One More Thought...

...about this: the people who (claim to) have the greatest faith in what Obama's endorsement would do for the Iranian opposition would be the last to admit that before the election, the opposition was newly energized by Obama's speech in Cairo. The things Obama actually does have no value; it's only the things he doesn't do that could transform the world.

Update: and then there's this quote from Mousavi's spokesman (via Mark Kleiman):

We [Iranians] are a bit unfortunate. When we had our Obama [meaning President Khatami], that was the time of President Bush in the United States. Now that [the United States] has Obama, we have our Bush here [in Iran]. In order to resolve the problems between the two countries, we should have two Obamas on the two sides. It doesn't mean that everything depends on these two people, but this is one of the main factors.

A Hypothetical for the Neo-Cons

I'm talking to you, Robert Kagan. And Stephen Hayes. And Peter Wehner. And Charles Krauthammer. And of course John McCain.

Here's the question:

Say there's a Presidential election that you and thousands of other Republicans are convinced was stolen by the Democrats. Say you're out there protesting, trying to build public support for your cause.

Now let's say Khamenei expresses his wholehearted support for your efforts. Say Ahmadinejad says "I stand with the American people in their opposition to Democratic tyranny." Say Hu Jintao says the election was fraudulent, and Medvedev calls for the Democrat to step down. Say Kim Jong Il says "today, we are all Republicans."

Would these expressions of support help or hurt your efforts to build support among Americans?

John Bolton vs. the CIA

So John Bolton isn't happy with the new Iran NIE. Knock me over with a feather.

Bolton's response is more temperate than some--he merely hints that the whole thing is the product of some dark conspiracy, rather than saying it outright--but it's certainly no more honest than you'd expect. He makes five points, each one with a different kind of dodgy reasoning:

• The 'uranium is uranium' dodge: "the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses." As, of course, is any material used in any military capacity. Ammonia can be used in fertilizer, and it can be used in truck bombs. The real question is: does Iran have ammonia?


• The 'they don't explain the reasons' dodge: "the NIE....implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein....Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point." But if the evidence is overwhelming that something happened, does the fact that we don't understand it mean it didn't happen?


• The 'Iran lies' dodge: "the risks of disinformation by Iran are real....The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism." Or maybe not:

  ...the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.
  
  In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

  This was described as "a lively exchange". I'll bet it was.


• The 'overvaluing new intelligence' dodge: "It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis." Except that it isn't a single piece of evidence:

  The secret intelligence that produced this reversal came from multiple channels -- human sources as well as intercepted communications -- that arrived in June and July. At that time, a quite different draft of the Iran NIE was nearly finished. But the "volume and character" of the new information was so striking, says a senior official, that "we decided we've got to go back"....A senior official describes the summer's windfall as "a variety of reporting that unlocked stuff we had, which we didn't understand fully before."



• The 'State Department geeks were behind this' dodge: "many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department". Mister Ad, meet Mister Hominem. Seems to me Bolton's real gripe is not that policy people were involved, but that the 'right' kind of policy people weren't:

  "Back in 2002, one of the knocks on the process at the time was that information was not vetted by analysts and was being rushed into the Oval Office," said the senior U.S. intelligence official.
  
  That experience showed, the official said, that bringing unvetted intelligence to senior officials could backfire.
  
  This time, even as they vetted the new intelligence and launched into major revisions of the estimate on Iran's nuclear program, intelligence officials said, they deliberately shielded analysts from administration officials and policymakers.

  Shorter Bolton: you can't get reliable intel without a little stovepiping.

[Hat tip: Tbogg]

Update: Commenter DennisSGMM at (new) Tbogg's gets it just right:

Bolton exemplifies that old quote:
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

Other Update: K-Lo had a different response:

From a friend: "You should tell Romney's people to announce that Bolton will be SecState and it will be game over as far as a lot of conservatives are concerned."

Oh, please please please please let Bolton feature prominently in the Republican nominee's campaign. Please?

World War III Averted -- What Now?

Now that Bush and Cheney's favorite toy has been taken away, what will the White House do to occupy themselves during the rest of their (incredibly lame-duck) term?

