One
hears not an encouraging word about US President
George W Bush these days, even from Republican
loyalists. Yet I believe that Bush will stage the
strongest political comeback of any US politician
since Abraham Lincoln won re-election in 1864 in
the midst of the American Civil War.
Two
years ago I wrote that Bush would win a second
term as president but live to regret it. Iraq's
internal collapse and the president's poll numbers
bear my forecast out. But Bush's Republicans will
triumph in next November's congressional
elections for the same reason
that Bush beat Democratic challenger John Kerry in
2004. Americans rally around a wartime
commander-in-chief, and Bush will have bombed
Iranian nuclear installations by October.
One factoid encapsulates Bush's
opportunity: in a February 14 CNN/Gallup poll, 80%
of respondents said they believed that Iran, if it
had nuclear weapons, would hand them over to
terrorists; 59% said Iran might use nuclear
weapons against the United States. A slight
majority of those polled, to be sure, did not wish
to use military action against Iran, but that
should be interpreted as "not yet", for two-thirds
said they worried that the US would not do enough
to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Americans are a misunderstood people. Only
one in five owns a passport, and a tiny fraction
of non-immigrant Americans learns a foreign
language. US apathy regarding what might plague
the rest of the world is matched only by US
bloodlust when attacked. President Bush earned
overwhelming support by toppling Saddam Hussein, a
caricature villain who appeared to threaten
Americans, but earned opprobrium by committing
American lives to the political rehabilitation of
Iraq, about which Americans care little.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is
the sort of villain that Central Casting once
sourced for studio film productions in Hollywood.
No more than Napoleon Bonaparte could stay away
from Russia can Ahmadinejad abandon Iran's nuclear
ambitions. He represents a generation that has
bled for its country and its sect for a
quarter-century and now has come into its maturity
and must demonstrate its mettle. The Revolutionary
Guards of 1979 now are middle-aged men who now at
last have a chance to lead. Ahmadinejad has salted
the regime's middle ranks with thousands of men
like himself.
America's discomfiture in
Iraq provides Iran with an opportunity to restore
its regional greatness, the last one for
centuries, if not millennia. If Iran stands down
as a prospective nuclear power, it faces a rapidly
graying population, declining capacity to export
oil and discontent among rural folk and the urban
poor. The promise of the Islamic Revolution will
have melted into mediocrity and cynicism, and the
generation of Ahmadinejad will have turned out a
damp squib. I made this case half a year ago (Demographics and Iran's imperial
design, September 13, 2005). And I have
predicted a US-led attack on Iran with Western as
well as Saudi support all year (Why the West will attack
Iran, January 24).
Now we have
from Seymour Hersh an instantly celebrated
report in The New Yorker claiming
that President Bush is preparing war against Iran,
including the prospective use of tactical nuclear
weapons. The president, according to one of
Hersh's interlocutors, is "absolutely convinced
that Iran is going to get the bomb" and believes
that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican,
if elected in the future, would have the courage
to do", and "that saving Iran is going to be his
legacy". So broad was the consensus among
foreign-policy experts cited by Hersh that the
White House had to deny that the use of force was
imminent, insisting that it was intent upon a
diplomatic solution.
Certainly the use of
force is not imminent. Even under the most
alarmist estimates Iran cannot field a serviceable
bomb during 2006. The Bush administration has
considerable time to attempt a diplomatic
solution, certainly until the eve of the
congressional elections.
To be very
precise, I am not accusing the White House of
manipulating the Iranian issue for political
purposes. On the contrary, if the US president
thought only in terms of political consequences he
never would have risked so much on the Quixotic
quest for Iraqi democracy. Still, Bush has the
opportunity to shift the subject away from the
unpopular campaign to improve the politics of the
Middle East, and back to the extremely popular
subject of killing terrorists. He believes (and I
am long since on record agreeing) that Washington
will have to put paid to Ahmadinejad before very
long, and there is no reason not to look for a
political benefit as well.
