Strategic Mousetrap

by digby

I continue to be impressed by Jim Webb. I don’t know what it is that makes him so straightforward and honest about what is really going on, but he is, and I’m grateful.

Yesterday he appeared with Chris Matthews and blew me away with this analysis, which was right on. (Try to ignore Tweety’s inane ramblings) :

WEBB: …One thing that we‘re going to see, however, is that when the—after we do the continuing resolution, when we have the 9/11 report coming to the Senate floor they‘re going to allow amendments. There are going to be a number of amendments on Iraq. I‘m actually considering putting in an amendment about Iran.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about Iran, because a lot of people, me included, wonder whether this administration might get us involved in a second war in that part of the world—the Mideast—in other words, get into a war with Iran. Does the president have the constitutional authority to go to war with Iran without checking with your branch of government?

WEBB: I don‘t believe he does, and there are two situations with respect to Iran. The first is, as I said yesterday on the issue of Iraq and how to move forward—the great frustration that I have is that we don‘t even have half a strategy here.

We have a continuing military policy—every time there is an escalation of the violence inside Iraq, but we have not had an aggressive diplomatic offensive by this administration that matches the quality of our military performance and that would embrace these countries in the region in a way that we can get a diplomatic solution.

You‘re not going to do that unless we go to Syria and Iran, as many people have said. Now, with respect to the administration and Iran specifically, I asked Secretary of State Rice, last month in a hearing—I read the presidential finding on the—on the resolution of ‘02 which basically said from this administration that they believe they have a lot of requisite authority, and possibly including Iran.

I asked her to clarify that. I have not received a clarification and I‘m considering putting a resolution in that basically says that no previous resolutions, no previous law empowers this administration…

MATTHEWS: Wow.

WEBB: … to unilaterally go into Iran.

MATTHEWS: I don‘t know the number of countries in the world right now, senator, maybe you know, it‘s probably under 200 but does the president hold authority to attack any one of them if he wants to, under this requisite authority that‘s mentioned here?

WEBB: This is a big problem.

MATTHEWS: I would say so. He could attack England basically on this reading.

WEBB: Yes, if you look at the framers of the constitution, they wanted to give the president as commander in chief the authority to repel sudden attacks.

That is totally different than conducting a preemptive war. And you know one thing, if you look at where we are in the Persian Gulf right now, when I was secretary of the Navy and until very recently, we never operated aircraft carriers inside the Persian Gulf because, No. 1, the turning radius is pretty close. And No. 2, the chance of accidentally bumping into something that would start a diplomatic situation was pretty high.

We now have been doing that, and with the tensions as high as they are, I‘m very worried that we might accidentally set something off in there and we need, as a Congress, to get ahead of the ball game here.

MATTHEWS: Before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was known to have engaged in that kind of activity in the North Atlantic, creating perimeters out there and daring the Nazi fleet—the U-boats to attack within that perimeter and basically month after month, increasing that perimeter until he thought he had perhaps been in a situation to gin up a war with a country he hated and wanted to see us fight.

It turns out that of course that Pearl Harbor intervened. Is this president trying to do the same thing, do you think? Trying to create a situation where it‘s easy for Ahmadinejad to do something wrong and create an act of war?

WEBB: Well there are again—even on the military side, there are two different situations. One is if there are Iranian military people actively involved inside Iraq as a former marine, I would support the notion of tactically engaging them. I haven‘t seen concrete evidence of that, but that‘s one situation.

The other situation, I do think that this administration has been pushing the envelope and we need a clear set of guidance from the Congress about when you can conduct preemptive war. Preemptive war is—was not even a concept until about 13 or 14 years ago.

MATTHEWS: What‘s the difference between being preemptive war and starting a war? It seems to me preemptive war is what I think Hitler did against Poland. I mean, what is preventive mean? It seems like you start a war, but you call it a preventive war. Isn‘t that simply nomenclature? If you started military action against another country, you‘ve started the war, haven‘t you?

WEBB: We‘ve always had a concept of a preemptive attack—if you see for instance a terrorist element getting ready to hit you…

MATTHEWS: That‘s preemptive. How about preventive?

WEBB: … you can hit them first.

