Iran: It's the Politics, Stupid

E. J. Dionne, in a column I missed last Friday, explains Rove's supposed 'demotion':

Here's the real meaning of the White House shake-up and the redefinition of Karl Rove's role in the Bush presidency: The administration's one and only domestic priority in 2006 is hanging on to control of Congress....Rove is simply moving to where all the action will, of necessity, be.

And he explains why:

The administration fears "investigations of everything" by congressional committees, this adviser said, and the "possibility of a forced withdrawal from Iraq" through legislative action.

Josh Marshall elaborates on this latter point:

Little of what's happened in the last five years would have been possible were it not for the fact that there was no political institution with subpoena power in Washington not under the control of the White House....The White House and the entire DC GOP for that matter is just sitting on too many secrets and bad acts. The bogus investigations of the pre-war intel is just one example, if one of the most resonant and glaring. Keeping control of the House and the Senate is less a matter of conventional ideological and partisan politics as it is a simple matter of survival.

Hence: Iran.

Now, we all know that this is what the Iran 'crisis' is all about. A couple of weeks ago, I argued that if we want to prevent a catastrophic military misadventure in Iran, we need to pre-emptively make an issue of this, of their cynical use of national security for partisan ends:

Make it about their political maneuvering. Make the point early and often that anything the administration says about Iran has no purpose other than influencing the midterms....Take their hubris and shove it right back down their smug little throats.

Or, to put it a lot more succinctly: it's the politics, stupid.

This week's Time has an article (a profile on new chief of staff Josh Bolten) giving us ammunition for just such an attack:

Friends and colleagues of Bolten told TIME about an informal, five-point "recovery plan" for Bush that is aimed at pushing him up slightly in opinion polls and reassuring Republican activists, whose disaffection could cost him dearly in November....

4. RECLAIM SECURITY CREDIBILITY. This is the riskiest, and potentially most consequential, element of the plan, keyed to the vow by Iran to continue its nuclear program despite the opposition of several major world powers. Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. "In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose," said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House. [emphasis added]

There you have it: an admission in a major national magazine that the push for action against Iran is driven by political (rather than national security) calculations. They're admitting, in effect, that the Iran 'crisis' is a campaign ploy.

We have everything we need. Everything. We have the storyline: corrupt administration desperate to avoid oversight stakes everything on the midterms, fabricates foreign policy crisis to that end. We have the evidence, an abundance of evidence, including (but not limited to) the astonishing admission in Time that yes, they really are subordinating national security to partisan ends. We have the opportunity: the propaganda offensive has yet to begin on a large scale, this time we see it coming, and we have time to define them before they define us. If we hit them now and hit them hard, we can still win this. We can make their fabricated crisis a political liability instead of their ultimate weapon, we can force them to abandon their unilateralist fantasies, and we can win back Congress in November.

[More of my thoughts on stopping the Iran war here and here; a roundup of other blogging on the subject here.]

[That's all, folks]