These are my suggestions:

1. Help repair the Republican Party's future prospects by requiring the redesign of stalls in every Midwestern airport's men's rooms.

2. Purge the Supreme Court of those annoying judicial activists that don't pass the Bat Boy litmus test (teach the controversy!).
3. Bring federal resources to bear in the ongoing search for the real killer of Nicole Simpson.

4. Learn to correctly pronounce the names of any three Middle East heads of state.

5. Keep an eye on the twins by offering Ozzy and Rob Zombie the use of Air Force One on their U.S. tour, in exchange for backstage passes.

Yours?

[cross-posted at Blue Mass Group]

Watching the Corners Turn Corners

The extraordinary thing about Ahmadinejad's visit to NYC is that it somehow distills wingnuttery to its very essence, so that all the wingnuts sound exactly like themselves only more so. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Corner.

Take Cliff May, for example:

How could Saddam have used chemical weapons against Iranians? Doesn't A'jad know Saddam didn't have WMD? That was just a neo-con lie.

Yes, Cliff is still having trouble with that whole 'linear time' concept, believing (apparently) that all events are simultaneous.

Meanwhile, K-Lo gets huffy:

Ahmadineijad just called what happened on September 11 "a tragedy." Sorry, it was a helluva lot more that that.

Alas, she does not identify the politically correct way to refer to 9/11. "The most tragic tragedy ever"? "The greatest crime ever committed against humanity"? Exactly how much hyperbole is required here? It would be helpful if she told us.

And then there's Jonah Goldberg, reliably sophomoric in his response to Ahmadinejad's claim that "We don't have homosexuals in Iran like in your country":

Yes, but I hear that there's so much toe-tapping in the Turkish toilet stalls it sounds like a Fred Astaire retrospective.

Ever the class clown, never actually funny.

And Jonah again, being the more Jonah than Jonah:

It'd be nice if someone in the audience shouted a Homeresque: "Borrrringg!!!"

Now that's a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.

The NARLs Come Out of the Woodwork

“I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”
--Anonymous (for obvious reasons) neocon think tank operative, on Cheney's orders to prepare a PR blitz for invading Iran; as reported by George Packer

Also Not a Raging Lunatic: Jack Goldsmith. Unlike, for example, David Addington:

Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. “If you rule that way,” Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, “the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”

More NARLs: James Comey. Dr. Richard Carmona. David Iglesias. General Peter Pace.

And so on.

My immediate reaction in most of these cases, of course, is: where were you when it mattered? Disillusioned enablers may deserve some credit for turning against the raging lunatics, but they still spent a lot of time on the wrong side.

My second reaction is to marvel at the kind of people Bush et al have managed to alienate. As Kevin Drum observes,

Goldsmith is no centrist. He's a hardcore conservative, he's unmpressed with civil libertarian arguments, he was thrilled to work with the Bush administration, he was a close friend of John Yoo, and he's convinced that we need to be on a war footing in the fight against terror. But even at that, he was appalled at what he saw during his tenure in the Justice Department.

Goldsmith, Carmoney, Comey, that unnamed neocon: all dedicated, ideologically-committed conservative Republicans. They have every single qualification for serving in a Republican administration--except, I guess, that they aren't raging lunatics.

My third reaction is to remind myself that the raging lunatics are still running things...and that, more importantly, the Republicans who would replace them are at least as crazy (if not more so). We are still screwed, and will probably be for a long time to come, and it could still get a whole lot worse.

Update: name corrected, thanks to Kathy in comments.

Instapundit: Still an Idiot

Glenn Reynolds' comment on the latest Plame news:

Regardless, given the many obviously more damaging leaks that no one seems to care about, I'm finding it hard to get excited about this one.

Leaking the identity of a covert operative working on nuclear proliferation and Iran (you remember them--crazy fanatical Muslim jihadi types who have to be bombed before they get The Bomb? Yeah, that Iran)? No damage there:

Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.

So given the real damage from the Plame leak, you ask, what sort of leaks would be 'more damaging' than that?

