Growing elite opposition to strike
on Iran By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Like the imminent prospect of
one's hanging, to paraphrase the 18th century
British essayist Dr (Samuel) Johnson, the suddenly
looming possibility of war can concentrate the
mind wonderfully.
If that aphorism didn't
apply in the run-up to the United States invasion
of Iraq nearly 10 years ago, it appears to be the
case now for key sectors of the US foreign-policy
elite - notably, liberal hawks who supported the
Iraq war - with regard to the sharp rise in
tensions between Iran and both the US and Israel
earlier this month.
Amid a crescendo of
threats by senior Israeli officials to attack
Iran's nuclear facilities, the murder, presumably
by Mossad, of a fifth Iranian nuclear scientist in
the past several years, and a
sharp escalation of
Western economic sanctions designed to "cripple"
Iran's economy, Tehran's threat to close the
Strait of Hormuz brought the until-then
hypothetical possibility of war - whether by
design, provocation or accident - sharply into
view.
The hawkish declarations by
Republican presidential candidates eager to prove
their love for Israel to Christian fundamentalists
and Jewish voters and donors didn't help, nor did
a renewed and intensified drumbeat for "regime
change" by some of the same neo-conservatives from
institutions like the American Enterprise
Institute and the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies that led the drive to war in Iraq.
Adding to the sense that war was suddenly
a very real possibility, these events more or less
coincided with the publication by the influential
Foreign Affairs journal of an article entitled
"Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least
Bad Option''. It advocated a limited and carefully
calibrated US aerial attack on Iran's air defenses
and nuclear sites, and was authored by an
academic, Matthew Kroenig, who had just completed
a one-year stint as a strategic analyst in the
office of the secretary of defense.
The
confluence of all these developments provoked a
number of influential members of the foreign
policy establishment - including several prominent
liberal interventionists who had supported the
Iraq war - to warn against any further escalation
either by the US or Israel.
"We're doing
this terrible thing all over again," wrote Leslie
Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on
Foreign Relations, the think-tank that publishes
Foreign Affairs, in the Daily Beast, in an appeal
for senate hearings on the implications of war
with Iran.
"As before, we're letting a
bunch of ignorant, sloppy-thinking politicians and
politicized foreign-policy experts draw 'red line'
ultimatums. As before, we're letting them
quick-march us off to war," warned Gelb, a
repentant Iraq-war hawk, about the chorus of
neo-conservatives and other hawks with whom he had
previously been aligned.
On the pages of
The New Republic, Kenneth Pollack, a former top
Central Intelligence Agency analyst at the
Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,
was cited frequently by liberal hawks before the
war, argued not only against any further
escalation, but also suggested that the sanctions
track on which the Barack Obama administration and
the European Union have increasingly relied was
proving counter-productive.
"The problem
is that these sanctions [against the central bank
of Iran] are potentially so damaging that they
could backfire," he wrote, citing their possible
negative impact on the West's own struggling
economies and the difficulty of sustaining them
diplomatically over time if they resulted in the
kind of "humanitarian catastrophe" inflicted by
the sanctions regime against Iraq from 1992 until
the invasion in 2003.
Moreover, he went
on, "The more we turn up the heat on Iran, the
more Iran will fight back, and the way they like
to fight back could easily lead to unintended
escalation. Doubtless such a war would leave Iran
far, far worse off than it would leave us. But it
would be painful for us too, and it might last far
longer than anyone wants."
Meanwhile,
another influential liberal hawk, Princeton
Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, argued in
project-syndicate.org that the West and Iran were
playing a "dangerous game" of "chicken" and that
the West's current course "leaves Iran's
government no alternative between publicly backing
down, which it will not do, and escalating its
provocations."
"The more publicly the West
threatens Iran, the more easily Iranian leaders
can portray America as the Great Satan to parts of
the Iranian population that have recently been
inclined to see the US as their friend," wrote
Slaughter, who stepped down as director of the
policy planning office under Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton.
"It is time for cooler
heads to prevail with a strategy that helps Iran
step back," she added, suggesting that the aborted
Turkish- Brazilian 2010 effort at mediation
between the "Iran Six" - the five permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council
plus Germany - and Iran be revived.
Yet
another Iraq hawk, New York Times columnist Bill
Keller, attacked the Foreign Affairs article,
assuring his readers that Kroenig's former
colleagues at the Pentagon "were pretty appalled
by his article, which combines the alarmist worst
case of the Iranian nuclear threat with the
rosiest best case of America's ability to make
things better."
Contrary to Kroenig's
predictions, Keller wrote, "An attack on Iran is
almost certain to unify the Iranian people around
the mullahs and provoke the supreme leader
[Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] to redouble Iran's
nuclear pursuits, only deeper underground, and
without international inspectors around. Over at
the Pentagon, you sometimes hear it put this way:
Bombing Iran is the best way to guarantee exactly
what we are trying to prevent."
Indeed, in
a reply to Kroenig entitled "Not Time to Attack
Iran", Colin Kahl, who had also just left the
Pentagon at the end of December after two years as
the head of Middle East policy, argued that
Kroenig's "picture of a clean, calibrated conflict
is a mirage. Any war with Iran would be a messy
and extraordinarily violent affair, with
significant casualties and consequences."
Among other objections, Kahl, a senior
fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American
Security, predicted that a pre-emptive strike of
the kind promoted by Kroenig could well spark a
regional war, solidify popular support for the
regime in Tehran, and transform "the Arab Spring's
populist anti-regime narrative into a decidedly
anti-American one".
Indeed, much of Kahl's
analysis was subsequently backed up by General
Michael Hayden (retired), who, as the head of the
Central Intelligence Agency during George W Bush's
second term, could hardly be called a liberal.
According to the "Cable" blog on foreign
policy.com, Hayden, who served as the head of the
Pentagon's National Security Agency from 1999 to
2005, told a small group convened at the Center
for National Interest last week that top Bush
national security officials had concluded that a
military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities -
whether by Israel or the US - would be
counter-productive.
The Israelis, he
reportedly said, "aren't going to [attack Iran].
They can't do it, it's beyond their capacity. They
only have the ability to make this [problem of
Iran's nuclear program] worse."
And while
the US has the ability to mount a campaign, it
could only serve as a short-term fix. "What's move
two, three, four or five down the board? I don't
think anyone is talking about occupying anything."
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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