Iranian efforts to develop a nuclear weapon are a big problem - and one we will only have a chance of addressing effectively if Iranian efforts can be stalled past November, and if Democrats sweep into the House and Senate.
I think I have a bit different take on this than the earlier diary positing imminent war. Every assessment I read suggests that the United States is militarily in no position to do anything unilateral - our forces are exhausted and trapped in a potential powder-keg in Iraq (see below).
In sum: the untenable position of our forces in Iraq is now crippling our ability to deal with Iran.
I believe (and deeply hope) that even our ruling Republicans are not stupid enough to use nuclear weapons. (Smacking down the outrageous claims of the Bush Administration that the authorization to use force in the "war on terror" empowers them to do whatever the hell they want, anywhere they want, becomes increasingly imperative the hotter the situation grows -- Gonzalez and Bush probably think they already have authorization to nuke Iran if they want.)
Clearly the best response to Iran will be through overwhelming multilateral pressure, which might have to be backed by a threat of force. This is tricky, however. The US would probably have to be a key part of any multilateral response, but the Bush administration continues to be regarded as toxic by almost every other government, and every multilateral institution, on earth.
Forcing the Bush Administration to back away from its excesses in the "GWOT" (torture, infinite detention of prisoners, extraordinary rendition, warrantless spying and requisition of business records, etc.), and dramatically reducing our troop-presence in hostile zones in Iraq (i.e., everywhere, with the possible exception of Kurdistan) could be important steps in regaining some standing internationally.
These steps will only happen if Democrats achieve a cleansing sweep in November.
Unless Democrats claim Congress and restore some vestige of oversight of the Executive branch, there will be no examination of failed US policies (or sheer lack of
any coherent policy) in Iraq, and no prospect of a change in direction.
The National Security Card
Pundits always talk about a problem Democrats have vs. Republicans on issues of national security. Pardon my isolation from the TV babble-sphere (where this conventional wisdom must not seem laughable), but WTF?
The unshakeable truth is that Republican incompetence in national security has been making the world a more dangerous place for more than a generation. In the 1980s, they made Al Qaeda through the covert operations they ran in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then they made Iraqi Shiites hate us by egging Saddam Hussein to launch the Iran-Iraq war (where the casualties were disproportionately Shiites on both sides). Then Bush's Ambassador to Iraq sent a mixed signal to Hussein, prompting the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, which concluded with Papa Bush irresponsibly encouraging a Shiite uprising - that may have resulted in the slaughter of as many as 100,000 more Shia - and ensured lingering bitterness.
More recently, on the Republicans' watch, we lost Osama bin Laden, thoroughly botched Iraqi reconstruction after the latest war - turning the country into an Al Qaeda training zone - and watched North Korea develop nukes. This is not to mention 9/11 itself. (Republicans mention it enough.)
On the North Korea debacle, in the last three years the North Korean regime has played Republican mis-steps to their advantage, no-doubt inspiring the Iranians. The North Koreans have opened a bomb-assembly line that has likely produced at least 6 nuclear weapons, and may be producing a new bomb every month. Just as the North Korean regime is thought to have critically enabled the Pakistani nuclear program in the 1990s by trading enrichment technology for rocket technology, the North Koreans (or Pakistanis) are quite plausibly sharing enrichment technology with the Iranians.
Iran is only the latest in a long string of failures.
Republicans are supposedly worried about "Weapons of Mass Destruction." With respect to nukes, Iran - unlike Iraq - is the real deal. The problem is that Republicans are more concerned about covering up their smoldering failures (not to mention their outrageous graft) than about protecting our security.
Not only is a Democratic sweep possibly the only chance to avoid a new debacle even worse than Iraq (an unsuccessful invasion or unilateral nuclear attack), the issue should be helping Democrats achieve the requisite sweep. Democrats should be addressing the issue in the campaign and actively exterminating any Republican pretense to competency in national security policy or management. Democrats should be able to find broad agreement and unity on this (the "lack of unity" issue apparently being another staple of the TV babblesphere).