Simple: any leak of information that makes the Bush administration look bad.

It's About 2012

Or so I'm tempted to speculate when I read something like this by Steve M, about the U.S. (i.e., Cheney) backing an al Qaeda-linked organization formerly headed by Khalid Sheikh Muhammed that carries out terrorist attacks in Iran.

In other words, we're backing al Qaeda allies against the country that offered to help us against al Qaeda.

Just add this one to the whole sad inventory of things they've done (and continue to do) that are so recklessly, catastrophically stupid that they defy explanation. An inventory that (I sometimes think) can't be explained by any standard measure of incompetence or corruption or arrogance or even any perfect-storm combination of the three.

And it makes me wonder: are they trying to do this much damage? Have they given up on 2008? Are they committed to simply making life hell for the next (Democratic) president?

Are they banking on 2012?

I ask semi-facetiously...but only semi-. Consider the damage they're doing to executive power. Consider Iraq: Republicans worry about total meltdown if we're still there during the 2008 elections...which Bush has said is a certainty. Leaving the mess for the next folks is a lousy strategy for 2008, but it may not be a bad strategy for 2012.

Whatever their motives, we've got another 22 months of dealing with this madness. All we can hope to do at this point is limit the damage until it's over.

Influencing Iran

Mark Kleiman makes an excellent point about a gap in discussion of Iran:

But what bothered me, as it usually bothers me, is that the conversation then continued under the assumption that "the United States" and "Iran" and the other national players in this game are more or less unitary actors, so that "the United States" can threaten to do something that damages "Iran" as a way of coercing "Iran" to act (or not act) in a particular way.

That mode of analysis (which I think of as "Westphalian" because of its implicit treatment of each state as a sovereign actor) is more or less standard. For some purposes, it makes accurate predictions and suggests appropriate courses of action. But it's clearly an abstraction from the real world in which the actions of "Iran" are the results of political conflicts and agreements among Iranian politicians, interest groups, and factions....

If we don't know how sending a carrier battle group to the Gulf will influence the probability that the Guardian Council will allow enough anti-Ahmadinejad candidates to run for the Majlis to take over control, then surely the right response is to learn how to guess better, not to make the decision about the CBG as if the expected impact on political developments in Iran were zero. I can't think of a more important question to ask, about any action we might take toward Iran, than "Will this strengthen or weaken the opposition to Ahmadinejad?" And yet I don't hear that question asked in the sort of thoughtful and insistent tone in which it ought to be asked....

And of course we are influencing internal Iranian politics, regardless of whether we set out to do so. Understanding the effects of our actions should be the first consideration.

So what kind of effect are we having now?

It should be self-evident that belligerent rhetoric strengthens Ahmadinejad's political position, just as bin Laden's videos used to strengthen Bush. As James Surowiecki pointed out a couple of weeks ago, though, it's actually much worse than that: belligerent rhetoric gives Ahmadinejad material support:

The past few months haven’t been easy for Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His refusal to halt Iran’s uranium-enrichment program led the United Nations to impose sanctions in December. Inflation in Iran has exploded, with the price of commodities like bread and meat rising as much as twenty-five per cent. In the country’s recent municipal elections, Ahmadinejad’s political allies were crushed, and clerics and lawmakers have begun criticizing him in public. Worse still, through the second half of 2006 the price of oil tumbled almost thirty per cent, a disaster for an economy as dependent on oil revenue as Iran’s....

This latest confrontation with the U.S. should have been the capper to a bad winter for Ahmadinejad. Strangely, though, it may instead have brought about an upturn in his fortunes. Soon, oil prices started to rise, jumping twenty per cent in just two weeks. As a result, the Iranian regime suddenly has an extra twenty million dollars or so to spend every day, a windfall that will help Ahmadinejad to placate his critics and solve some of his country’s more pressing economic problems....

When buying and selling oil, traders don’t just look at today’s supply and demand....[I]f buyers think there’s a chance that supply is going to be lower down the line—because, say, Iranian oil fields will be shut down—they will be willing to pay a higher price today in order to guarantee that they will have the oil they need....In the current confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, these same concerns create a perverse set of incentives: whenever the U.S. says things that make a military conflict with Iran seem more likely, the price of oil rises, strengthening Iran’s regime rather than weakening it....

