Rescinding the Bush Doctrine

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

By Andrew J. Bacevich | March 1, 2007

RATHER THAN vainly sniping at President Bush over his management of the Iraq war, the Democratic-controlled Congress ought to focus on averting any recurrence of this misadventure. Decrying the so-called "surge" or curbing the president's authority to conduct ongoing operations will contribute little to that end. Legislative action to foreswear preventive war might contribute quite a lot.

Long viewed as immoral, illicit, and imprudent, preventive war -- attacking to keep an adversary from someday posing a danger -- became the centerpiece of US national security strategy in the aftermath of 9/11. President Bush unveiled this new strategy in a speech at West Point in June 2002. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize," he said, "we will have waited too long." The new imperative was to strike before threats could form. Bush declared it the policy of the United States to "impose preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses."

Although the Constitution endows the legislative branch with the sole authority to declare war, the president did not consult Congress before announcing his new policy. He promulgated the Bush Doctrine by fiat. Then he acted on it.

In 2003, Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat to the United States; arguing that he might one day do so, the administration depicted the invasion of Iraq as an act of anticipatory self-defense. To their everlasting shame, a majority of members in both the House and the Senate went along, passing a resolution that "authorized" the president to do what he was clearly intent on doing anyway. Implicitly, the Bush Doctrine received congressional endorsement.

Events since have affirmed the wisdom of seeing preventive war as immoral, illicit, and imprudent.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

--MORE--

When nightmare scenarios are used to justify endless war, it’s time to wake up

February 26, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

What If We Leave?

by John Mueller

It is continually proclaimed that an American withdrawal from Iraq would carry grim consequences. President Bush calls it a “nightmare scenario,” and Frederick Kagan predicts “catastrophe.” Few Democrats disagree: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer warns that “precipitous withdrawal … could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation’s security and credibility.”

Indeed, the aftermath of withdrawal would be problematic and messy—like the present war—but it might not be as dire as increasingly desperate war supporters maintain.

The least persuasive scenario—but the one most likely to arrest the attention of Americans—is that Iraq will be taken over by international terrorists who would use it as a “safe haven” to “launch attacks on America,” as the president put it in an interview on “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” in January.

Since al-Qaeda already has something of a safe haven in the unruly areas of Pakistan, it is not clear how adding space in Iraq would be of notable help. Moreover, international terrorism is essentially a conspiratorial enterprise carried out by tiny cells of plotters who can operate anywhere. Insofar as the 9/11 planners needed a safe haven, they found it in Hamburg, Germany, while those in London, Indonesia, Morocco, Madrid, and elsewhere were locals whose cells were based in their home countries and whose physical connection to the international jihadist movement was limited at best. Furthermore, in the wake of a U.S. exit, Iraqis are unlikely to tolerate the continued presence of foreign fighters (who make up only a very small portion of the insurgency) because these adventurers have mostly spent their time killing Iraqis and because, for better or worse, their key mission will have been accomplished.

More plausibly, America’s exit from Iraq will exhilarate international terrorists because victory over the U.S. will seem even greater to them than victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden’s theory that Americans can be defeated, or at least productively inconvenienced, by inflicting comparatively small but continuously draining casualties on them will achieve apparent confirmation.

But that one is already lost: almost any exit from Iraq will have this effect. People like bin Laden believe that America in-vaded Iraq as part of its plan to control the Middle East’s oil and dominate the world —a perspective that polls suggest is enormously popular in Muslim countries as well as in such non-Muslim ones as Germany and France. The U.S. does not intend to do that—at least not in the direct sense bin Laden and others allege —nor does it seek to destroy Islam, as many others around the world bitterly assert. Such people will see almost any kind of American withdrawal as a victory for the terrorist insurgents, to whom they will give primary credit for forcing America to leave without accomplishing what they mistakenly take to be its key objectives.

Moreover, jihadists may be inclined to draw a special lesson by comparing the results of 9/11 with those of the Iraq War: it is much more productive to hit the “far enemy” when it comes near than to hit it in its homeland. That is, if their goal is to get the U.S. out of the Middle East, it is better for jihadists to cause it damage in places where its interests are limited rather than in places where its interests are vital. Thus, even if the result of the Iraq War exhilarates some terrorists, it would not necessarily whet their appetites for another 9/11.