Nothing But Flowers, Dick?
Here is how our predicament in Iraq fundamentally hamstrings our ability to deal with Iran. From a recent article by Peter Galbraith:
Late last month Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader in Baghdad, traveled to Tehran to confer with his Iranian sponsors, who help pay for his ten-thousand-man private militia, the Mahdi Army. Commenting on the impending crisis between the United States and Iran over Iran's nuclear program, al-Sadr said, "If neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we will support them. The Mahdi Army is beyond the Iraqi Army. It was established to defend Islam."
And unlike the days of the fierce fighting against Al-Sadr's forces throughout southern Iraq in 2004 (also described in the article), Al-Sadr is now the leader of a major, legitimized part of the Iraqi ruling coalition.
Today, Moqtada al-Sadr controls one of the largest factions within the victorious United Iraq Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 national elections. Nor is he the only member of the Alliance likely to side with Iran if war comes. SCIRI--the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq--is Iraq's largest political party. It was founded in Tehran in 1982, and its name gives an accurate idea of its politics. The Iranians also created, trained, and apparently still fund SCIRI's military wing, the Badr Corps, which has over 12,000 troops. Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is the former head of the Badr Corps, whose members he has helped place throughout Iraq's national police. Dawa, the third major element in the UIA, also has close relations with Iran.
Here is the crux of the argument in sum:
With the US Army vastly overextended in Iraq and Iran's friends in power in Baghdad, the Iranians apparently feel confident that the United States will take no action to stop them if they try to make a nuclear weapon. This is only one little-noticed consequence of America's failure in Iraq. We invaded Iraq to protect ourselves against nonexistent WMDs and to promote democracy. Democracy in Iraq brought to power Iran's allies, who are in a position to ignite an uprising against American troops that would make the current problems with the Sunni insurgency seem insignificant. Iran, in effect, holds the US hostage in Iraq, and as a consequence we have no good military or nonmilitary options in dealing with the problem of Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the 1979 hostage crisis, we did this to ourselves.
The key to breaking through the Republican-generated fog is squarely
- To frame the Iran nuclear issue as a critical challenge
- To explain that our military options are sorely constrained because of the quagmire in Iraq; and that the lack of realistic military options undermines our diplomatic options
- To explain the fundamental need for a re-examination and change of approach - both to get our troops out of the powder-keg, and to ensure / enable a multilateral response
- To explain that the reason Republicans cannot do this is because they are too focused on spinning and grinning - they are too invested and entrenched in defending past mistakes and incompetence in Iraq, when it is now overwhelmingly obvious that...
- Republicans in Washington, and on the ground in the CPA in Iraq, egregiously botched the reconstruction
Again borrowing Galbraith's summary:
In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, "Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy." His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush's shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.
These shortcomings have led directly to the current dilemmas of the US both in Iraq and with Iran. Unless the President and his team -- abetted by some oversight from Congress -- are capable of examining the causes of failure in Iraq, it is hard to believe he will be able to manage the far more serious problem with Iran.
Focusing
Republican failures in the "War on Terror" go well beyond the particular tactical blunders that led us into the Iranian double-bind. For instance, Republican policies have also helped to train a new generation of Al Qaeda recruits in Iraq (even if Republican efforts have not resulted in meaningful progress toward training an Iraqi national army), and Republican thuggery has nurtured the frenzied hatred of untold numbers of others around the world, which may inspire more entrepreneurial terrorism, like that which struck the UK on 7/7.
But Democrats too often lack focus, on an agenda, and the craft of telling simple stories. It sure strikes me that by zeroing in, in a forward-looking way, on how the Republicans are handing nukes to the Iranians, Democrats could unify our critique of Iraq, tell a story that most Americans already know in a rough sense (even if many have not connected all the dots) - and just maybe prevent an enormous tragedy.