No, no, wait, stick around for a second -- the diary you are about to read is not another "We’re attacking Iran on April 6" diary.
Let me begin by saying that, frankly, I have no idea whether the cruise missiles start raining down on Tehran and Isfahan and Natanz on April 6, 2007, on November 1, 2008, on January 19, 2009, or never -- although I sincerely hope it’s the latter.
But I submit that no intellectually serious person can honestly say that the odds of the U.S. and/or Israel launching an attack on Iran in the remaining 665 days of the Bush Administration are so trivial as to not be worth wasting our beautiful minds worrying about.
Having said that, please keep reading even if I just insulted you by calling you intellectually unserious or dishonest, because even if you think there's no chance we'll attack, this diary is for you too -- and you ought to have no problem making the commitment I'm going to ask of you.
Follow me on the flip.
Let me start by saying that, in my personal opinion (which, in combination with 99 cents, buys you a McDonald's double cheeseburger) is that a planned air attack on Iran is not likely to come as soon the end of next week, for the simple reason that we haven’t yet seen the sort of breathless ‘round-the-clock news coverage that I expect we would be seeing if such an attack were really only 10 days away.
However -- again, in my layperson's opinion, for what it's worth -- I think the odds of such an attack occuring in the next 22 months or so are substantial, perhaps as high as 50/50. But even if you really think there’s just no way our military would do that and that I am (along, I suppose, with Wesley Clark and his friends at StopIranWar.com, Sy Hersh, and the numerous unnamed active-duty generals who have threatened to resign if we attack Iran -- as well as blogger Arthur Silber, whose writing over the past several months on this topic has been among the most trenchant and powerful I’ve ever read (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for starters)) some kind of unhinged paranoid conspiracy theorist for indulging in such speculation, then what I’m going to ask of you ought to be effortless for you to do.
First, a quick digression: about a month ago, Jane Smiley (who I know nothing about other than she’s apparently a popular novelist, author of "A Thousand Acres")) had a fairly lightweight column at the Huffington Post entitled "What Would You Do If Bush Declared Martial Law?" -- essentially arguing that, while the Bush Administration was reckless and had some very dangerous ideas about democracy, it is at the end of the day living in a farcical fantasy-world. Her closing paragraph captures the gist:
Our armed forces can't subdue Iraq. I can't imagine that Bush thinks they could subdue New England or the West Coast, much less the whole US. To imagine himself commanding such a thing seems like magical thinking at its most obvious. So, what would you did if Bush declared martial law, laugh?
Now let’s just glide past the critical logical fallacy of her premise, which apparently involves President-Bush-as-comic-book-villain waking up one morning and deciding to make an address to the nation solemnly announcing that "I hereby declare MARTIAL LAW and hereby SUSPEND THE CONSTITUTION and establish FASCISM as our new government, under my leadership as DICTATOR-FOR-LIFE; oh, and by the way, I henceforth decree that SATANISM shall be the official religion of the United States of Fascist America. Bwaaaa-haaaaa-haaaaa!!!" At which point the American people’s innate love of freedom would cause them to rise up in revolt. (My simple point here is that, as Huey Long said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come in the guise of anti-fascism" -- and just as certainly, if martial law were declared it would not be called martial law. Thus, the author's contention that "the American people would never stand for any president announcing that he's suspending the constitution and declaring martial law, ordering troops to shoot anyone who doesn't like it," even if true, is irrelevant -- it would never be framed in such terms.)
Because what I want to focus instead are the comments. While there were a handful of Bush supporters saying "you’re all a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists," and a sizable number of responses along the line of my own pessimistic thinking, but there were a surprising number of the following sorts of blustery pronouncements:
I believe Americans, including myself, would take to the streets.
If Bush declared martial law, I would give thanks that my complaints about the NRA had come to nothing. Then I would go out and buy a gun.
[A]s bizarre as it sounds, maybe a declaration of martial law is precisely what it is going to take to finally shake our citizens out of their slumber and force these criminals from office... the white house occupants would be replaced in a matter of days...
This is why this peacenik woman has kept up her shooting skills and owns a personal arm.
Only in their DREAMS would they think they have that snowball chance in hell pulling this type of thing off.
I'd like to think our military would tell George Bush to go piss up a rope if he exercised his new power to declare Martial Law. If they didn't I'm sure I'd be joining millions of others who took to the streets and headed to Washington to overthrow this jackass.
Look, maybe I’m wrong and maybe in fact each and every one of these commenters would indeed be on the next Greyhound Bus to Washington, ready to muster on the National Mall and storm the White House. But it just struck me as just the anti-Bush equivalent of the sort of Keyboard Kommandoism we have come to expect from Jonah Goldberg and his ilk on the pro-war right, and I suspect that many of these commenters are either 12-year-olds sitting in their basements and/or people who really don’t think it’s possible and therefore are perfectly willing to indulge in such Walter Mitty-style fantasizing about how cool it would be to be on the front lines defending freedom and honor in the galaxy.