After the American venture in Iraq is over, freelancing jihadists who trained there may seek to continue their operations elsewhere, like the jihadists who fought alongside the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. If those experiences are any indication, however, the impact of these adventurers may not prove terribly significant. Following the example of their predecessors in Algeria, Chechnya, and Bosnia, they will most likely end up offering marginal reinforcement to rebel forces in places like Kashmir, Somalia, and Afghanistan. They might also try making trouble in their home countries, like Saudi Arabia, if they can manage to get back.

Whatever happens with the freelancers, the civil war in Iraq may become worse after the United States withdraws. But the ranks of the anti-American insurgency will be significantly reduced because those committed to forcing out the occupiers will presumably stop engaging in violence when their main target leaves the scene. As in Afghanistan after the Soviets left, a warlord-dominated and partially criminalized civil conflict could persist, though it will more likely resemble the somewhat less horrible, if exceedingly complicated, factionalized civil war in Lebanon.

In time, the Iraqis, like the Lebanese before them, will have to sort this out—perhaps with the aid of some of their neighbors. The U.S. invasion almost instantly made Iraq a failed state, and only the exhausted locals can patch it back together, as many civil wars in Africa and Asia have demonstrated over the last decade. An eventual agreement among combatants is possible in all this, as is a military coup and the return of strong-man rule—particularly if the elected government is seen as incompetent. The notion, however, that a resentful new government in Iraq will cut off oil production to spite the U.S. makes little sense, as that would further impoverish the country and destabilize the regime.

Those who favor continued U.S participation in Iraq’s civil war need to explain how the American presence there—irritating to most Iraqis, polls suggest—will significantly speed the reconciliation process. They also need to indicate how many American lives they are willing to sacrifice for this end, assuming that it is even possible.

The Iraq Study Group and many Democrats advocate enlisting the support of Iraq’s neighboring states to settle the civil war. This approach holds promise because Iraq’s neighbors have good reason to be concerned. Although they may support different factions in Iraq’s civil conflict, a stable, productive, diverse, and peaceful Iraq would likely serve their best interests. They certainly don’t need floods of Iraqi refugees, and if the civil war can’t be stopped, they would want to do all they could to contain it, perhaps applying the Europeans’ approach to the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Their hearts—or at least their interests—are in the right place.

There is a dilemma, however: almost all of Iraq’s neighbors are on the hit list of the neoconservatives who influence the Bush administration so heavily. In the run-up to the Iraq War, neoconservative guru Norman Podhoretz strongly advocated expanding Bush’s axis of evil. “At a minimum,” he suggested, the list should extend beyond Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to include “Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends’ of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority …” More realistic (and prescient) than other neocons about democracy, he noted that “the alternative to these regimes could easily turn out to be worse, even (or especially) if it comes into power through democratic elections.” Accordingly, he emphasized, it will be necessary for the United States “to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties.”

As Baghdad was falling in 2003, neocon Richard Perle triumphally issued a similar litany of targets in a speech at the U.S. Army War College, adding for good measure—and possibly in jest—France and the State Department. In their book, The War Over Iraq, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol stress that the war they so passionately advocated was over a lot more than just Iraq: “The mission begins in Baghdad, but does not end there. … War in Iraq represents but the first installment.” And in a speech in late 2006, Charles Krauthammer continued to champion what he calls “the only plausible answer,” an ambitious undertaking that involves “changing the culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed …” Any other policy, he divined, “would ultimately bring ruin not only on the U.S. but on the very idea of freedom.”

These men do not, of course, directly run the White House. But given how much they and other neoconservatives have influenced the administration’s intellectual development and military decision-making, the designated target countries would be foolish in the extreme not to take such threats very seriously. As long as the United States and its seemingly permanent bases linger, most of Iraq’s neighbors have good reason to feel profoundly uneasy. And for their own purposes, they have a strong incentive to assure that the American experience there is as miserable as possible.