The persistence of the risk premium means that Ahmadinejad, whatever his religious or nationalist inspiration, has an economic incentive to say confrontational things that spook the oil market. But the effect of his pronouncements is limited, because traders know that self-interest is likely to keep Iran from doing anything that would cut off the supply of oil. What really keeps the risk premium high is the American penchant for public responses to Iran’s provocations.

So once again, the Bush administration is doing the exact opposite of what would be in America's interest, while making catastrophic conflict much more likely and much more difficult if it happens.

I guess it's just what they do.

Revolt of the Generals

According to Sy Hersh (hat tip: Josh Marshall), the administration's overall Middle East strategy has shifted to effectively siding with the Sunnis (Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents) against the Shiites (Iran, Hezbollah, the government we installed in Iraq) in order to stop Iran from...something. It's never quite clear.

And part of this strategy is, of course, preparing for war:

In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

Which of course would make war a fait accompli, and any efforts to stop it irrelevant and ineffectual.

And it gets better: according to the London Times, the most effective resistance to this catastrophic clusterfuck in the making may be the generals:

SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

I'm a little dubious about this...except that we do have other indications of unrest in the ranks:

General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said recently there was “zero chance” of a war with Iran. He played down claims by US intelligence that the Iranian government was responsible for supplying insurgents in Iraq, forcing Bush on the defensive....

Hillary Mann, the National Security Council’s main Iran expert until 2004, said Pace’s repudiation of the administration’s claims was a sign of grave discontent at the top.

“He is a very serious and a very loyal soldier,” she said. “It is extraordinary for him to have made these comments publicly, and it suggests there are serious problems between the White House, the National Security Council and the Pentagon.”

So there's good evidence that the people who would actually be in charge of prosecuting Bush's war are horrified at the prospect, and may well be actively resisting it.

On yet another hand, the Air Force is apparently more complaisant...and they'd be the ones doing the bombing.

We're in some scary territory, folks. Under any other president, this sort of thing would be intolerable (anybody remember how the military undermined Clinton?). This administration, though--these people are so far off the deep end that military revolt against civilian control might actually be the least worst thing that happens.

Iran: Time for a Pre-Emptive War...Against War

I've never been very enthusiastic about advocating withdrawal from Iraq; it's the right thing, certainly, but all our options are terrible, and withdrawal just happens to be the least terrible.

I've been far more emphatic about the less ambiguous and much more important matter of war with Iran. Where Iraq was a catastrophic mistake, attacking Iran would be an apocalyptic blunder. Despite the skepticism of some (skepticism I hope is justified), it sure looks to me like the administration is aggressively pushing the unthinkable. In that light, I think James Fallows is exactly right (hat tip: David Kurtz):

Deciding what to do next about Iraq is hard — on the merits, and in the politics. It’s hard on the merits because whatever comes next, from “surge” to “get out now” and everything in between, will involve suffering, misery, and dishonor. It’s just a question of by whom and for how long....

By comparison, Iran is easy: on the merits, in the politics. War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq.

Fallows argues that the most important thing Congress can do right now is pass a resolution "making clear that it will authorize no money and provide no endorsement for military action against Iran."

Matt Yglesias takes comfort from Schumer's comments on Iran, and it is encouraging in the sense that he's clearly not giving Bush a pass this time:

...you never give someone who has been so bad the second benefit of the doubt. I think anything the President asks for with Iran is going to be received with extreme dubiousness, certainly by me, by the Democratic Senate and by the American people. I mean he says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iran, people are going to think twice before believing it. If he says this is an immediate danger to the US, people are going to think twice before believing it. If he says military force is the only way to deal with this problem, people are going to thing 20 times before believing it.

Good for him.

But here's what worries me about Schumer's comments: he's prepared to oppose an AUMF when and if it comes up, but there's nothing there about pre-emptively opposing action. This line in particular is disheartening: "Should he try to go into Iran without an AUMF will do everything we can to try to stop that." Well, fine...but by then it'll be too late. The time to act is now.

