Posted on 01/29/2006 4:13:58 AM PST by RWR8189
EVENTS ARE CONVERGING TO ELEVATE the nuclear crisis with Iran into the central crisis of the Bush presidency. War presidents are graded not by circumstances they inherit, including those that lead to war. They are judged by how they react to those circumstances.
Franklin Roosevelt as a war president is defined not by the attack on Pearl Harbor, but by the radical war aim he laid out against Japan and Germany in the wake of Pearl Harbor--unconditional surrender--and by his relentless and successful pursuit of that war aim until the day he died.
When Lyndon Johnson became president in November 1963, he inherited a chaotic situation in South Vietnam due to an ill-advised military coup against the civilian-led Saigon government countenanced by his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. As vice president, LBJ had fought to prevent the anti-Diem coup, which proved to be a ghastly mistake. Yet Johnson as a war president receives a failing grade for one reason only: When he left office in January 1969 the United States was in a far weaker geopolitical position, in Vietnam and globally, than it had been when Johnson took office.
In the same way, long after the present wartime president leaves office, his success or failure will be judged not by the enemy attacks of 9/11 but by how he responded to those attacks--and by whether his responses prove right or wrong.
In response to 9/11, Bush and his administration put down clear markers and bright lines. The days of treating terrorism as a criminal activity, to be solved primarily by the work of policemen, prosecutors, judges, and juries, were over. The president served notice that foreign governments providing safe haven for terrorist enemies of the United States would be treated as if those governments were mounting terrorist operations themselves--that is, as enemies of the United States in a world war. And he announced that rogue states would not be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
To achieve these war aims, Bush proclaimed two new doctrines. The new military doctrine, a marked departure from the Cold War doctrine of deterrence, was that of preemption: We would no longer wait for military mobilizations or attacks before striking against a growing terrorist threat. Preemption comprised a series of military options up to and including invasion, occupation, and regime change.
The new geopolitical doctrine was the promotion of democracy as a central U.S. policy goal around the world but with particular focus on the Arab and Islamic cultures. Without political reform in the Islamic world, Bush argued, eliminating one set of terrorists would achieve no more than a respite before terrorism's next wave.
By the time of the January 2002 State of the Union speech that singled out an "axis of evil"--Iraq, Iran, and North Korea--as the most dangerous of the world's surviving rogue states, Bush had successfully defined his response to 9/11. He had also laid out a coherent U.S. military and political strategy to deal with the protracted world war he believed us to be in. You could disagree with the strategy, and many did. But no one could deny that such a strategy had been laid out.
In the years since 9/11, the Bush war strategy has yielded some undeniable successes: the turning of Pakistan from a fomenter of terrorism and of nuclear proliferation into a semicollaborator of the United States; the ousting of the Taliban government and its al Qaeda mentors in Afghanistan; and the renunciation by Libya of its nuclear program, to name three. Claims can be made as well for the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon followed by free elections and for the advance of democratic reforms in a number of other Islamic countries.
Beginning with the March 2003 invasion, the war in Iraq has taken center stage as the toughest, best-defined test of the Bush war strategies: in a nutshell, military preemption and regime change, followed by democratic reform in the wake of terrorist challenges from Sunni revanchists and Islamist terrorists swearing allegiance to al Qaeda. Iraq has tested every element of the Bush war strategy. Until fairly recently, it seemed plausible that the success or failure of Bush's global strategies, and thus of the Bush presidency itself, would hinge on U.S. success or failure in Iraq.
With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran last June, this began to change. There may or may not be elements in the Iranian government willing to accommodate the emerging Shiite-majority government in Iraq. There may even be factions in Iran that would hesitate before providing a direct challenge to Bush's preemption doctrine. If such factions exist, however, they are irrelevant today. Ahmadinejad, for whatever reasons, appears determined to force Bush to live up to his post-9/11 strategy or tacitly admit that he has abandoned it in the face of difficulties in Iraq.
One by one, Iran's radical president is removing the pretexts for U.S. inaction or delay. Could we live with a nuclear Iran? Not one led by a man who says the Jewish Holocaust never happened and muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel. Is there a way to take advantage of the fact that the Shiite wing of Islamism has not taken part, so far, in a shooting war with the United States or its allies? Not with an Iranian president who convenes a terror summit in Damascus with Bashar Assad, the all-but-proven murderer of the former premier of Lebanon, and with Hamas, the avatar of Sunni terrorism in the Palestinian territories. Given these events, it would no longer be shocking to see Ahmadinejad at a summit with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq and an advocate of the mass murder of Shiites as a tactic in the war against U.S. forces and the Shiite-led Iraqi government.
Reports out of Iran suggest Ahmadinejad may see himself as a central actor in an Islamic apocalypse. A man with this mindset might see provoking the United States as forwarding the end game of Allah. And he might not fear provoking Israel into an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities that could trigger convulsions throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Much depends on how far Iran is from putting together its first nuclear warhead. Some reports, particularly those traced to Israeli intelligence, point to the very near future. Even if the ominous date turns out to be much further away, Ahmadinejad shows little sign of pausing for breath. Indeed, the Hamas sweep of the Palestinian parliamentary elections is no doubt being seen in Tehran as a vindication of Ahmadinejad's Damascus terror summit days earlier.