Accordingly, in an important sense the ongoing presence of the United States makes productive co-operation by most of Iraq’s neighbors problematic. But America’s withdrawal would instantly shift the issue, supplying Iraq’s neighbors with a comparatively unqualified interest in ending the civil war and stabilizing the country. The danger is that their efforts could mostly be devoted to supporting one side or the other in the civil war, which happened with the not-so-neighborly nearby interveners in Lebanon and Congo’s civil wars. But pressure from the international community and a more modest, somewhat distant America, as well as the sensible appeal of the imperative to bring the Iraq disaster under control, may well be able to prevent that.

The sorting-out process may be facilitated if, as seems likely, the U.S. reacts to its Middle East misadventure by embracing an Iraq Syndrome reminiscent of the Vietnam Syndrome that restrained America from meddling further in Africa and Southeast Asia, while the Soviet Union foolishly gathered up a set of expensive dependencies there (and in Afghanistan) that hastened the demise of the Cold War.

The American public would probably be quite capable of shrugging off defeat and failure, as it proved in Vietnam as well as in the lesser debacles of Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. And since American casualties are what matter in the U.S., little attention would likely be paid if a civil-war bloodbath developed in Iraq. Accordingly, there would likely be few, if any, calls to send troops, contrary to the current cry of war supporters that if things fall apart we would just have to go in again. Since Iraqi citizens do not vote in American elections, the U.S. government would likely reduce financial support for the Iraqi government after American troops leave.

This process might impel a suitably mellowed country to abandon some of its self-infatuated rhetoric. The United States has become a “superpower” unable to make electricity to work in Baghdad and an “indispensable nation” incapable of garnering international co-operation when it really needs it, and it may come to re-examine its role in the world.

Perhaps America will even embrace the wisdom propounded by George W. Bush in the presidential debates of 2000, before the neocons moved in:

If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. . . . I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you. I think we can help. . . . I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.

It would be a new, and considerably improved, Bush Doctrine.

John Mueller is professor of political science at Ohio State University. His most recent book is Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

The 'Bush Doctrine' and Weapons in Space

February 12, 2007

by Rodrigue Tremblay

"The dangerous patriot: "The one who drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism . . . which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory."

James A. Donovan, Colonel, US Marine Corps

"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control."

Lord Acton (1834-1902)

"If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject... "

William Graham Sumner

On September 20, 2002, George W. Bush, in conformity with the path that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Rice and Co. had traced for him, adopted a hegemonic foreign policy and issued the famous hubristic "Bush Doctrine". His then Security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and her assistant, Philip D. Zelikow, drafted much of the 2002 report titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States”, which has come to be known as the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive wars and of American assertive military hegemony around the world.

Eight months before, in his January 29, 2002 first State of the Union Address, Bush, inspired by his neocon and theologian speech writers, had singled out three disparate countries as belonging to an "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea), even though two of these countries had been at war at each other for years (Iraq and Iran) and the third (North Korea) had no visible political ties to the first two. Bush also expressed his intention that the United States control both the Earth and Outer Space, no matter what the other 191 countries of the world think and no matter what international law and international treaties call for.

On Earth, the neocon Bush-Cheney administration's goal was to invest so much in military gear, and to take military actions if necessary, that no other country would ever challenge its status as the world's sole military superpower.

The intention was to establish a military New American Empire for the 21st Century, along the lines of the British Empire in the 19th Century.

In Space, the administration asserted the "far out" claim that the United States has the right to control Outer Space and to deny access to space to any country not in sync with U.S. interests. Bush's then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the so-called report on "Counterspace Operations Doctrine" (2004), even stated that the U.S. should not refrain from using such tactics as "cover, concealment, and deception" and "satellite jamming" to control Outer Space. —The chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, General Peter Pace, said that (Donald) Rumsfeld must truly be 'inspired by God!' This hairy policy was revisited and signed into law by President George W. Bush, on October 18, 2006, thus initiating a new and dangerous Space arms race.

The U.S. already has a 'Air Force Space Command', which was created on September 1, 1982, by the Reagan administration. But to indicate that nothing is off-limits, the U.S. Air Force also announced, on November 2, 2006, that it was setting up what could become a new four-star command to fight in cyberspace, where officials say the United States has already come under attack from China, among others. In the words of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, "The aim is to develop a major command that stands alongside Air Force Space Command and Air Combat Command as the provider of forces that the President, combatant commanders and the American people can rely on for preserving the freedom of access and commerce, in air, space and now cyberspace."

