It's About Freaking Time

After dicking around for four-plus years wallowing in the fantasy that the Iranian mullahgarchy could be sweet-talked and/or bribed out of its head-long drive for nuclear weapons, with predictably meager results, it appears that the Administration's adults have finally regained the President's ear:

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in eighteen months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush Administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo." ...

Iran is one of the reasons Bush is in "deep trouble" over Iraq. I've argued from the beginning that Iraq could not ultimately be stabilized until Iran was summarily dealt with, in the same way that Vietnam was unwinnable because we never took away the VC's privileged sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, and the Korean War wasn't won because we didn't attack Red China directly.

You don't win wars when you don't do everything possible to attain victory. Bush has been fighting the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism on the cheap by limiting operations to Afghanistan and Iraq. It hasn't worked. Instead we've gotten precisely the sort of open-ended conflict that Americans are not culturally or tempermentally suited to wage. The other side has gotten the domestic political upper hand through sheer bellicose attrition, and now we're in the process of defeating ourselves.

After all of the above, it finally dawns on Dubya that his presidency's running out, and who is likely to be his successor. And NOW he's getting serious (perhaps) about winning the war. Why should it have taken Dick Cheney to reaquaint him with the facts of life in the age of terror?

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week.

"The source". If there's one thing in this story on which I agree with the Admiral, it's the thin reed on which the Guardian is leaning for it. That this source thinks the President getting serious about confronting the mullahs is a "cause for concern" ought to indicate that s/he is probably not an Administration source; which, of course, brings his/her credibility into greater question.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

Ah, the "career diplomat". That creature which will always see diplomacy as the preferred alternative to military action out of professional self-interest, beyond reason, indifferent to results, into the very mouth of hell itself. And, of course, dragging the country down into the flames with them.

Can't you picture this meeting? Burns tells the President that, for all intents and purposes, his foolish, futile diplomatic strategy will go on indefinitely until the Iranians are sufficiently stocked with nukes and ICBMs to begin annihilating Israel and imposing nuclear blackmail on Europe and ourselves to cover their conquest of the Middle East - for starters. Or perhaps just EMPing us and getting it over with. Cheney blows his stack, tells Bush the whole strategy is ridiculous, and asks him if he really wants a nuclear war that he could have pre-empted to be part of his legacy.

A very sage question, that. Perhaps it reminded Dubya of why he tapped Big Time to be his veep in the first place. And what a grievous mistake it was to stop listening to him.

As well as how horrific an error it would be to follow Allahpundit's advice and let Hillary handle it. Because we know how she'll handle it: the same way her hubby "handled" national security threats - by appeasing them.

Now to be fair, AP does include Fred Thompson in that admonition, and I'm confident that he could have full, open hostilities with Iran handed off to him and handle them just fine. I'm not confident, however, that he or any other GOP successor to Bush would see the wisdom, and muster the courage, to make the case for them himself. Why?

1) Congress will still be in Donk hands, probably by much bigger margins, and would never, EVER give another Republican president a free military hand, no matter what the circumstances.

2) Nobody ever seeks the White House in order to be a "war president". Hell, even Dwight Eisenhower ran in 1952 on the central promise of "ending the war" in Korea.

What about military action short of a full-scale, Iraq-like invasion? Isn't that more in the grey area that doesn't necessarily require outright congressional authorization? It was for Bill Clinton in all his overseas military adventures, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo. But, again, he wasn't a Republican president. And more to the point, pinprick surgical strikes or even a sustained bombing campaign wouldn't topple the mullahgarchy, which is the self-evident strategic objective of any military campaign against Iran.

As you've probably deduced by now, the factors weighing against a President Thompson doing President Bush's heavy war lifting for him are the same ones making Bush doing it himself also unlikely. Also the same ones making a President Thompson unlikely as well, unless the Iranians escalate their hostilities against us to a level that burns through all the despicable, brain-dead "anti-war" noise the far Left is screeching out these days.

What that level is, I can't begin to guess. I would think that with Iran waging a proxy war against us in both Iraq and Afghanistan an established fact, seizing military personnel of our principle ally, and hosting al Qaeda bases and leadership on its own soil, some form of military response would be so obvious and self-evident as not to even need to be argued for. At the very least, it would have in the not-very-distant past.

I guess the mullahs are special, or something. Even erstwhile conservative voices fear crossing them. The aforementioned Admiral Morrissey goes on for an aggregate ten paragraphs on all the reasons why we should duck the fight we're already in with Tehran, and none of them are the slightest bit compelling:

One major problem is that we have enough on our plate in Iraq, and opening a second hot war will stretch us in a manner unlike anything we have experienced in recent years.

It would not be a "second" hot war. It would be the same "hot war" we're already in, except that we would finally be taking the offensive, in our preferred mode of warfare, and the one at which the mullahs, with their 1960s-vintage conventional forces, couldn't hope to compete.

