The "attack Iraq" crowd was hard at work through the late 1990's cobbling together arguments that a US-effected regime change in Iraq would do everything from ushering in a golden age of Mideast democracy to achieving a utopian age through American military dominance. The Clinton Administration wasn't quite foolish enough to bite. Then came George W. Bush...
Now, the New York Times has seen fit to run an op-ed, by Alan Kuperman, arguing that the United States should bomb Iran. No less than two columnists at Foreign Policy magazine have seen fit to weigh in against Kuperman's op-ed. The very title of Mark Lynch's Mainstreaming the Mad Iran Bombers aptly telegraphs Lynch's argument against Kuperman's bizarre pro-bombing screed, so reminiscent of arguments we heard in the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq. Lynch's most salient take-away point ? - Neocons and commenters from the Washington Post have long been making similar, ill-considered (even deranged) arguments but, Lynch notes, people take the New York Times more seriously. Alas, that may be true.
Dan Drezner, also from Foreign Policy, agrees that Kuperman's NYT op-ed is incompetent, even to the point Drenzer wonders whether the NYT is craftily undercutting neocon arguments for an attack on Iran. Maybe, but Drezner also thinks Lynch's attack on Kuperman's NYT op-ed is heavyhanded. Now, I don't pretend great foreign policy expertise but Drezner seems unaware of the key role the New York Times played in the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq.
The NYT's shilling for US foreign adventurism goes back to the CIA initiated coup against the Democratically elected Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954*. Little seems to have changed since. Here's a review of the 2004 book, The Record of the Paper: Fifty years of the New York Times on Foreign Policy by Howard Friel and Richard Falk.
"In this meticulously researched study -- the first part of a two-volume work -- Howard Friel and Richard Falk demonstrate how the newspaper of record in the United States has consistently, over the last 50 years, misreported the facts related to the wars waged by the United States.
From Vietnam in the 1960s to Nicaragua in the 1980s and Iraq today, the authors accuse the New York Times of serial distortions. They claim that such coverage now threatens not only world legal order but constitutional democracy in the United States. Falk and Friel show that, despite numerous US threats to invade Iraq, and despite the fact that an invasion of one country by another implicates fundamental aspects of the UN Charter and international law, the New York Times editorial page never mentioned the words "UN Charter" or "international law" in any of its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001, to March 20, 2003. The authors also show that the editorial page supported the Bush administration's WMD claims against Iraq, and that its magazine, op-ed and news pages performed just as poorly."
As Marc Lynch's trenchant critique puts it, we need to draw the line - we cannot let this poorly considered "attack Iran" jingoism stand unchallenged. Lynch writes,
Advocates of such a military strike have been agitating tirelessly for years to mainstream and normalize an idea once seen as mad, using precisely these arguments so often that their deep weaknesses may not even register anymore. Opponents of such a military strike -- on the grounds that it would not likely stop the nuclear program, would kill lots of innocent Iranians and inflame Iranian public opinion, would destroy Obama's hopes to transform America's relations with the Islamic world and inflame anti-Americanism back to Bush-era levels, and so on -- may not take this seriously enough.
...I suspect that one of the great foreign policy challenges of 2010 is going to be to push back on this mad campaign for another pointless, counter-productive war for the sake of war.
This is no joke. We need pushback.
*correction - my dating of the Guatemala coup against the Arbenz government was incorrect, off by 2 years. The anti-Arbenz coup was in 1954.