Ten years since the Iraq invasion, many more years with Iranian threat inflation

James Fallows thinks about the ten year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. He says he'd like to hear from the liberal war hawks and what they've learned.  I don't quite fit that category - not always a liberal for one thing, and was undecided rather than a supporter of the war.  I did believe the WMD stories, and that getting rid of an entrenched dictator could be enormously valuable (I've lived in two dictatorships and had a taste of them).

On the latter issue of overthrowing dictatorship, I think I've learned a distaste for putting American boots on the ground absent clear popular support, which is why I opposed the Afghanistan war expansion but supported doing what we did in Libya, and doing something and not the nothing we've done so far in Syria.

On the former issue of WMDs, Fallows makes an excellent point about "threat inflation", that threats are almost always portrayed as far worse and more imminent than is actually true, and gives some examples.  I've been thinking about Iran's nuclear threat, and it turns out in 2011, Christian Science Monitor had a good description of that over time.  Here's a condensed version:

1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be "uprooted by an international front headed by the US."

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. "Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East," Peres warned, "because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy."

1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that "Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought" – about five years away – and that Iran’s nuclear bomb is “at the top of the list” of dangers in the coming decade.

1998: The same week, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.

I think we should forever rename Netanyahu as Bibi "Iran Will Have Nukes in 1997" Netanyahu, and never again take seriously anything he says.  As Kevin Drum says, we're also far better off to discount significantly any claimed threat elsewhere.


UPDATE:  thought I'd add that the new Republican willingness to cut the defense budget may be complicating budget negotiations, but otherwise it's a good thing and might lead to less adventurism.

Warmongers always accuse enemies of insanity

What Paul Pillar says.  We can live with a nuclear Iran, because their leaders are evil, not insane:

The simple argument is that Iranian leaders supposedly don’t think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred. On the campaign trail Rick Santorum has been among the most vocal in propounding this notion, asserting that Iran is ruled by the “equivalent of al-Qaeda,” that its “theology teaches” that its objective is to “create a calamity,” that it believes “the afterlife is better than this life,” and that its “principal virtue” is martyrdom. Newt Gingrich speaks in a similar vein about how Iranian leaders are suicidal jihadists, and says “it’s impossible to deter them.” 

The trouble with this image of Iran is that it does not reflect actual Iranian behavior. More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one. They are no more likely to let theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behavior than other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife. Iranian rulers may have a history of valorizing martyrdom—as they did when sending young militiamen to their deaths in near-hopeless attacks during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s—but they have never given any indication of wanting to become martyrs themselves. 

I think Khomenei would've been most likely to be an insane-from-our-perspective fanatic, and he negotiated an end to the Iran-Iraq war because it was in the interest of his regime's continued power.

Of course this doesn't mean evil leaders won't be aggressive or take risks.  Hitler attacked the Soviet Union when he hadn't finished digesting Western and Central Europe.  OTOH, there's no way he would've attacked the USSR if the Soviets already had nukes.  It is possible to reason through how an evil leader thinks.  If Iran gets nukes, and I don't even know how determined they are to get nukes as opposed to nuclear capability, it would be insane to give them to terrorists.

I think warmongers accuse enemies of irrationality to keep the rest of us from using reason ourselves.  If our enemies are insane, our only choice is to overcome them.  We heard the same stuff about Saddam, with no evidence afterwards that he was insane.  I suppose it's not impossible to encounter an insane enemy, but overuse of that argument, and Iranian history, suggests it's unlikely here.

Journalists, ask whether a President Romney will resign if Iran gets a nuclear weapon on his watch

In case the video goes away, Romney warns “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will get a nuclear weapon,” he said. “If we elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not.” We need some way to rein in the blatantly untrue claims like this one, and demanding promises for consequences may be one way to do that.

After having run for office myself, I still can't get over how much worse the quality of rhetoric and campaigning is at the state and national level.  On my campaign website I described what I supported but said "I will be just one of seven Board members, so making [my issues] happen will need some help, but public support and public involvement can help push through changes...."  I believe it would've cost me politically if I made promises I couldn't guarantee, like Romney's doing.  Journalists ought to hold him accountable, or at least get a flustered response out of him.
----------------
Just to imitate the journalistic practice of false balance, here's a nice thing to say about a former Republican candidate, Rick Perry:  he was right about instituting Supreme Court term limits (via New Yorker with some helpful elaboration).  I've supported this before, I think a lot of my fellow lawyers would do the same, and I see no reason for Democrats not to do the same.

