I won’t bother going over her recommendations and rebutting them, because so many have already done it for me:
Matt Duss at the Wonk Room, whose entire post is a definite must-read:
What’s Farsi for ‘Cakewalk’?
…Maybe there are Iranian democrats who support the U.S. bombing their country, I’d love to hear from them. But I think we’ve gotten far too casual about proposing these sorts of attacks. If we’re going to talk about it, let’s at least talk about it seriously, recognizing that very many people will very likely die. They deserve a lot better than than you know, if everything goes just right, it just might work!
Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists.
…The “car accident” line in her post is a clear reference to the bombing of two scientists’ cars last month in Tehran. Here is a BBC account of those attacks, carried out by unknown men on motorbikes. One of the scientists was killed and one was wounded. Both of their wives were also reportedly wounded. Another nuclear scientist was killed in a similar bombing earlier this year.
No one has argued that any of these men could be considered combatants. It’s also still unclear who was behind the attacks, though Iran has accused the United States and Israel of having a role. But even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.
At Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss picks up on this same inconsistency, but has a broader point about the Post:
The Washington Post has replaced the American Enterprise Institute as the primary hub of neoconservative arguments for U.S. aggression in the Middle East. AEI served a Republican administration, and cannot perform that role for Democrats. So the Post is now doing the job, percolating militarist ideas for the Obama administration. Old wine in a new bottle. Jennifer Rubin is the latest hire, fresh from Commentary magazine, arguing for an attack on Iran…
Later on Weiss comes back to the issue, and points us to a Huffington Post piece by David Bromwich, who calls it “barbarous dialect”:
There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why?
Bromwich focuses on President Barack Obama’s decision to assassinate a U.S. citizen who preaches violent extremism against the U.S., and the fact that even the president can joke about “drone strikes” — that is, shooting missiles down on villages from on high. Bromwich:
]]>A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.
The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear [...]]]>
The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear program, it is indeed a less than ‘ideal’ plan — it may not work at all.
Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, in his August story, that even the Israelis are convinced that an attack might only temporarily set back the Iranian program: “[T]hey believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years.” Many experts estimate the length of the delay will be even less.
Goldberg cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s secret Osirak nuclear facility as an example of a successful attack: “In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.” (Glenn Greenwald notes Goldberg made the opposite claim in the run up to the Iraq war: Hussein’s program never ended.)
The “success” of the Osirak attack is a common theme among neoconservatives. The Hudson Institute cited the strike in a January 2010 report urging the U.S. to support an Israeli attack on Iran and to prepare for the resulting wider war.
At the Progressive Realist blog, Louisville professor and blogger Rodger Payne lines up a number of academic and other studies that challenge this conclusion. Here’s an excerpt of one (PDF):
The 1981 Israeli aerial striike on Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq is frequently cited as a successful use of preventive military force, and may be used to justify similar attacks in the future. However, closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear program, and may have even hastened it. Attempts to replicate the “success” at Osiraq are likely to do even worse, as proliferating states are now routinely dispersing and concealing their nuclear, biological, and chemical programs to decrease their vulnerability to air strikes. Given the poor track record of preventive attacks in controlling the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, American interests will be best served in the future by embracing other tools of counterproliferation.
Most honest appraisals of a potential military strike against Iran’s nuclear program admit that it may only be a setback for the alleged weapons program — if it works at all.
“Numerous analysts doubt that Israel is capable of carrying out a successful strike,” Matt Duss wrote this summer, lining up experts.
A study by a British think-tank this summer concluded, according to Haaretz, that “[a]n Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.”
Even if the U.S. — as Lieberman wants — carries out a strike with its more advanced weaponry and planes, the results will likely be the same. There’s no reason to expect that U.S. intelligence or technological abilities are so much greater than Israel’s that a U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear program would be decisive.
This is something Duss and I have harped on as of late: not only would an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities be no “cakewalk,” but like the Osirak attack, it probably will not accomplish its ostensible longer-term objectives.
]]>Duss writes that [...]]]>
Duss writes that Lieberman ignores a central question in his push to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites: “It’s entirely unclear that the U.S. can, even if it decides to do so, stop Iran’s nuclear program through military means.”
When asked at CFR if he was suggesting the U.S start a third large-scale war in the region, Lieberman responded,”Nobody is talking about invading Iran” and that ”we’re not talking a war.” Apparently bombing a country is not an act of war.
But Duss points out that a virtual conga line of top U.S. military brass have said strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities will only delay — not end — Iran’s nuclear program (emphasis in original):
As Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman General James Cartwright stated in testimony to the Senate Armed Services committee in April, strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would, at best, only delay the Iranian nuclear program for a few years, while at the same time solidifying Iranian domestic support for the regime and removing any hesitancy that may have existed over the necessity of obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Gen. Cartwright was then pressed by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) on whether the only way to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear capability was “to physically occupy their country and disestablish their nuclear facilities?”
Gen. Cartwright answered: “Absent some other unknown calculus that would go on, that’s a fair conclusion.”
Gen. Cartwright’s comments track squarely with those of retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who, in discussing the various scenarios and likely consequences of a strike on Iran, concluded: “If you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”
Which brings us to Iraq and Afghanistan, two disasters for which Joe Lieberman bears as much responsibility as any American politician. As Eli Clifton helpfully points out, Lieberman is now simply repurposing his Iraq arguments for Iran. Which is, of course, what all the neocons are doing. (No, these are not particularly imaginative people.)
I might argue with Duss’s last point: Neoconservatives can indeed be imaginative when it comes to ways to sell wars, as well as in their overestimation of U.S. abilities to accomplish their ambitious goals for military action.
It appears air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are for neocons the 2010 “cakewalk” incarnate to a “liberated Iraq” — that strategy of preemptive aggression sold under the pretense that the goals at hand can be easily accomplished and, as Lieberman appears to put it, the United States can “manage” consequences.
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