While I haven't blogged about it, I've been following events in the coming war with Iran over the last couple weeks, and I've come to some conclusions as to why the Administration seems so dead-set on doing it.
Simply put, the Administration is full of small men who want to be great men.
On the flip...
The President and the Vice President have sent out strongly worded warnings today, and over the weekend the President acknowledged that he has authorized troops in Iraq to capture or kill Iranian operatives instead of just catching and releasing them. This rhetorical and political shift mirrors the saber-rattling coming from conservative mouthpieces on Iran, including calling their actions a second Holocaust, as well as what appear to be overhyped stories in The New York Times about Iranian influence in Iraq, based entirely on information that has been well-known for months. The US also appears to be planting stories in the European press about Iranian machinations with North Korea, for example, in the hopes that they migrate stateside. Top Presidential candidates are pushing for war with Iran, and even Senator Edwards has called stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is the challenge of our generation.
If this all sounds terribly familiar to you, you're not alone. Last week Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller remarked that "To be quite honest, I’m a little concerned that it’s Iraq again... this whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre.”
I would tend to agree that I view this with a foreboding sense of deja vu. I mean, you once again have the neglect of the situation in Afghanistan, where there is a far greater probability of terrorism emanating from that region, in favor of Iran. You have sketchy intelligence, which claims that Iran is supplying arms to insurgents in Iraq but has very nearly no evidence of such a link. You have literally any report about Iran put into the context of a coming war, instead of the Iranian domestic political sphere which is where it ought to reside. You have loud statements that Iranians are crossing the border into Iraq to cause trouble when in fact the opposite may be true, with Iraqi violence spilling over into Iranian border areas, particularly Khuzestan. You have mistaken statements that the whole world views Iran's nuclear ambitions as an existential problem, when in fact public opinion in this country and in Iran are similar, a support of international nonproliferation rules but a willingness to allow uranium enrichment for nuclear energy purposes. You have Administration officials lining up on behalf of the Iranian people, calling to rescue them from tyranny, when what Iran has is not exactly democracy, but not a dictatorship either, instead a place where the supposed "leader" of the country (Ahmadinejad) can be fully rejected in local elections. You have what the Administration calls "definitive proof" about an imminent Iraqi nuclear program, when reality suggests that the program is in chaos and decades away from being realized. And this I will excerpt because it's a key point.
Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved. The country denies developing weapons, saying its pursuit of uranium enrichment is for energy purposes.
Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace - in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the US - a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production.
So clearly, the Administration is using the same tactics of lies and fearmongering to prepare the ground for a war against a country that is not a credible threat to the United States. The question has to be why. And I think Digby gets close to it by bringing up something I've been thinking about of late.
But it's the next part, the childlike psycho-babble blather about how we will have let down all our friends and allies and shown Al Qaeda that we can be intimidated if we withdraw, that's noteworthy. (Cheney) has never wavered from day one from that idea and it's clear that it is the sum total of his strategic view of dealing with Islamic extremism: prove that we aren't cowards.
The only thing he seems to know about strategy is that if you "back down" your enemy will think you are soft and if you don't "back down," no matter what the circumstances, you will convince the enemy that they can't defeat you. Basically, he really believes the trash talk that bin Laden's been spewing all these years, --- trash talk that would not sound odd coming from the mouth of a world wide wrestling star or a seventh grade bully [...]
I would suggest that it is the greatest strategic disaster in our history because it wasn't really a strategy at all. It was a simple-minded reading of a complicated problem based upon some psychological need among a handful of powerful men. And vice president Cheney is clearly still very powerful. He is out there making a spectacle of himself with this talk and nobody can stop him even though it's terribly counter-productive to the current legislative and foreign policy challenges and the president's standing with the nation at large. He is a dangerous and somewhat deranged man. But the problem is that the man at whose pleasure he serves is just as deluded as he is.
It is this kind of thing that makes me believe that they will provoke a war with Iran. It is their strategy to prove that the US is the biggest toughest bastard on the planet. Iraq isn't getting that job done. Maybe doubling down will.
While I think this is very right, I think there's a little more to it than that. The Project for the New American Century, the foundational document of the neoconservative movement, kind of gives away the end goal right in the title. This is an ideology about American exceptionalism and global hegemony. The signatories to this document described that they would likely be unable to muster the political will to implement their agenda without a life-changing event akin to a Pearl Harbor.
In effect, these ideologues, and the empty suit they have fronting for them, are small men that wish to be something greater. You can see this every time Bush talks of how he will be vindicated by history, and the constant references to Churchill and Truman. He's measuring his face for an addition to Mount Rushmore as we speak. The idea is to become a MAN OF HISTORY rather than someone who needs to deal with the niggling details of the present. And war is what consecrates men of history. If you haven't read War is a force that gives us meaning by Chris Hedges, you need to do so. In this excerpt, Hedges describes how war is an addictive phenomenon that taps into the primal urge to defend and protect.
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it gives us what we all long for in life. It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our news. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those that have the least meaning in their lives-the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the lost legions of youth that live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world-are all susceptible to war's appeal.
The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers - historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state - all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.
And so it takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure. Few, once in bottle, can find the strength to resist.
Now do you understand why the President calls this "the ideological struggle of our times"? He sees himself as striding across the battlefield like a modern-day Patton, boldly defeating the terrorists with his own bare hands. He's starring in his own movie where are the sublimated historical urges to be a warrior-king are allowed to surface. This is why we have to go to Iran, not to protect some notion of freedom or save the world from grave danger. It's so that one small man can add a few inches to his manhood and believe in the greatness he's convinced himself he exhibits.
...Incidentally, Christopher Hitchens let his slip show that being a great man was his only end goal in this New Yorker piece:
In a 2003 interview, Hitchens said the events of September 11th filled him with "exhiliration." His friend Ian Buruma, the writer, told me, "I don't quite see Christopher as a 'man of action,' but he's always looking for our defining moments--as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side and stand up to the enemy." Hitchens foresaw "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate." Here was a question on which history would judge him; and just as Orwell had (in his view) got it right on the great questions of the 20th century -- Communism, Fascism, and imperialism -- so Hitchens wanted a future student to see that he had been similarly clear-eyed (He once wrote, "I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences posthumously."
And George Bush is governing as if his policies will be administered posthumously. And he wants to believe in that A&E special 30 years from now about how he stood up to Iran and made the world safe for democracy.