Rafsanjani chooses wrong side - bad news for Iran

There were two opportunities for a good outcome in the short term for Iran: that security forces would split or side with protesters, forcing a compromise or overthrow of the regime; or that former president Rafsanjani, a political opponent of Ahmadinejad and Khamanei, would use his chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts to remove Khamenei and compromise with protesters.

The security forces never split, and Juan Cole reports the bad news that's been ignored elsewhere:

Rafsanjani has clearly decided to defer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on
handling the outcome of the elections, and has come out as critical of the crowd
politics and occasional turbulence they produced. As a multi-billionaire and man
of the establishment, he may well have been frightened that the massive street
rallies for Mousavi a week ago signalled a danger to the status quo, which he is
attempting to preserve.

Rafsanjani doesn't want the increased repression of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, nor potential revolution. Looks like he's chosen sides.

Sadly, change in Iran will likely have to take some time now. Troublemakers in Iran will have the upper hand for a while, and so will potential troublemakers in Israel who want to start a military conflict.

Iran and American perception

I haven't had much to contribute about Iran. I hope things turn out well, while fearing it could be another Burma. A colleague of mine is Iranian-American, and she emigrated back to Iran last summer to work on environmental issues there. I get occasional emails about what's going on, and hope she's okay too.

As to the "Obama should take the side of protestors" meme from the right, I think it's a matter partly of how one thinks American involvement in Iranian politics would be perceived in Iran. If you think the Iranian public would perceive American involvement as instantly friendly and non-oppressive, then it would be foolish to not weigh in. If on the other hand you recognize our role in overthrowing an elected government, long-term support for a brutal dictator, and subsequent military support for Iran's opponent in a brutal war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, it might seem less wise to take sides. It's just a matter of which is a more accurate way to anticipate how Iranians would react to our taking sides.

Israel to bomb Iran this week?*

*As The Daily Show once noted, insinuations made without evidence are often justified by adding a question mark, but here goes nothing.

Enough celebrating over what I anticipate the election to be, and time to get cranky. Presently, it seems unlikely that the US will try to obliterate Iran's nuclear program, although I wouldn't rule out semi-accidentally stumbling into a hot border war that spreads. Given US reluctance, what will Israel do?

If they decide to do it themselves, I think their two best time periods to do it are before Obama's inauguration, or at some point in the future when the US relinquishes control of Iraqi airspace. The safest path for Israeli bombers is over Jordan and Iraq, not Saudi Arabia. Bush would be less resistant than Obama, and Israel could present Obama with a fait accompli, so that favors an attack relatively soon.

The other possibility for Israel is to wait one or more years, when the US doesn't have legal responsibility for Iraqi airspace. It'll be many years after that time before Iraq could really do anything about the Israeli air force, so this would be the diplomatic sweet spot for attacking Israelis, assuming they're willing to wait.

It also assumes the Israelis want the diplomatic sweet spot to get America off the hook. Maybe they don't - if they attack while the US sits on its hands and refuses to shoot down Israeli warcraft (and I doubt we would), then the Arab world would blame the US for the Israeli attack, which would make Israel happy enough.

So what should Obama do? Not much he can do until he's inaugurated. If it happens before January 20, he should say "Once is enough - when I'm President, any warcraft from any nation that enters Iraqi airspace under US control will be shot down." If no attack occurs, he could still say that when he's President, eliminating the "once is enough" part.

More happily, there's this Fresh Air interview with former CIA operative Bob Baer. He knows Israeli officials who want an attack but are not getting their way. Maybe someone in Israel realizes there's still time to figure out what Iran is really doing, or even that a long-term smoldering war with Iran is even worse than Iran getting nukes.

UPDATE Jan. 10 2009: Israel wanted to attack Iran and asked for Iraq overflight rights, but was refused by Bush. Good for him.