What they should do now is block funding for an Iran invasion, as Fallows suggests; rescind the Iraq AUMF (but skip the part about impeachment, which would be an obviously empty threat); and, most importantly, hold hearings (hat tip; Digby).

The hearings are most important because realistically, they're the precondition for the other two. We need aggressive hearings (on the intelligence, on the diplomatic alternatives, on the consequences of military action, on the executive's obligation to consult Congress before committing to action) to solidify public opposition to attacking Iran, and to make sure that any case the administration tries to make is made in our forum on our terms. Every attempt at an end-run--selective leaks to Fox News, e.g.--should get them a truckload of subpoenas. Every sign of manipulated intelligence should be trotted out for all the world to see.

The reality is that even if the Democrats are completely united and work to head off a military strike before it happens, they still can't stop it; the best they can do is make the political consequences of an attack so steep that even Cheney thinks twice before doing anything completely batshit crazy. The only hope of having even that slim chance is if they act now, before the administration once again creates its own reality.

[That's all, folks]

Reid Warns Bush on Iran

This is encouraging:

Democratic leaders in Congress lobbed a warning shot Friday at the White House not to launch an attack against Iran without first seeking approval from lawmakers.

"The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told the National Press Club.

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I think any administration proposal to attack Iran would be pretty much dead on arrival in this Congress. That won't stop them from doing it without Congress, but this should put them on notice that there will be political consequences. Warning Bush before the fact--putting the issue on the table, instead of letting them present it as a fait accompli without debate--was the smart right thing to do.

This pre-emptive strike illustrates a more broadly encouraging aspect of this Congress: they're setting the agenda, instead of reacting to Bush's. That's largely a function of being a majority again, of course...but given the opportunity, they have moved to make the most of it. Congress is, happily, a branch of government again.

[That's all, folks]

How Crazy Is Bush?

Crazy enough to start a war with Iran?

I'm not convinced, but I'm not betting against it either. For six years we've had lesson after lesson on just how batshit crazy these people are. I think a lot of us have learned not to put anything past them.

[That's all, folks]

The Iran 'Crisis': Some Perspective

Filling in for Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias puts the Iran debate in perspective:

The Iran debate has really become rather surreal. You have the "Islamofascist" locution jumping from the fever swamps of rightwing punditry into the mouth of the President of the United States. You have the Secretary of Defense issuing dire warnings of another Munich. These things are being done by the exact same people who, four years ago, were utterly dismissive of claims that invading Iraq was likely to serve Iranian interests better than American ones. Indeed, you have the exact same people who two years ago were assuring us that it made sense to commit American blood and treasure to fight Sunni insurgents on behalf of Iranian-backed Shiite militias now saying we need to commit more blood and treasure in Iraq to stop . . . Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

And that's just the beginning. Read the whole thing.

I have argued repeatedly that publicly fretting about what to do with Iran is a losing proposition, because it lends a sense of legitimacy to a 'crisis' that is at best exaggerated (and at worst completely fabricated) to serve Republican political ends. Yglesias treats the 'crisis' with exactly the derision it deserves; his piece serves as a template for how we should all respond.

[That's all, folks]

Iran: Attack of the Zombies

So Ahmadinejad sends a letter to Bush on May 9. It doesn't have a lot of positive content, but it is an unprecedented communication considering that Ali Khameini has been violently opposed to talks with the U.S.

The same day, Khameini's representative sends another letter to Time Magazine. This one does have concrete proposals aimed at defusing conflict with the western nations.

The two letters are accompanied by other signs that Iran wants to talk.

This is the background for the bogus story about yellow stars for Iranian Jews. People are talking about talking...and if there's one thing Bush wants to keep off the table, it's the talking option. Hence, the timing of the yellow star hoax.

Yes, it was quickly debunked. A cynic might say it doesn't matter. What matters is that people stopped talking about talking.