In fact, some
of Bush's supporters are citing my thesis that
confrontation with Iran cannot be avoided. In its
weekly e-mail newsletter, the Weekly Standard, the
most neo-conservative of all US publications,
offered the following note by online editor
Jonathan V Last:
Iran is a looming crisis, but it's
still far enough away that you can find smart,
interesting writing on the topic without having
to wade through too much dross. One of the most
intriguing writers on Iran over the last several
months has been the anonymous "Spengler" from
the Asia Times [Online].
Spengler has
been arguing for some time now that a Western
attack on Iran is nearly inevitable because, he
says, Iran's demographics - the country's
average age is soaring upwards at an alarming
rate - are pushing the country toward an attempt
to establish a Persian empire:
"Re-engineering the shape of Iran's
population, the central plank of the new
government's domestic program, should be
understood as the flip side of Iran's nuclear
coin. Aggressive relocation of Iranians and an
aggressive foreign policy both constitute a
response to the coming crisis.
"Iran
claims that it must develop nuclear power to
replace diminishing oil exports. It seems clear
that Iranian exports will fall sharply, perhaps
to zero by 2020, according to Iranian estimates.
But Iran's motives for acquiring nuclear power
are not only economic but strategic. Like
[Adolf] Hitler and [Josef] Stalin, Ahmadinejad
looks to imperial expansion as a solution for
economic crisis at home ...
"Iran's
ultra-Islamist government has no hope of
ameliorating the crisis through productivity
growth. Instead it proposes totalitarian methods
that will not reduce the pain, but only squelch
the screams. Iran envisages a regional Shi'ite
empire backed by nuclear weaponry" [Demographics and Iran's imperial
design].
So what if Spengler
is right and a military conflict with Iran is on
its way? Blogger Dan McLaughlin noted ...
something troubling in the way liberals are
approaching the possibility of this showdown.
McLaughlin pointed us toward the bright and
engaging Washington Monthly writer Kevin Drum,
who says of Iran: "If Democrats don't start
thinking about how they're going to respond to
this, they're idiots. We don't always get to
pick the issues to run on. Sometimes they're
picked for us."
McLaughlin also
highlights something Drum wrote last February:
"Democrats ought to figure out now what they
think about Iran. After all, we've got the Ken
Pollack book, we've got the referral to the
Security Council, we've got the slam-dunk
intelligence, and we've got the lunatic leader
screaming insults at the United States. Remember
what happened the last time all the stars
aligned like that?"
So: What would be
the Democratic response if (a) Bush asked for an
authorization of force against Iran or (b)
simply launched an assault without asking
Congress? The chances of this coming up as an
issue this year are strong enough that it would
be foolish not to be prepared to deal with it.
As McLaughlin observes, there's
something troubling in the idea that one of [the
US political] parties should be crafting its
stance on this subject not by looking through
the lens of US policy, but by using the filter
of domestic politics.
I am somewhat
surprised to find myself quoted so generously in a
publication whose views I have treated rather
roughly these past three years, and the US
president's political fortunes were far from my
mind when I wrote the demographic analysis of
Iran's imperial design. No matter: if conflict
with Iran is indeed unavoidable, the Bush
administration can re-emerge as a war government
rather than as Wilsonian nation-builders, with
every expectation of popular support. The
Democrats already have begun to game the responses
to a US attack on Iran before the election, as
Last reports, which is to say that the Republicans
have begun to game the Democratic response.
Just as in the 2004 elections, the
Democrats will have a losing hand if the White
House orders force against Iran. Americans rally
behind a wartime leader; the one exception was
Vietnam. America's engagement with Iran would
resemble the Bill Clinton administration's aerial
attack on Serbia rather than the Iraq wars, for
there is no reason at all to employ ground groups.
God takes care of drunks, small children
and the United States of America. Improbably,
destiny has a surprise in store for George W Bush.
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