The rush to war with Iran isn't over

The recent National Intelligence Estimate saying Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is great news. First, it's great news for the cause of world peace. More immediately, though, it imposes a new barrier to the Bush Administration's drumbeat for war with Iran.

Unfortunately, though, we can't assume that we're free from the danger of yet another war started during the Bush presidency. They have another path to war.

Several months ago, the Bush Administration signaled that the first act of war would not be an attack on nuclear facilities, but cross-border attacks from American troops in Iraq:

In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq - arming and training militants - would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

The way we end up in an all-out war with Iran is not starting with a massive invasion, as happened in Iraq, but as a result of attacks and reprisals that bring us stumbling into all-out war. Stumbling into full scale war may or may not be the intention of the Bush Administration, but that doesn't really matter once we start down that path.

The trigger event is still a cross-border attack related to labeling the Quds Force as a terrorist organization: in other words, the Kyl-Lieberman resolution that John Edwards condemned and Clinton supported. This danger still exists, despite the good news about the nuclear weapons.

Two final notes: it's hard not to conclude that Iran's halting its program in 2003 was related to a significant event that happened on its border in the same year. While the Iraq invasion was a huge mistake, this may have been the small silver lining.

Second, an amusing Fox News report from September:

Germany's withdrawal from the allied diplomatic offensive is the latest consensus across relevant U.S. agencies and offices, including the State Department, the National Security Council and the offices of the president and vice president. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, the most ardent proponent of a diplomatic resolution to the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions, has had his chance on the Iranian account and come up empty....

Vice President Cheney and his aides are said to be enjoying a bit of "schadenfreude" at the expense of Burns. A source described Cheney's office as effectively gloating to Burns and Rice, "We told you so. (The Iranians) are not containable diplomatically."

What's the German term for schadenfreude that actually ends up all over one's face?

NY Times not doing its duty in showing Giuliani's idiocy

Catching one of Giuliani's stupidities, they let another one slide by:

[Giluiani] casually lumped Iran with Al Qaeda. “Their movement has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani was asked in an interview to clarify that, inasmuch as Iran had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Further, most of its people are Shiites, whereas Al Qaeda is an organization of Sunnis.

“They have a similar objective,” he replied, “in their anger at the modern world.”

In other words, he said, they hate America.

So do lots of other people - are they all collectively responsible for 9/11?

And what the Times let slide by is this quote, "At a house party in New Hampshire, Mr. Giuliani suggested that it was unclear which was farther along, Iran or North Korea, in the development of a nuclear weapons program."

Not everyone knows the best judgment of the US government is that Iran is a decade away from a bomb. Many people will have forgotten that North Korea has already exploded a nuclear weapon. The point is that Giuliani said something that is unquestionably idiotic, and the Times didn't call him on it, or even give a reader the chance to hear a contrary position - the truth - used to chew him out.

The headline is funny though: Giuliani Says Nation at War Requires Him.

(Via Same Facts.)

The Reasonable Libertarian and the ethics of assassination

At first glance, a reasonable libertarian might consider Glenn Reynold's enthusiasm for assassinating radical Iranian mullahs and atomic scientists to be a "small government" approach, and Reynolds might even think he's returning to his libertarian roots following his armchair leadership in Iraq. I'll just note that as a policy matter, "no government" as in no assassinations and no wars of conquests, can often be superior to small government. Maybe assassination can sometimes be helpful, but at least in the case of radical mullahs, getting caught doing what Saddam tried to do to Bush Sr. would be the exact opposite of helpful.

And then there's the small matter of whether it's ethical. I disagree with Kevin Drum (linked above) who calls all killing of civilians "terrorism". Those civilians and high-ranking politicians who are intimately involved with the military may as well be wearing a uniform and are legitimate military targets. But Reynolds wants to kill all the radical mullahs, not just high-ranking ones, and if Iranians aren't working on a bomb, then killing their scientists is also wrong. Reynold's ethical screen needs a great deal of tightening.

Assassination and other threats of force could be appropriate for an ethical or even a competent presidency to use in dealing with Iran, but that's not what we have, and Reynolds is making a mistake to encourage this behavior.