Does White House have a 'Thelma and Louise' plan?
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Let me make an argument about the possibility that a regime-change-style, shock-and-awe air assault might be launched on Iranian nuclear facilities and associated targets -- based on no insider knowledge, just the logic of George and Dick's Thelma-and-Louise-style imperialism.
We all know at least half the story by now. Is there anybody in official Washington -- other than our president, vice president, the vice president's secretive imperial staff, assorted neocon supporters, and right-wing think tanks -- who isn't sweating blood, popping pills and wondering what in the world to do about our delusional leaders?
Senators, House members, former top officials and high military types are crawling out of the Washington woodwork to offer the kinds of dire warnings that, not so long ago, would have been confined to the peripheries of political argument.
A huge air assault on Iran, surely involving staggeringly powerful bunker-busting missiles, would seem to be an act of madness. It would be immensely destructive to Iran (and yet almost surely a rallying point for its fundamentalist regime); bloody in its repercussions for U.S. soldiers in Iraq; imperiling to U.S. allies in the region; and a potential energy disaster. A series of explosive events could unravel the oil heartlands of the planet, making the administration's last years in Iraq little more than an hors d'oeuvre before a banquet of catastrophe.
You don't have to rely on me for this. In his confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered his own bloodcurdling scenario for the aftermath of such an assault: While "Iran cannot attack us directly militarily, I think that their capacity to potentially close off the Persian Gulf to all exports of oil, their potential to unleash a significant wave of terror both in the -- well, in the Middle East and in Europe and even here in this country -- is very real. ... Their ability to get Hezbollah to further destabilize Lebanon I think is very real. So I think that while their ability to retaliate against us in a conventional military way is quite limited, they have the capacity to do all of the things, and perhaps more, that I just described."
The possibility of an attack on Iran has been on the horizon since before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when, as Newsweek reminded us, one quip of the bolder neocons was: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
Many who warned early of such an attack -- such as the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter or former CIA official Philip Giraldi -- are now even more passionately convinced the administration is headed for the Iranian cliff, possibly as early as spring.
But it took more than their work for so much of official Washington to panic. It took the administration's decision to send the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, the second carrier task force in the Persian Gulf; it took the announcement of what Mideast expert Juan Cole has termed President Bush's "fatwa," allowing the U.S. military to take out Iranian agents anywhere in Iraq; it took the detention by U.S. forces of various Iranian officials in Iraq and the invasion of an Iranian office in Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan; it took Bush's insistence at his press conference last week that the Iranian government is responsible for weapons funneled into Iraq to harm U.S. soldiers; it took the refusal of officials like John Negroponte to say whether they believe the administration already had the right to whack Iran without returning to Congress for permission.
And it took, of course, the administration's catastrophe in Iraq, which drives everything before it, as well as all those eerie parallels with the administration's behavior in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
All of this brought home the possibility that our leaders might one day actually take the house down with them, that they might floor the accelerator and head directly for the cliff with something between sneers and smiles on their faces.
An attack on Iran, if it were to happen, promises a special mixture of two fundamentalisms that would make a single lethal brew. Neither of these Washington fundamentalisms are religious or particularly Christian in nature.
The first -- the bedrock faith of the Bush administration and its neocon supporters since Sept. 12, 2001 -- is the religion of force. Our self-styled "wartime" commander-in-chief and the vice president head an administration that has long been in love with the dazzling military possibilities of the last standing superpower. Its high-tech destructive capabilities, they believed, gave them the power to go it alone in the world, shocking and awing a post-Cold War assemblage of lesser states into eternal submission. Force -- the threat of it, the application of it -- was the summa cum laude of their go-it-alone university of power.
Back in 2001-03, they saw force as their own special Tao, their way in the world; now, reaching into their problem-solving quiver, they naturally find only the same arrow that's always been there: a religion for all occasions.
In the case of a possible future assault on Iran, this larger fundamentalism of the Church of Force will surely combine with the only significant force the Pentagon has on hand -- air power, the second fundamentalism. The belief in air power's ability to fell regimes and bring whole peoples to their knees, is deep-seated. Since before World War II, we've been living with a military belief system in which bombing others, including civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do; in which air power can, in relatively swift measure, break the will not just of the enemy, but of that enemy's society; and in which air power is the royal path to victory.
That this has not proven so; that it did not prove so in Afghanistan, in shock-and-awe Iraq, or in Israel's air assault last summer on Lebanon matters little. Faith in the efficacy of air power (as opposed to its barbarism) is fundamentalist in nature, therefore not disprovable by the facts on the rubble-strewn ground.
As a result, you shouldn't underestimate the strength of the belief that "it" -- force, air power -- will do the trick next time, if only you have the nerve not to listen to the Nervous Nellies and instead double down on your bet.
Do you remember that period before the invasion of Iraq when neocons and their various admirers were proclaiming us the New Rome, hailing a Pax Americana globally (and a Pax Republicana domestically) that would last forever and a day? They were then intent on describing a jungle world of failed states at the global peripheries that needed an imperial power like ... well, like us ... for order. That, of course, was before the Bush administration managed to bring a jungle world to Iraq.
Are we then, under George and Dick, simply a failed empire? Do we now rule (as opposed to threaten) anything? Are we an empire at all -- even at home where a vast, ungainly government is being privatized into ever more expensive chaos and the federal budget is being driven over a military-industrial cliff -- or are we Kong? Or a Three Stooges version of the imperial? Or is it just that Dick and George, all four hands on the spinning wheel of state, are heading for that cliff intent on liberating us all?
Having long embraced a fantasy of victory, they now show every sign of wrapping their arms around their own Iraq defeat as if it were victory, and -- with the enthusiasm of Thelma and Louise trapped by all those cop cars -- taking the only path that seems open to them. As the alternatives grow ever starker -- surrender to those "Democrat" electees, to the critics, the cavilers, the ragtag insurgents, the alien mullahs, even panicked Republicans in their own ranks -- what's left but that liberating, exhilarating trip over the cliff?
Unlike the movies, where reviews can tell you the ending before you enter the multiplex, political life, even geopolitical life, is a remarkably unsettled -- as well as unsettling -- thing.
Nothing assures us that some predetermined fate will actually drive us all over that cliff. But if, before November 2008, we do head in that direction, a small suggestion: Don't bother to buckle your seat belt. It's not going to be that sort of a trip to the bottom.
Tom Engelhardt, consulting editor for Metropolitan books, is the intelligence behind www.tomdispatch.com, where a longer version of this piece appears. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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