However, the goal of preserving free access to Space and cyberspace is paramount. Worldwide, most people believe that Space should not be militarized. The underlying principle here is that Space, Outer Space and celestial resources, such as the Moon or the planets, are the common heritage of humanity as a whole and should not be appropriated by any one country or any nation in particular, through military means or otherwise. Besides, any attempt by one nation to militarize Space, and even to take control of cyberspace, would be in violation of the spirit of the 1967 “Outer Space Treaty” (OST). This fundamental treaty has been signed by 125 countries and ratified by 98, and it solemnly bars participating nations from placing nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in orbit of Earth, installing them on the Moon or any other celestial body, or to otherwise station them in Outer Space.

That is why the world entered into a new era when China, on January 11 (2007), launched a missile strike against one of its old orbiting weather satellites, 800 kilometers above Earth. The Chinese government also announced that the deployment of its anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon was a move to demonstrate the danger of having weapons in Space, and that its objective was to encourage the Bush-Cheney administration to enter into talks aiming at abolishing weapons in Space. Unfortunately, the current administreation had already announced that it opposes the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that would seek to prohibit or limit access to, or use of, Space. —It acts like it would welcome a new arms race in Space and possibly would like to start a new 'Cold War' with China and Russia.

The issue of weapons in Space is not new. In 1981, the old Soviet Union developed an ASAT system consisting of a bomb-carrying satellite, which was positioned next to a target satellite to be destroyed. During the same period, the United States developed an ASAT system, whereby an F-15 fighter would carry a two-stage missile to a high altitude and let the missile tracking system guide it to a target missile set to be destroyed. Since Congress voted a moratorium on the development of ASAT systems, in 1985, the United States has not tested any new ASAT system.

However, the Chinese demonstration and the Bush-Cheney avowed policy of taking military control of Space indicate that urgent action is required on this issue, if Space is to be kept demilitarized. A U.N. agency tailored along the International Atomic Energy Agency should have the responsibility to inspect any rocket launch to make sure that it does not carry armaments into Space. That may be the only way to make sure that no national government place armaments into Space.

Therefore, it would seem appropriate that the United Nations, under its new leadership, convene an international conference and adopt necessary measures to reinforce the Outer Space Treaty and make sure that no single nation-state can dominate Space or could ever claim that Space belongs to it.

Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com

Also visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.

Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com

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Posted, February 12, 2007, at 5:30 am

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The writing's on the wall for Iran

The Bush administration rejected any reports that it planned to attack Saddam Hussein as "urban legends". The same language is now being used over the possibility of US action against Iran. But when the US is joined by the Saudis and the Israelis and their powerful supporters in Washington, it spells danger - as the Soviets learned in Afghanistan and the Iranians in their war with Iraq.

Jan 31, 2007

By Leon Hadar

Rejecting the notion that the United States was planning to attack Iran and Syria, White House spokesman Tony Snow called it a myth or an "urban legend".

"I want to address [a] kind of a rumor, an urban legend that's going around," Snow told reporters at a White House briefing two days after President George W Bush vowed to go after Iranian terrorist networks involved in Iraq violence. "What the president talked about in his speech on Iraq strategy is defending American forces within Iraq," Snow insisted.

In his January 11 televised speech on US policy in Iraq, Bush had accused Tehran and Damascus of fueling the insurgency in Iraq and expressed disagreement with proposals, including from the Iraq Study Group (ISG), to negotiate with both countries as part of an effort to reach peace and stability in Iraq. He said: "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq." Bush also announced that he would dispatch another aircraft-carrier battle group and deploy Patriot anti-missile batteries in the Persian Gulf.

Generally speaking, an urban legend is a widely circulated, folklorish story - often based on exaggerated or distorted fact - that is believed to be true by many who repeat it.

So let's see. Many reports circulated in Washington and elsewhere in 2002 and early 2003 that, notwithstanding Bush's stated commitment to deal with Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) through diplomatic means, the White House was already considering plans to oust Saddam Hussein militarily. It seems that Bush et al would characterize such "pre-invasion preparation" speculation as urban legend. After all, Bush and his advisers denied the reports - much in the same way they are challenging the current reports on the possibility of US preparations to attack Iran.

