Crying Wolf
by digby
This article from First Post says it all:
Among British neo-con commentators and policy wonks – the Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld right-wing fan club centred on the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – anger over the West’s vacillation in the face of Iranian intransigence is running especially high.
[…]
But before they blame everybody else for letting him [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Iranian president] get away with it, the armchair warriors of the right should ask themselves why he seems able to defy the world with such apparent impunity. The invasion of Iraq, the neo-cons’ favourite cause, is one obvious answer. With the US bogged down in Iraq, Tehran can be sure that the American public is in no mood for another Middle Eastern adventure.
Should that show signs of changing, Tehran can up the pressure on the coalition whenever it wants. Ironically, the Iraqi government, installed by the Americans, is dominated by pro-Iranian Shias. So are many of the militias that run large parts of the country.
So pervasive is Iranian influence in Iraq post-Saddam that, when the US and its allies eventually withdraw, Iran is likely to turnout to be the principal beneficiary of the invasion.
The Iraq fiasco has demonstrated the limitations of American power in the Middle East, for all the world to see. If the neo-cons had only bothered to make serious plans for the reconstruction of the country, Tehran might now take Western sabre-rattling rather more seriously.
Then, as always, there is the question of oil. Iran is still the world’s fourth largest exporter of the black gold; and at a time when supplies are tight, that gives it obvious leverage. In addition, the majority of all Middle Eastern oil exports have to pass down the Gulf and through the Straits of Hormuz, which the Iranians effectively control.
If need be, Tehran could have the world literally over a barrel. Experts have been warning about the West’s dangerous dependence on imported oil for years. But the neo-cons have consistently pooh-poohed their warnings and opposed any attempt to curb America’s profligate use of energy.
The other day, Jack Straw said the Iranians were “pushing their luck” by pressing ahead with uranium enrichment. Given the neo-cons’ disastrous record of bad judgment, incompetence and worse, the Iranians must think that they are pushing at an open door.
The neo-cons told us that Saddam had to be removed because he had weapons of mass destruction, when in fact he had none. Now that we find ourselves up against a dangerous country that really is about to get WMD, we discover the neo-cons have already squandered our power and credibility in Iraq.
I have written before about how powerful countries must maintain their mystique or risk having crazy people make mistakes. Once it shows that its military is not omnipotent and that its intelligence is crude, it emboldens madmen to play their cards. It’s a stupid, unnecessary error to be proven impotent by lying so boldly and being wrong so grandly, which is what we did with our misbegotten invasion of Iraq. Powerful nations should only go to war when they either have no other choice or are virtually assured of success in concert with a powerful coalition of allies. Screwing up this way in the nuclear age is especially dangerous.
We toppled Saddam, but we exposed the fact that our greatest asset — the belief that we have super, high tech intelligence and military capabilities beyond anyone’s imaginings— was a sham. And our poor planning proved to everyone that the military braintrust running this country can at times be so wrong that it can render our superior military and economic prowess irrelevant.
And the neocons know it. Here’s Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman suddenly turned into Ken “Kumbaya” Adelman on Wolf Blitzer last Monday. And here I thought we were fighting World war IV:
BLITZER: … Joining us now to talk about the possible showdown [with Iran]is Ken Adelman. He’s a former deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, former director of the U.S. arms control and disarmament agency.
[…]
BLITZER: Is there a military option, a viable U.S. military option to go ahead and knock out the Iranian nuclear facilities?
ADELMAN: I don’t think we should ever take it off the table, but when you look at the practicalities of knowing what they are doing, knowing where they are doing it and knowing that you can get to those targets, it seems very improbable to me.
[…]
ADELMAN: …I hope there is a regime change in Iran. And then it can come about not by military action but that can come about by subverting the regime right there, using the methods of Martin Luther King to tell you the truth, civil disobedience, peaceful, nonviolent techniques.
BLITZER: Well, should the U.S. and its allies be engaged in covert action to try to result in this regime change?
ADELMAN: Sure, we should have been doing that for the last 30 years. And that’s part of the spread of freedom the president talks about, but we haven’t done enough on that.
And what you can do, very quickly is take the playbook from Poland, from our approach to Poland in the early 1980’s with — from the Carter administration, and then especially the Reagan administration, dealing with solidarity, and just update it. Instead of using money to give for machines, use the Internet. Now instead of walkie-talkies, you now use cell phones. But what you want to do is to help Democratic forces.
BLITZER: So to encourage the dissidents in Iran right now to overthrow the regime.
ADELMAN: Absolutely.
BLITZER: And you think that is a doable option?
ADELMAN: Well, it’s certainly doable to give them support, more support than we are doing. Whether they succeed or not, you just don’t know, but one thing you can do is to model it after what you had in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, what you’ve had in peaceful demonstrations around the world.
BLITZER: Well, I’ve heard, you know, that scenario, but the U.S. has been trying to do that in Cuba, for example, for decades unsuccessfully to get rid of Fidel Castro. North Korea, the U.S. has been trying to do that for decades to get rid of Kim Jong-il unsuccessfully.
Yes, there was a successful end of the Cold War and all the change, the Democratic reforms in central and eastern Europe, but is Iran, in that model?
ADELMAN: No, Iran is a much more right model. It’s more like Poland is at the outset of solidarity. Why is that? Because what we know is the majority of people in Iran, the vast majority, can’t stand these corrupt and really awful repressive laws.
And so you have the conditions, it’s a far more educated population. It’s a far more open population. It’s a far more open country than others. So that you can really go in there and these kind of techniques that you had in Poland, and you in the Ukraine, and you had in Georgia.
I mean, this is a proven technique. Now, it’s not proven everywhere, and it doesn’t work everywhere, but it’s not going to work unless you help it.
BLITZER: I’ve heard top administration officials say that the goals should be to delay Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon for as long as possible, with the hope that perhaps in the interim there could be regime change.
ADELMAN: That’s fine. I would agree with that.
BLITZER: The question is how long is it going to take them to develop, to get beyond the point of no return?
ADELMAN: I mean, we have been by and large very successful since the early 60’s in non-proliferation. You have to worry now about India and Pakistan leading the way, you have to worry about Iran and North Korea on the verge.
But overall, it’s remarkable, Wolf, when you think of a 1963, I believe it was, Kennedy — President Kennedy gave a speech in which he predicted by the 1970s, that there would be 25 nuclear nations, nuclear-armed nations around the world.
Well, you know, in the 1970s there were probably seven or eight. There weren’t 25. And here we are in 2006, and there are not 25. So we’ve done much better than expected, and I think if we do Iran right — really concentrate on regime change through nonviolent means, through peaceful means, through Martin Luther King means — I think we can make some progress.
More cartoon history. Last time we were re-creating WWII, this time we are re-creating Selma and Solidarity. (And I can’t help but be amused that Adelman and his pals, who only two years ago said that the non-proliferation regime of the last 40 years was liberal mollycoddling, are now wrapping themselves in it. Chutzpah, thy name is neocon.)
Immature political thinkers that they are, the Bush administration and the neo-con cabal had been aching to prove America’s manhood (and their own) to the world for so long that they prematurely ejaculated. Now we are spent, at least for a time, and the whole world knows it.
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