according to policymakers, military officials, analysts and diplomats. …
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper [in September] that "all options" were being weighed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.
Army Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon said, "We will not rely on others."
Preemptive strikes are an essential element of Israel's military doctrine. Perhaps the most pertinent example is the air raid that destroyed Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. …
"The comparison to 1981 is of the utmost relevance, because the decision-making is based on the same factors," said army reserve Col. Danny Shoham, a former military intelligence officer who is a researcher at Bar-Ilan University.
"Those are: What is the reliability of the intelligence picture? What would be the response of the opponent? What is the point of no return in terms of nuclear development, and what would be the international response?" He and others noted key differences that could weigh against a military strike. Iran's nuclear development sites are widely scattered, in many cases hidden underground and heavily fortified, so Israel would have far less opportunity to deal the Iranian program a single devastating blow.
The Israelis may be bluffing. Or not. The Iranians may have a secret stash of smuggled uranium, as a terrorist opposition group suggested yesterday. They may be determined to have a Bomb no matter what, figuring that those who already have them and are designing new ones are poor determiners of who should not have them.
Thus, while Iran says
it will suspend uranium enrichment, anyone with an idea of how the mullahs operate would be a fool not to be suspicious. But I’m just as suspicious when
Powell says Iran pursuing nuclear bomb.
This suspicion upsets me. Not because I have any respect left for our Secretary of State, or the likes of Ken Pollack, but because there are legitimate threats in the world, and we ought to be able to trust those in charge or who influence those in charge to be straight about those threats. We shouldn't have to wonder how much of their Iranomania is about security and terrorism, and how much of it is, ultimately, once again, about oil.
As someone who comprehended my first political lie when Eisenhower denied any U-2s were flying over the Soviet Union, you would think I would long ago have stopped hoping that, maybe just maybe before I'm dead we'll have some leaders who tell the truth, to us and to the world.