I suppose that when it comes to Washington, something that is urban legend-esque ceases to be a legend only after we read one of Bob Woodward's post mortems in which we end up discovering that those who had been accused of "spreading rumors" were actually telling the truth. We might then learn that the press secretary who had dismissed these facts as nothing more than "rumors" was probably just out of the loop. ("Out of the loop" is what "insiders" call a government official who doesn't have access to information about what the Decider and his Vice are really planning.)

As a journalist who covered Washington in the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I recall the many "urban legends" that were circulating at that time. These included rumors about how Vice President Dick Cheney and then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld were pushing for a war with Iraq; about how their aides were pressuring the intelligence agencies to come up with "estimates" to help exaggerate the Iraqi WMD threat and Baghdad's alleged ties to al-Qaeda; about how the Americans and the British were secretly drawing up a strategy for a military confrontation with Iraq while pledging to continue to pursue diplomacy; and about how some of the leading Iraqi exiles lobbying for the "liberation" of Iraq, such as Ahmad Chalabi, were untrustworthy characters.

I read some of these reports in the press; others reached me through the grapevine. They were all immediately denied by the White House press officer. Yet after the war had been raging, most of these "rumors" proved to be based on fact. In a way, any political analyst familiar with the way Washington works and the way decisions are made there - who could read between the lines of media reports and official statements, and who would deconstruct the modus operandi and body language of Bush and his aides - had no choice but to conclude that war with Iraq was inevitable. In that case, the conventional wisdom got it right.

So it's not surprising that journalists and pundits who continue to follow their professional instincts are experiencing a certain sense of deja vu as they begin to wonder these days whether Bush and his aides are planning to expand the current war in Iraq to Iran (and Syria). The initial source of this "urban legend" was Bush's infamous "axis of evil" speech, in which he lumped Iran together with Iraq and North Korea as deserving US punishment.

The speech was followed by various pledges, including public statements, press leaks and even the commitment of US financial resources to "export" democracy to Iran. And in the aftermath of ousting Saddam from power in Baghdad, there were even a few hints here and there about "regime change" in Tehran. Interestingly, the Bush administration denied press reports about Iranian attempts to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Washington over Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine.

Finally, at the center of the US anti-Iran campaign was the effort to end Iranian plans to develop nuclear weapons - allegations based on questionable intelligence estimates from Washington and Jerusalem - either through diplomatic means or, the efforts implied, otherwise.

For a while, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that against the backdrop of the ensuing mess in Iraq, the neo-conservatives were losing influence, the "realists" were gaining power, and that the Bush administration was going to move toward some sort of diplomatic "engagement" with the Iranians along the lines proposed by the ISG, other respected foreign-policy experts and leading Democrats.

But after Bush and Cheney politely rejected the ISG recommendations, and after signs that Bush and Cheney were getting ready to "do something" about Iran, the conventional wisdom concluded that the White House had now embraced further military escalation in the Persian Gulf.

The Israelis, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have been playing into the hands of US warriors by suggesting that an Iranian nuclear bomb would pose an "existential" threat akin to the European Holocaust and that if US diplomatic and/or military power failed, Israel would have no choice but to "take care of the problem". The warnings were buttressed through a series of public statements, including a visit by Olmert to Washington, and leaks to the press, including a recent British newspaper report that Israel could use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's nuclear military sites.

At the same time, the Saudis have been warning that a nuclear Iran would help transform Tehran into a hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf and provide it with an opportunity to lead an alliance of Shi'ite Mideast factions, from Iran to Israel/Palestine through Lebanon, in a way that would threaten Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab-Sunni regimes.

The sense of alarm perpetuated by the Saudis was reinforced through press leaks suggesting that the members of the hawkish wing of the Saudi royal family, led by former ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan, were gaining strength, and that the Israelis and the Saudis, backed by Washington, have been conducting secret talks to coordinate the anti-Iran strategy.

Indeed, according to Israeli press reports, Olmert and Prince Sultan have met to discuss Iran and related issues. The meeting and other signs of coordination on Iran among Washington, Jerusalem and Riyadh have raised the possibility that the Bush administration is trying to draw the outlines of a new strategic consensus involving it, Israel and the pro-US Arab-Sunni regimes (Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states, and Egypt and Jordan).