A cynic might also point out that even having been debunked, the story lives on in the febrile minds of the Iran hawks. A cynic might cite Roger Simon:

The folks over at Talking Points Memo are rather convinced that the Iranian Dress Code story is "already debunked" (here and here). None of them speak a word of Farsi, as far as I know, but the word of Juan Cole is apparently good enough for them - better obviously than that of Farsi native speaker Amir Taheri, whose column first broke the story.

Needless to say, there was more than just 'the word of Juan Cole' debunking the hoax. From the Reuters article:

1. A copy of the bill obtained by Reuters contained no such references.
2. Reuters correspondents who followed the dress code session in parliament as it was broadcast on state radio heard no discussion of proscriptions for religious minorities.
3. Senior parliamentarian Mohsen Yahyavi described the Canadian report as "completely false".
4. Iran's Jewish MP Moris Motamed also agreed the bill made no attempt to force special garments on the minorities.

But none of that matters, of course. Nor does it matter whether the Roger Simons of the world are mendacious or merely ignorant. What matters is that the lie lives on and has taken root as an alternate narrative--one that will be trotted out repeatedly by the warbloggers to justify military action in Iran. That's the way the right works: they don't ever need to prove anything; they just have to provide a semi-plausible alternative to reality in order to give themselves a pretense of justification for their crazy beliefs.

The other thing that matters here, is that as far as anyone can tell the White House is not involved. Perhaps they have graduated from implausible deniability to the plausible kind. Perhaps they have learned from Iraq that it is better if they not be the ones who are repeatedly caught in lies. Outsourcing a good chunk of the propaganda campaign lets them reap the benefits without even having any responsibility to evade. It's a win-win for them.

We're going to see a lot more of this, and it's going to get a lot uglier. Get ready for a summer of killing zombies.

[That's all, folks]

Iran: Just Say No, Yet Again

Matt Yglesias just says no:

I'm by no means opposed to the idea of more aggressive diplomatic and economic pressure and what have you. But I most certainly am opposed to starting a war. And insofar as twists and turns in policy are likely to be just smoke and mirrors -- as we saw before Iraq -- designed to smooth the path to war, I don't think people should waste their time talking about this stuff. The President has it within his power to alter this dynamic any time he wants. All he needs to do is say that, no, he's not going to start a war with Iran, but he does want to deal with the nuclear issue. With war taken "off the table," then we can have a conversation about diplomacy, the UN, sanctions, isolation, etc., etc., etc. But as long as war is on the table, then war -- not diplomacy -- is the issue, and the "military option" is a terrible one.

It genuinely is like Social Security, where the solvency question was being used as a cloak for the privatization agenda. Democrats kept getting labeled "irresponsible" for refusing to engage in a big wonk-fest about options for achieving long-term fiscal balance. But they rightly held their ground, perceiving that to the people who held all the power solvency wasn't the issue -- Social Security was. They wanted to destroy it, and Democrats didn't. Take privatization off the table, and then we can talk about solvency. Well, Bush wouldn't do it. Because, of course, we were right -- what he cared about was phasing the program out.

On Iran, it's the same thing. Liberals should be prepared to engage in a sophisticated and nuanced discussion of options for coping the Iran . . . the day after the President tells the "bombs away!" crew to buzz off. Until then, folks need to decide whether they want to collaborate, wittingly or unwittingly, with the people pushing us toward war or whether they want to fight them.

Yup. I'm sure it's entertaining for people to think long and hard about what our policy ought to be in a perfect (i.e., Democratic-run) world...but it really, really doesn't help.

More nattering nabobs of negativism linked below the fold:

• Josh Marshall
• Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist
• John Aravosis
• Newark Star-Ledger columnist John Farmer
• Greg Sargent (Tapped)
• Pachacutec (Firedoglake)
• Andrew Sabl
• Josh Marshall
• My previous posts: What to Do About Iran?; The Politics of Iran; and Iran: It's the Politics, Stupid.