If the Bush administration is developing a military option to deal with Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons--a form of preemption--it is doing so very quietly. On the pure military level, this is, of course, appropriate. If you had to pick one flaw in the superbly organized U.S. invasion of Iraq, as Jed Babbin recently pointed out, it would be the lack of an element of surprise.
But what is starting to become clear is that Ahmadinejad's seemingly reckless challenge will extract, and is meant to extract, a cost in U.S. standing among our friends and allies, in Iraq and across the globe. A war president who can be portrayed as having given up on the core of his own war strategy will be seen as a leader considerably less capable of deterring our terrorist enemies, wherever they are and whatever it is they are plotting.
Jeffrey Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm.
Conventional wisdom has it that once the mullahs are gone Iran won't seek nukes, I think that is wrong. A non-mullah government might go along with the NPT initially, but in the long run national pride means Iranian nukes.
Right? 9/11 and the resulting War on Terrorism wasn't enough?
I need Prozac.
Or copious amounts of booze.
Exactly. If the newly made Pakistan has nukes, why the 3000 years old Persia would not have them?
Are you suggesting that he isn't the box of rocks the alphabet media has been indicating he is? ;)
Good point, and FWIW ... I agree.
America was a hundred times stronger in 1950 than in 1940..............
OF COURSE it was, and is even more powerful now than ever.
The idea that the President should keep going on TV and laying out his strategy, would be considered absurd in the past because we had a populace that placed trust in our presidents during such situations (Democrat or Republican) and understood that it would give the enemy an advantage. Today it would give the media and far-left "experts" the chance to pick away at it, again to the great advantage of the bad guys.
The real job of any president is to conduct foreign policy and see to our national security, not to provide freebies to everyone, and some faith in him could go a long way. If we were getting hit over and over again since 9/11, then we would be justified to criticize performance and demand change. But this has not happened, and can't we give a little credence to the idea that he and his advisors indeed DO have a long range plan for all aspects of this?
Maybe it all boils down to it being a matter of what we simply HAVE to do, with what ever means we possess, or, as some would like, taking polls as to what we MIGHT/COULD/COULD NOT do.
If we really believe that there are no ways to deal with this most deadly threat, then we might just a well grab our shovels and dig the shelters.
It is fun to speculate though!
I hope you are right- but we shouldn't forget that the Mahdi Army and their supporters are part of the Shai alliance that won a near majority in the Iraqi election. However I guess that whilst Ayatollah Ali Sistani is alive (he is the leading Shia spiritial leader in Iraq) things may be fine as he rejects the model of Iranian-style theocracy in favour of a separation between religion and politics. However once he goes- he is very old- dealing with the more pro-Iranian leaders like Moqtada Sadr will be another ball game.
I have another concern and that is democracy in the middle east. It would seem that radical islam is popular with the masses. It started in Algeria a few years back when the elections were cancelled by the army when it seemed clear that the radicals would win.
In Iran the people elected in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad- a absolute nut.
In the palestinian authority they vote in Hamas.
In Iraq- if you read some of their policies- the Shia alliance looks potentially dangerous.
I would fear who would get into power if Saudi Arabia introduced democracry!!!
Do you think spreading democracy will meet with our own long term aims?
Can you describe to me how such military campaign is supposed to look like? And what exactly do you expect to be achieved?
Circumstances have forced Bush to restate Franklin Roosevelt's famous dictum: "Carry a big stick, and make sure everybody knows it."
I"m not going to compare and contrast an air war in Iran with Serbia. I'm just saying... take out the AAA, defeat the airforce, destroy the command & control, own the skies over Tehran, try to decapitate the regime, control movement on the ground (i.e. if it moves it dies).
I leave it to the war planners to develop individual targets, and what other cities have to be managed.
Don't underestimate American Air Power. The Iranians apparently need a demonstration. My point is, we can't surgically target the nuclear sites, but we can sure as hell rain fire and brimstone down on their heads.
Why not? It was the latest air campaign, easy to compare and to draw conclusions. You cannot dismiss the actual experience and base everything on theory or wishes.
Size of the target, distance from bases, duration were more advantageous in 1999, technological/military superiority maybe lesser and the results were minimal.
Clinton set down rules that limited casualties on both sides, and I would guess that on each night's mission most of the planes sent were AA suppression flights and few were actual ordanance droppers. In Iran I would bet we would see more of a Iraq91 version of American air power. Stealth and cruise missles for command and control followed by large amounts of aircraft to initiate a crippling first and second strike. I doubt Serbia seen the Full Monty of the American airpower as much as I doubt the long term effectiveness of airstrikes on the strategic equation in the area.
In 1959 Eisenhower managed to bring much of the USA air force into the Middle East without arousing much attention. The whole news focus was on the marines splashing ashore in the Labanon. It wiull be harder to move in such secrecy today, but a little misdirection might help.
There are other options. Think a bit.
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