Because, frankly, I suspect that each of these commenters would have responded in roughly the same way if, instead of living in America in 2007 and being asked "what would you do if Bush declared Martial Law," if instead it were 1999 and they were asked "what would you do if a Republican president lost the popular vote, and won the electoral vote only by virtue of a several-hundred vote margin in a state where there was massive evidence of suppression of the African-American vote -- and after the state supreme court ordered a full recount, the United States Supreme Court intervened to halt the recount and essentially declare the Republican candidate the winner" ("no way, man, there’d be rioting in the street, and I’d be right in front!"); or if in 2000 you asked them "what do you think would happen if the President falsified evidence to justify a unilateral and unprovoked attack and occupation of a sovereign foreign country, and then outed a spy to punish a former Ambassador as retribution for blowing the whistle on those lies" ("that’s wack, man, we’d string him up by his balls, man!"); or if October 2001 you asked them "what do you think would happen if the President declared that he had the power to arrest and detain forever anybody who he declared to be an "enemy combatant," and further ordered the U.S. military and the CIA to torture those people" ("hey man, that’s crazy, there’s no way that would happen -- and if it did, every red-blooded American would have to fight each other for the privilege of being the first one to storm into the White House and f*ck the President’s sh*t up!").
But suppose that rather than just shaking your head and walking away at the silliness of these comments, you could counter each of those absurd answers by saying "no, really -- what would you do for real? And, are you prepared to commit now to that course of action?" And suppose you were able to get a whole community of people to go on the record, and say "Alright, maybe I don’t think your scenario could ever come to pass, but if that were to happen, here’s what I’m prepared to promise I will do: I would . . ." [quit my job and travel to DC to join anyone else who was with me camping out on the National Mall nonviolently protesting until the Bush Administration were forced out of office]/[be prepared to participate in a nationwide general strike, shutting down the centers of the nation’s major cities, until the war ended and the Bush Administration was impeached or otherwise removed from office]/[(insert your own promised course of action here)].
What’s the advantage of making such a commitment now, with regard to something we all hope will never come to pass? First, because when your house is filling with smoke is not the time to be figuring out your fire-escape route; better to plan now when you have the luxury of weighing the advantages of the different possibilities.
Second, because the world will look a whole lot different on the day after we attack Iran than it does today -- undoubtedly the media will be trumpeting the boldness of our Commander-in-Chief’s decisive action and ridiculing anyone questioning the necessity of the attack as lefty whackjobs, and complementing the diarists who will pop up to say "see, see, I told you all but you wouldn’t listen! Now it’s too late and the world’s going to end and it’s all your fault because you didn’t listen to me and you didn’t recommend my diary telling you all the attack was coming!" I’m confident that even here we’ll undoubtedly have our share of commenters wringing their hands and telling us how unfortunate it is that we had to do this but after all Ahmadenijad has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map and after all what are you, an anti-semite? -- and in that environment (not to mention with all of us still reeling from the shock that the crazy mother-f*ckers did it after all), it will that much more difficult to start from square one in organizing a rational response.
Finally, human nature being what it is, once we’re presented with a fait accompli, it’s far too easy to say, "gee, it’s too bad this happened, but what can we do now, huh? But boy, if the neocons try to follow this up with an attack on Russia, well, we’ll really show them then, won’t we?" (Atrios is fond of quoting the final lines of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which seem appropriate here:
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But, somehow we missed it.
Well, we'll know better next time.
And if you are someone who has been living in a cave for the last 6 years, and you think the Bush Administration would never do such a thing (Because after-all they're not bloodthirsty savages, right? I mean, they're not insane?!? And where would they get the troops? Right???) and you think this talk of war with Iran is all so much tin-foil-headed paranoid conspiracy-mongering -- well, fine, then you should have no problem committing yourself now to a course of action and make a promise that you’ll never have to make good on, right?
So let me ask you -- what will you do if we launch an all-out "shock and awe" air assault on Iran? Are you ready to promise that? As for me, I know I can't just continue living my life and pretend that nothing has really changed. I'm fortunate enough to have a little bit of savings squirreled away, enough at least to survive several months without a job, because I have decided (partially for reasons which might reveal a little too much information if I got more specific) that I can't continue my current job if the United States attacks Iran -- but beyond that I don't know whether it would make the most sense to tarry to Washington, D.C. and camp out on the mall, or just to stay where I am and try to foment nonviolent mass action there, or alternatively to just definitely give up forever on the United States and make a beeline for the Canadian border.
I didn't say I had the answers -- I'm asking this because I think it's high time we all figure it out and commit to our course of action now, but I suspect virtually none of us have spent enough time doing so; and I'm in that boat just as much as any of you.