[That's all, folks]

Iran: It's Still the Politics

Josh Marshall tells us how to fight the Republicans on Iran:

With respect to what's coming on Iran, what is in order is a little honesty, just as was the case with the Social Security debate a year ago. The only crisis with Iran is the crisis with the president's public approval ratings. Period. End of story. The Iranians are years, probably as long as a decade away, and possibly even longer from creating even a limited yield nuclear weapon. Ergo, the only reason to ramp up a confrontation now is to help the president's poll numbers.

This is a powerful message because it is an accurate message. We have many challenges overseas today. Chief among them, as one of the Democrats' senate candidates puts it, is "refocusing America's foreign and defense policies in a way that truly protects our national interests and seeks harmony where they are not threatened." The period of peril the country is entering into isn't tied to an Iranian bomb. It turns on how far a desperate president will go to avoid losing control of Congress.

Go to his heart. Go to his weaknesses. Though the realization of the fact is something of a lagging indicator, the man is a laughing stock, whose lies and failures are all catching up with him.

Exactly. Pretending this is a real crisis is a losing proposition. Taking the fight to the enemy, hammering them on their mendacity and their cynical manipulation of national security for partisan gain--that's how we win this. They've given us the road map; all we have to do is follow it.

Here's a roundup of other helpful advice on the subject:

• Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist
• John Aravosis
• Newark Star-Ledger columnist John Farmer
• Greg Sargent (Tapped)
• Pachacutec (Firedoglake)
• Andrew Sabl
• Josh Marshall
• My previous posts: What to Do About Iran?; The Politics of Iran; and Iran: It's the Politics, Stupid.

[That's all, folks]

Brzezinski, Iran, and the Wingnuts

I remember Carter's foreign policy as seriously schizophrenic. There was the advocacy for human rights and an inclusive global order; there was the hawkish Realpolitik, anti-Soviet actions, and massive military buildup. The former were generally associated with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The latter were generally associated with National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

For the few of you who missed it, Brzezinski had an excellent op-ed in Sunday's L. A. Times explaining why an attack on Iran would be a stupendously bad idea. The gist:

First, in the absence of an imminent threat (and the Iranians are at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war....Second, likely Iranian reactions would...in all probability bog down the United States in regional violence for a decade or more. Iran is a country of about 70 million people, and a conflict with it would make the misadventure in Iraq look trivial.

Third, oil prices would climb steeply, especially if the Iranians were to cut their production or seek to disrupt the flow of oil from the nearby Saudi oil fields....Finally, the United States, in the wake of the attack, would become an even more likely target of terrorism while reinforcing global suspicions that U.S. support for Israel is in itself a major cause of the rise of Islamic terrorism. The United States would become more isolated and thus more vulnerable while prospects for an eventual regional accommodation between Israel and its neighbors would be ever more remote....

As a hawk's hawk, a tireless advocate of military strength and the willingness to use it, Brzezinski is not the first person you expect to be arguing for peace. That makes him worth listening to...as does his prescience on the Iraq adventure, which he opposed for reasons that have since been proven correct.

None of which, of course, matters to the wingnuts. For example:

Paul Mirengoff (Powerline):

It was he and his feckless boss President Carter who saw no cause for concern in a potential Iranian mullocracy, and hence no reason to back the Shah of Iran who stood in the mullahs way.

Right or wrong (and I think he was probably wrong), Brzezinski was the Shah's strongest advocate in the Carter administration. He's the one who pushed for a crackdown on militants, while Vance was pushing the Shah to liberalize.

California Conservative:

This is typical liberal ideology. Negotiate from a position of weakness is straight from the Jimmy Carter failed handbook. Then again, Brzezinski is the failed bureaucrat that gave him that “Let’s all get along” advice. It’s obvious that Mr. Brzezinski didn’t learn anything from Reagan’s intimidating the Soviets into oblivion.

Anyone who remembers the Carter administration knows a) that 'let's all get along' was antithetical to Brzezinski's approach, and b) that Brzezinski (as noted above) pushed for the military build-up (which Reagan continued, but did not initiate) that wingnuts credit with defeating Communism.

