Mark Jurkowitz asks, as he asked on Greater Boston,
But I found reading “The Iran Plans” to be more frustrating than enlightening. As he portrays an administration — already militarily and politically bogged down in Iraq — using the same philosophy driven by the same people to think about repeating the same policy, two huge questions come to mind.
1) Is it really true that the situation in Iraq hasn’t given this administration a little more reason to pause, to view the virtues of multi-lateralism more warmly, and to question its ability to control events and manage the spiralling fallout from a major military operation? Can that be possible?
2) How will the great mass of American people — now giving Bush the lowest grades of his presidency and giving Capitol Hill Republicans the willies about the 2006 midterm elections — react if and when key administration figures start making belligerent noises about attacking another Middle East country on the basis of fears about their ability to acquire WMD and use it against us?
He calls for “context,” which I’m all for. There’s this from Matt Yglesias:
I’m not so high on this “Bush wants to bomb Iran to secure his legacy” concept…. Rather, there’s a widespread view on the American right that it’s always a mistake to reach diplomatic agreements with “evil” regimes. There’s also a widespread view on the American right that, contra the examples of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, nuclear deterrence won’t work against “crazy” leaders. At the intersection of those two opinions is the conclusion that we ought to be very, very, very, very willing to use unilateral preventative military force against countries that have nuclear weapons programs or that we merely vaguely suspect of having nuclear weapons programs. Both of those ideas are foolish and dangerously wrong, but they’re also widespread — not private oddball notions of Bush’s.
So political calculations aside, there’s very strong suggestion that the attack-Iran ideology isn’t coming from out of left-field or Sy Hersh’s imagination. Now, Mark’s right that what the Bushies want privately won’t necessarily translate into action. But given that the administration has learn that rolling double or nothing usually comes out in its favor. It didn’t take center in the 2004 election. It has weathered criticism of the war, of Rumsfeld, of just about everything with more of the same. What’s more, it still has no indication that foreign policy hawkishness is, all told, a losing stance electorally. Why is attacking Iran beyond the realm of possiblity for them?
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