Operation Desert Blunder

Here's a quote from globalsecurity.org:

The success of strikes against Iran's WMD facilities requires both tactical and strategic surprise, so there will not be the sort of public rhetorical buildup in the weeks preceeding hostilities, of the sort that preceeded the invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the Bush Administration will do everything within its power to deceive Iran's leaders into believing that military action is not imminent.

The full text can be read at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-timeline.htm and it includes an interesting timeline of when President Bush might and might not authorize an attack on Iran.

I'm not griping about anything that was said on globalsecurity.org, which has over the years been fairly sober. What I'm griping about is the way we (read President Bush and his people) keep taking their eye off the ball.

Who declared war on the United States? Who brought down the World Trade Center buildings and attacked the Pentagon? Who blew a hole in the side of USS Cole?. Hint: it wasn't Iran. So why are we taking our eyes off the real objective in this so-called War on Terror, Afghanistan, and getting ourselves all wrapped around the axle with Iran?

Is it really just the nuclear issue? North Korea built and detonated a half-assed nuclear weapon, and we rewarded them with a package deal that gives them "energy supplies" (read oil) in return for suspending a weapons program they couldn't afford in the first place. Why is it that North Korea, a member of the "Axis of Evil", is rewarded for building a nuke, while Iran is threatened with war for merely enriching uranium? For the sake of consistency alone we should hold both countries to the same standard, it seems to me. And is a nuclear-capable Iran any more of a threat to us than, say, a nuclear-capable Pakistan? Pakistan is one revolution away from looking like Iran in 1979, after all, and where is that OBL fellow said to be hiding again?

I can't help but wonder if part of the US government's preoccupation with Iran these days has to do with the Big O - oil. I can't prove it, and just thinking it makes me feel a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, but there it is, all the same.

I have over the last decade become a firm believer in what I call the "China theory", even though good examples of it have been seen in the USSR and Vietnam. It works thus. You simply ignore what the allegedly hostile government does, maintain economic relationships, and wait for social and economic changes to render the allegedly hostile government irrelevant. Sure, there are still hard-line Communists in the Chinese government, but they have been almost completely marginalized by events. Attempts by the Communists to stop the changes taking place in China today would be akin to shoveling dirt into the Yellow River, and at some point the hard-liners will shuffle off to the great Stalinist Old Folks Home and leave the Chinese government in the hands of the new entrepreneurs (which opens a different can of worms, but a less dangerous can of worms).

The same thing can happen in Iran, assuming we don't attack Iran (note that we never declare war on anyone any more, which I think amounts to dereliction of duty by the Senate. We have votes to "authorize military action" but if you put a motion before the Senate to declare war on anyone, I bet those media hounds would head for the hills so fast the dust cloud wouldn't settle for three days). A policy of engagement will lead to economic and social changes inside Iran that will, at some point, render the existing leadership irrelevant. What, really, is the single thread that unifies the Iranian goverment right now? I would bet that it is a sense of being under siege by the West in general and the United States in specific.

Release that state of siege and engage with Iran and I suspect that sooner rather than later the hard-liners in the Iranian government will be rendered irrelevant by the facts on the ground. This is not to say that Iran will ever look like the United States. Iran will always draw inspiration from its rich Persian history and from its Muslim orientation, but I don't see that a proud and vigorous Iran has to necessarily pose a risk to the United States.

But, having said that, Bush will do what he's going to do. He's already called the Constitution, a document he swore to defend, a "goddamned piece of paper"*, and his signing statements often promulgate points of view that even to me seem to be wildly unconstitutional. So he'll do what he wants to do - he is the Decider, after all. But I, for one, am sick of bankrolling the wars he started for bogus reasons while the one war that I do think needs to be fought (that would be Afghanistan) gets no attention at all.

I will make you this bet. I will bet that there are more people in the US military working up preliminary planning for an attack on Iran than there are US infantrymen holding ground in Afghanistan. And I think that's criminal. This talk of the anticipated Taliban "Spring Offensive" shouldn't even be on the news. We should have sufficient manpower and money in place in Afghanistan to make any talk of a Taliban offensive ridiculous. But we don't, and that makes me mad.

*Consult http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12142005.html if you don't believe me.