These reports recalled a similar "strategic consensus" that evolved in the 1980s during the Ronald Reagan administration, when the Americans, Israelis and Saudis - and, yes, then-US partner, Saddam's Iraq - were cooperating in dealing with both the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and with the challenge from revolutionary Iran.

And anyone who knows how to assess the balance of power in Washington will tell you that when the Americans are joined by the Saudis and the Israelis and their powerful supporters in Washington in a coordinated effort to harm you, run fast for cover. Both the Soviets fighting against Osama bin Laden and his mujahideen allies (assisted by Washington) in Afghanistan and the Iranians attacked by Saddam's Iraqi military (assisted by Washington) learned that lesson in the 1980s.

In addition to the pressure exerted by the Saudis and Israelis on Washington, Bush in his January 11 speech blamed the Iranians for targeting US troops in Iraq and threatened to use US military power to disrupt such actions. The next day Bush announced that he was sending an aircraft carrier to visit Iran's neighborhood, and the military ordered US troops to raid an Iranian consulate in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil. Such actions could lead even a low-level intelligence analyst to see "signals" coming out of the White House aimed at Iran.

Moreover, the decision by the Bush administration to appoint Admiral William Fallon to oversee US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has raised many red flags among observers in Washington. Why choose a navy admiral to lead two ground wars in the Middle East and South Asia, unless you regard that as a preparatory step for a strike on Iran's nuclear military sites? If that happened, Iran would retaliate by attacking oil platforms and tankers, closing the Strait of Hormuz, and perhaps hitting oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia; the US Navy would probably play a key role in protecting the oil flowing from the Persian Gulf.

Many members of Congress have also been reading the signals, and they are worried that the Bush administration may be making the conditions for another war in the Middle East. During testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted that the administration had no plans to cross Iraq's borders into Iran to attack supporters of the Iraqi insurgency and militias.

But Republican Senator Chuck Hagel compared Bush's strategy to the late president Richard Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam War. "You cannot sit here today, not because you are dishonest or don't understand - once you get to hot pursuit, no one can say we won't engage across border," he said. "Some of us remember 1970 and Cambodia, and our government lied to us and said we didn't cross the border. When you set in motion the kind of policy the president is talking about here, it is very, very dangerous."

Other Democratic and Republican lawmakers expressed similar concerns that the rising tensions with Iran could ignite a full-blown war and demanded that the White House consult Congress before going to war with Iran. But Bush-Cheney and their neo-con advisers may have found a way to overcome the threat of congressional and Democratic opposition, and it has to do with the potential Israeli role in a crisis with Iran.

If Israel decides to attack Iran's nuclear sites, many of the same lawmakers would probably applaud the move, a reflection of their pro-Israeli disposition. After all, can anyone imagine Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton bashing the Israelis on the eve of the primaries or the general election?

But any retaliation from an Israeli attack on Iran would probably necessitate a US response, which Congress would have no choice but to support. It is quite likely that if Iran also decided to unleash its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon and encouraged them to attack Israel, the Israelis would respond by invading Syria and forcing out Bashar al-Assad - another "regime change" that might benefit the interests of US allies in Lebanon.

And of course, the Bush administration would then dismiss the notion that the strike by a client state received a green (or at least a yellow) light from the White House as another "urban legend". (We'd probably have to wait for Woodward's next volume to learn that while US lawmakers were whining, the green light was flashing as the Americans, Israelis and Saudis were readying for a war with Iran.)

But it's also possible that such a book would not conclude with a neo-conservative-scripted happy ending in which the Bush administration celebrates the triumph of Pax Americana. Bush, Cheney and their neo-conservative aides have already tried to use Israel's strategic services, when they gave Olmert a green light to attack Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon last summer, hoping that devastating the partner of Iran and Syria would serve as a blow to Tehran.

But the best-laid plans of mice and neo-cons often go awry. Hezbollah resisted the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and emerged with a political victory in the aftermath of war, providing Iran and Syria with a win. Similarly, an Israeli strike against Iran could fail and/or result in thousands of civilian casualties. The Shi'ite-led government in Iraq could be forced to ally with the Iranians and demand the withdrawal of US troops from the country, while anti-US sentiments in the Middle East and the Muslim world would skyrocket.