Carol Liebau:

One can only wish that Zbigniew Brzezinski were as helpful to his own country as he has been to the forces of Islamofascism in Iran, both now and, of course, during the administration of the terminally incompetent Jimmy Carter, where he served as national security advisor (and when the radical Isamicists came to power in the first place).

There are plenty of people to blame for the theocratic revolution, starting with Eisenhower and the CIA (who overthrew Mossadegh in 1953) and continuing through Nixon and Kissinger (who encouraged the Shah as he stifled every democratic alternative in Iran), but Brzezinski: not high on the list.

Update: Boghie has acknowledged his error. Good for him.
Boghie on Your Six:

At this point in time (1978) Secretary Brzezinski was promoting ‘Human Rights’ without concern for RealPolitic [sic]. That hung Iran, a long term realpolitic [sic] ‘ally’, out to dry and directly led to the revolution.

Once more, for the slow learners. Cyrus Vance: human rights. Brzezinski: Realpolitik. Got the difference?

I know I shouldn't be surprised by such stupefying dumbassery. This is what they do. Still...jeezus, what a bunch of fucking morons.

[That's all, folks]

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]

Iran: Just Say No

For a couple of weeks now I've been saying that the only useful policy on Iran is Just Say No--that is, all our efforts have to be focused on preventing Bush from following the catastrophic course he has in mind.

There are, of course, a lot of other Nattering Nabobs of Negativism out there. Below the fold is a roundup of posts I considered particularly useful. My aim is to keep updating this as the opposition gets more organized. Meanwhile, feel free to suggest additional posts in comments. [Updates below]

• Update: Here's one I missed when it was first posted last week: Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist, quoting a correspondent on how to fight this thing:

  So, what does that mean: starting now we need to get every Congress-critter on record saying that there are no good military options for Iran. etc.. We need to hunt the Republicans down on Security issues and corner them so they lose credibility.
  
  Because if we come to that vote in October and we STOP BUSH because Democrats are united and Republicans are fractured we'll have an excited Democratic base ready to lay down on train tracks for Democrats in Congress.

• John Aravosis has an excellent set of talking points, and takes a stab at distilling them into a briefer message:

  Iran is ten years away from developing nuclear weapons. There is no discussion of America rushing into another premature war until either Bush leaves office, or Congress is able to provide effective oversight of, and can serve as a counter-balance to, the Bush administration's incompetence.

• Newark Star-Ledger columnist John Farmer gives the Just Say No rationale in a nutshell:

  And what about the neocons, our home-front heroes -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the civilians they've recruited like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley -- who orchestrated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war and foreign regime change?
  
  They should never again be allowed anywhere near the instruments and agencies of the American government.

• Greg Sargent (Tapped) draws on a recent historical parallel:

  There are two different questions Democratic officeholders can be asking themselves, their staffers, and their consultants. One question is "How should I handle the Iran issue?" The other is "How should I handle the Iran issue given that supporting a war with Iran is a non-starter?" If you think of the Social Security campaign as the model of effective opposition, the crucial first step there was when Democrats decided that privatizing Social Security was a bad idea and that they were committed to opposing it. Once you reach the conclusion that backing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people isn't going to be on the table as a tactical option for 2006, you can start working on the question of how to be against the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people without appearing "too weak."

• Pachacutec (Firedoglake) suggests talking points and tactics for the campaign. I think the talking points are pretty weak--they appeal pretty much to the converted, rather than to folks we need to convert--but there's an intriguing tactical suggestion:

  Getting groups of citizens to show up at the offices of senators and congressmen is an extraordinarily powerful tool. It’s underutilized and underappreciated. A handful of people going to an office is worth two thousand emails, letters or phone calls. It works. It shows them we are real people, and takes much less effort to coordinate than a peace march. Please get involved today to stop the next next mindless war against American interests, before it’s too late.

Previously linked posts:

• Andrew Sabl:

  Here good politics is good policy: only repeated, unified political opposition, as we pulled off on Social Security, has any chance of preventing this catastrophe.

• Josh Marshall:

  The only sensible expenditure of energy is to find ways to hem these guys in or constrain them before they do even more damage to this country.

• My initial post and follow-up.

[That's all, folks]