MATTHEWS: Because Bush talks about preventive, not preemptive. He doesn‘t say like Israel did back in ‘67, when they saw the screws being tightened and war coming and everybody mobilized. They said we‘ve got to act. That‘s preemptive. Preventive is when you just say we don‘t like the other guy‘s cut of his jib. We‘re going after him.

WEBB: I don‘t think we should be doing either in terms of a war, preemptive or preventive. And the language if you look at the presidential finding on the ‘02 resolution is very loose. It even goes to threats or other concerns and that‘s why we‘re going to be seeing Secretary of State Rice in the next day or two—I‘m going to again present this to her and if they don‘t give us a clear answer, I‘m going to introduce a resolution.

MATTHEWS: I thought the Democrats back when they went along with this war, people like Gephardt, especially Gephardt, managed to get one bit of concession out of the administration that the war on Iraq would only be the war they were going to fight, that they didn‘t give them a complete blank check to fight any country in that region around the world. Maybe we should both do some legislative history checking here, but I do wonder where the Democrats didn‘t get that small concession from President Bush when they agreed to basically tow his line.

WEBB: They certainly didn‘t, if you read the presidential findings.

They have thought that they did, when they were debating it, but as you know, I and a number of people including Tony Zinni and General Hoar, two former CentCom commanders, would basically say this is not the way to deal with the war against international terrorism. You don‘t tie your military up into one spot and create essentially a strategic mousetrap.

It was a very bad strategic decision for us to go in Iraq in the first place and we‘re not going to get out of there until we have the right kind of diplomatic environment.

See, that isn’t so hard. It’s the truth and it’s also a strong, believable Democratic critique.

Most importantly, he goes directly at the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and rules it out completely. This is the single most important thing he said and it’s vitally important that other Democrats follow his lead. It’s not hard to say that they will always defend this country, but the Bush Doctrine has made us untrustworthy in the eyes of the world and we need to go back to adhering to international law.

This is beyond politics. The Republicans apparently believe that they can say anything and then govern according to their whims. The Democrats can’t. Somebody has to fix this mess. Democrats need to start speaking about this issue in realistic terms.

Update: I meant to also mention this article in Vanity Fair which explores this Iran issue in some depth. Very interesting.

One little nugget:

Baker’s realpolitik is anathema to neocons, but it is worth remembering that Bush, despite pursuing a neoconservative agenda in Iraq, is not a dyed-in-the-wool member of their group. “The president is a true believer in the policies the administration has been engaged in,” says one former N.S.C. staffer. “When it is applied to the policies regarding the Palestinians, Hamas, or Iran, there is a common thread. It is not pure neoconservatism, nor is it the pragmatic realism we saw under Bush One.”

Bush showed his willingness to depart from the neocon line a year ago, when he received an unusual proposition from Israeli officials together with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas, and a top administration neoconservative, Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. According to a Middle East expert, the Israelis and Abbas had determined that Hamas was positioned to fare strongly in the upcoming Palestinian elections, so they came to the administration with a plan to postpone them. “The Israelis and the Palestinians together had worked out a way to do it,” says the expert. “The Israelis were going to say that Hamas candidates could not run in Jerusalem, which was under Israeli jurisdiction, because they did not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And Abu Mazen was going to say if they can’t run in Jerusalem, then we can’t have an election now, [because] it wouldn’t be fair to Hamas. It was all worked out.”

There was just one problem: Bush, whose enthusiasm for spreading democracy had led him to actively lobby for the elections, didn’t want to go along. “The president said no,” the expert says. “He said elections will be good for Hamas. They would have to be responsible. They expected Hamas to do well, but not get a majority. Now they’ve become the government and it’s a big mess.” If anything, Bush had shown himself to be less pragmatic than his neocon advisers.

When you have a man with a fifth grade worldview (shared by Cheney, by the way) this is what you get.

And then there’s this little bit from Frederick Kaplan about the AEI surge recommendation report:

“There was no contact with the Bush administration. We put this together on our own I did not have any contact with the vice president’s office prior to … well, I don’t want to say that. I have had periodic contact with the vice president’s office, but I can’t tell you the dates. If you are barking up the story that the V.P. put this together, that is not true.”

Right.

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