Other possible consequences could include a dramatic increase in energy prices, especially if Venezuela decided to join an oil embargo; demonstrations by outraged citizens in major European (not to mention US) cities; and most important, growing pressure from the European Union, Russia and China on Washington to convene an international conference on the Middle East.

While the United States and Israel could emerge victorious from the military campaign (not unlike the British, French and Israelis after the 1956 Suez Campaign against Egypt), they could also find themselves totally isolated in the international community, facing enormous diplomatic and economic pressure to reverse their policies. That is what happens when history transforms an urban legend into a tragedy.

Leon Hadar, a Washington-based journalist and contributor to Right Web (rightweb.irc-online.org), is author most recently of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (2006). He blogs at globalparadigms.blogspot.com.

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)

The GOP in a Quagmire

By Robert D. Novak

Thursday, January 18, 2007; A23

The sense of impending political doom that clutches Republican hearts one week after President Bush presented his new strategy on Iraq to the nation is stoked by the alarming intelligence brought back from Baghdad by Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and passed around Capitol Hill.

In a pre-Christmas visit to Iraq, Coleman and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida met with Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government's national security adviser. Coleman described their astounding encounter in a Dec. 19 blog entry: Dr. Rubaie "maintains that the major challenge facing Iraq is not a sectarian conflict, but rather al-Qaeda and disgruntled Baathists seeking to regain power. Both Senator Nelson and I react with incredulity to that assessment. Rubaie cautions against more troops in Baghdad."

Rubaie denied the overriding reality of sectarian violence in Baghdad because his government is tied to the Shiite belligerents in that conflict. While Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pays lip service to Bush's demand that he crack down on Mahdi Army commander Moqtada al-Sadr, U.S. officials recognize that Maliki's political support depends on the Shiite militia leader. Thus, Maliki's government is in denial about sectarian conflict. Maliki did not show up for a news conference in which he was scheduled to comment on Bush's new strategy, and he personally remains silent about the plan at this writing.

This hastens the desire of Republicans, who once cheered the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East, to remove U.S. forces from a politically deteriorating condition as soon as possible. "Iraq is a black hole for the Republican Party," a prominent party strategist told me this week. What makes his comments so important is that he is not a maverick Republican in Congress but one of Bush's principal political advisers.

As they adjust to the 2006 election returns, Republicans recognize that this was no isolated bump in the road. The loss of about 320 state legislative seats across the country to the Democrats classifies last year's election as a midrange electoral disaster.

The internal Republican debate concerns how much Iraq contributed to this outcome. The White House and Republican members of Congress who voted for intervention in Iraq contend that many issues led to their defeat: incompetent management of the Hurricane Katrina crisis, widespread cases of corruption and abandonment of spending restraint. But Republicans at the grass roots tell me that Iraq was the central problem and must be erased as an issue.

Former Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich, a popular and effective Republican who had nothing to do with Iraq policy, believes his defeat was wholly caused by the war. Republicans in a variety of states -- such as Maryland, New Hampshire, Oregon and Missouri -- blame defeats, down to the local level, on Iraq.

One nationally prominent Republican pollster reported confidentially on Capitol Hill after the president's speech that if at the end of the year U.S. troops are still in Iraq and U.S. blood is still being spilled there, the GOP disaster in 2008 will eclipse 2006. Thus, many Republican members of Congress have tied their hopes to Bush's pledge that Iraqi forces will take over local security by September.

But Republican opposition has intensified rather than diminished since the president's speech. What was whispered privately is now declared publicly. At last week's hearing, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's second-ranking Republican -- Chuck Hagel -- called Bush's new strategy "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

The conservative elite of the House of Representatives, members who had 100 percent positive voting records as measured by the American Conservative Union, gathered Wednesday morning for an ACU breakfast on Capitol Hill. They still talked about "winning" in Iraq and deplored the consequences of "surrendering."

But they do not know how that victory can be achieved if the Iraqi government is tied to the Shiite militias, a political dilemma in Iraq that no increase in U.S. troops can solve. Republicans can only hope that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her sidekick, Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, overplay their hands by cutting off funds to U.S. troops in the field. It is a slim hope for now.

2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.