Economic National Security

by digby

According to Steve Clemons and others with contacts inside the national security community, Fallon was fired for insubordination and it doesn’t portend any change in Iran policy. As I wrote yesterday, Fallon was arguably insubordinate so that isn’t something to be taken lightly. The principle of civilian leadership is important. Fallon’s disagreements with the administration left him only one option — resign, and then talk to the press. You can’t do it while in uniform.

However, there are a few other things to consider. First, is the article I flagged yesterday which indicates that the Bush administration (and yes, our European allies) are intent upon isolating Iran on the basis of nuclear proliferation when the evidence suggests that they have stopped their program. Pardon me for being suspicious that these countries might just be watching the price of oil hit 110 dollars a barrel and keeping their options open for reasons other than those stated.

I have no idea if Bush will attack Iran. But depending upon them being logical and rational about it is a mistake. They truly did go into Iraq with the idea that they could install Ahmad Chalabi as their puppet and that was just delusional.So, while I am sure that it’s true that most people believe that it’s impossible for them to get away with it, I do not trust in such calculations. More importantly, they are playing with fire and I certainly don’t trust their competence. As long as they are mucking around, as that article suggests they are, the greater possibility of somebody making a mistake. These are not competent people. Anything can happen.

Finally, even if they do not launch an attack before they leave office, they are laying the groundwork to either back-up President McCain, who has never met a war he didn’t want to fight, or to relentlessly criticize President Obama or Clinton for failing to launch said attack. They create infrastructure for these sorts of things that make them extremely influential when they are out of power and which they use to pressure their political rivals for both policy and political reasons.

I fully expect a new Team B to be instituted the minute the Republicans are out of power. And they will use that supposedly cowardly NIE as their excuse. There’s just too much right wing influence pressing for intervention in Iran for them to give up, from nuts like Hagee, to the usual neocon suspects to the Israel lobby to the GWOT fetishists. If nothing else, they are setting themselves up for a very lucrative “Iran lobby” practice once out of power.

There have often been paranoids and imperialists in our country agitating for war with somebody, particularly since the modern conservative movement emerged after WWII and caught the anti-communist bug in a big way. But this is different. We are entering a period of economic turbulence, one of the biggest factors causing it being the cost of energy and political instability in the areas that provide it. Add to that the threat of global warming (and the paralysis of the rich countries of the world in dealing with it) and we are looking at a right wing that is likely to renew itself around various permutations of “economic national security.” (They will, needless to say, find some way to pin the whole thing on dark foreigners who are trying to kill us in our beds and destroy the American way of life.)

As the great conservative philosopher Ann Coulter put it, “Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil.” It’s not a lot more complicated than that.

Update: Dover Bitch just emailed me with this recent article from Wired about Kissinger and Nixon’s “madman theory.” New documents were just released outlining an operation called “Giant Lance.”

The article points out that the madman concept is actually game theory, which has formed a huge part of military planning for decades:

One of the starting points for Cold War game theory was President Eisenhower’s proposed doctrine of “massive retaliation”: Washington would respond viciously to any attack on the US or its allies. This, the thinking went, would create enough fear to deter enemy aggression. But Kissinger believed this policy could actually encourage our enemies and limit our power. Would the US really nuke Moscow if the Soviets funded some communist insurgents in Angola or took over a corner of Iran? Of course not. As a result, enemies would engage in “salami tactics,” slicing away at American interests, confident that the US would not respond.

Cluster bombs, designed with “submunition” ordnance to set off a chain-reaction of explosions, became an important part of the US conventional military arsenal in the 1960s. In Southeast Asia, cluster bombs allowed the US military to inflict widespread damage on the enemy from the air, without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Video: The National Archives

The White House needed a wider range of military options. More choices, the thinking went, would allow us to prevent some conflicts from starting, gain bargaining leverage in others, and stop still others from escalating. This game-theory logic was the foundation for what became in the ’60s and ’70s the doctrine of “flexible response”: Washington would respond to small threats in small ways and big threats in big ways.

The madman theory was an extension of that doctrine. If you’re going to rely on the leverage you gain from being able to respond in flexible ways — from quiet nighttime assassinations to nuclear reprisals — you need to convince your opponents that even the most extreme option is really on the table. And one way to do that is to make them think you are crazy.

Consider a game that theorist Thomas Schelling described to his students at Harvard in the ’60s: You’re standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to another person. As soon as one of you cries uncle, you’ll both be released, and whoever remained silent will get a large prize. What do you do? You can’t push the other person off the cliff, because then you’ll die, too. But you can dance and walk closer and closer to the edge. If you’re willing to show that you’ll brave a certain amount of risk, your partner may concede — and you might win the prize. But if you convince your adversary that you’re crazy and liable to hop off in any direction at any moment, he’ll probably cry uncle immediately. If the US appeared reckless, impatient, even insane, rivals might accept bargains they would have rejected under normal conditions. In terms of game theory, a new equilibrium would emerge as leaders in Moscow, Hanoi, and Havana contemplated how terrible things could become if they provoked an out-of-control president to experiment with the awful weapons at his disposal.

The nuclear-armed B-52 flights near Soviet territory appeared to be a direct application of this kind of game theory. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote in his diary that Kissinger believed evidence of US irrationality would “jar the Soviets and North Vietnam.” Nixon encouraged Kissinger to expand this approach. “If the Vietnam thing is raised” in conversations with Moscow, Nixon advised, Kissinger should “shake his head and say, ‘I am sorry, Mr. Ambassador, but [the president] is out of control.” Nixon told Haldeman: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace

You’ll recall that just last October, Bush was stridently warning everybody about WWIII. It was that NIE that stopped all that talk in its tracks.

And you’ll also recall that Henry Kissinger has been prowling around the white house again since 2002:

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.

“Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”

The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.

In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.

In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”

He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.

Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.

The article concludes with this conversation:

More than 35 years after Giant Lance, I asked Kissinger about it during a long lunch at the Four Seasons Grill in New York. Why, I asked, did they risk nuclear war back in October 1969? He paused over his salad, surprised that I knew so much about this episode, and measured his words carefully. “Something had to be done,” he explained, to back up threats the US had made and to push the Soviets for help in Vietnam. Kissinger had suggested the nuclear maneuvers to give the president more leverage in negotiations. It was an articulation of the game theory he had studied before coming to power. “What were [the Soviets] going to do?” Kissinger said dismissively.

But what if things had gone terribly wrong — if the Soviets had overreacted, if a B-52 had crashed, if one of the hastily loaded warheads had exploded? Kissinger demurred. Denying that there was ever a madman theory in operation, he emphasized that Giant Lance was designed to be a warning, not a provocation to war. The operation was designed to be safe. And in any case, he said, firm resolve is essential to policymaking.