Some might argue that we could use our navy to attack Iran, and we do have three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf. However, the Iranian response would likely come on the ground, against our troops in Iraq, and perhaps against the British in the south. We have our hands full in trying to secure Iraq against internal forces, let alone a full-blown invasion from Iran.

Even better. Use air strikes to lure Iranian regular forces into Iraq's flat, open desert terrain and turn the eastern strip of the country into another merry kill-zone. With those forces depleted and destroyed, a defense in depth is correspondingly debilitated, and perhaps a full scale US invasion is rendered unnecessary by the popular uprising so many center-righters keep fantasizing about.

Besides, our raison d'etre in Iraq is to stop a wider war from exploding in the Middle East. Not only would an attack prompt exactly what we hope to avoid, but it would likely radicalize the Iraqi Shi'ites, who would not appreciate the US using Iraq as a military base against their natural allies in Iran. We'd have to pull back to the west in Iraq, and we could lose the use of Iraqi ports on the Gulf as a result.

Wrong. Our raison d'etre in Iraq is to stop a wider war from exploding in the Middle East on the enemy's terms. This reflects the depressing fact that ever since President Bush landed on that aircraft carrier four years and two months ago, we've been playing defense. In order to win this war it will have to widen - but on OUR terms, and on OUR initiative.

As to the Iraqi Shi'ites, they'll recognize the strong horse in this equation, same as any other Muslims. If Mr. Morrissey still has the vapors, make sure to get Ayahtollah Sistani on board. If his followers are truly from the Najaf branch of Shia Islam rather than the radical Iranian strain, that should be sufficient.

Ed's crack about pulling back to the west in the midst of an operation that would be going in the opposite direction by definition is, frankly, too silly to merit engaging.

An attack on Iran would radicalize the Iranians all over again. Right now they feel an increasing disconnect between themselves and their largely inept leadership. That disconnect will dissipate in an instant if Iran gets attacked by a foreign power. All of our efforts to promote a democratic movement in Iran, which have been too limited by half, will get wasted in an attack. Creating seventy million radicals should be something to avoid, not something to actively pursue.

That's craven excuse-making. If there's any genuine "disconnect" between the Iranian population and its theocratic overlords, logic suggests, if not demands, that they would welcome American forces as liberators. True, that logic was less than fully borne out in Iraq, but don't forget how long Iran has been subverting our efforts there. At any rate, I hardly think that liberating another seventy million people would turn them against us, especially as I rather doubt that we would have to follow it up with anything like the level of "nation-building" that we have next door - again, due in large part to Iranian meddling and the uniquely tripartite nature of Iraq. The Iranians would be a lot more capable of picking up their own pieces.

The fact is that an enslaved people liberating themselves from a crushing dictatorship is, historically speaking, exceedingly rare. That liberation almost always has to come from the outside. Where an existing "democracy movement" is key is after the liberation takes place, NOT before.

We need to have Iraq stabilized and our forces greatly reduced before we could tackle the much larger nation of Iran. We'd have to have exhausted our diplomatic and economic options.

We can't stabilize Iraq unless Iran is defeated. And Iran cannot be defeated with "diplomatic and economic options." Remember the mullah's quest for nukes? The survival of the Islamic regime is its principal raison d'etre. If we wait until "diplomatic and economic options" have been "exhausted," it'll be too late to prevent a nuclear mullahgarchy (if, indeed, it isn't already), and the escalation of the already-existing war on their terms.

We've waited far too long to invade already. That's why we're in this predicament.

The best way to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the mullahs is to work to overthrow them. That won't happen through an invasion, as satisfying as military action might be to some.

Speaking as one of that "some," I don't find the prospect of invading Iran "satisfying". I don't find our deployments in Afghanistan or Iraq "satisfying" either. Would that we didn't have to be in these far-flung pieces of the globe. Would that there was no war at all. Would that we could all live in the old Coca-Cola commercial, beat our spears into golf clubs, and spent the rest of our lives watching Britney Spears and Paris Hilton try to out-whore each other.

But that's not the reality of the world we live in. The reality is that we are in a war to the finish with the aspiring Global Islamic Caliphate, Iran is the hub of that entity, and they will plunge the world into nuclear holocaust if we don't remove them while we still can. And that can only happen through an American-led invasion.

I've said it before; it's beyond depressing that after all our sacrifices of the past six years, I have to say it again.

Correction - what's beyond depressing is that the Guardian story is probably bogus. Which means that waiting for the Iranian hammerblow to fall - probably in the form of a WMD terrorist attack against one of our cities - and getting stuck with the "wider war" the Admiral thinks we can avoid by doing nothing at far greater cost in blood and treasure is inevitable.

I'd say that I have an inkling of what Winston Churchill felt like in the late 1930s, except that (1) I'm nowhere near his league in anything, and (2) he argued at one time for "encouraging uprisings" in Nazi-occupied France and southern Europe in lieu of opening a second front against Germany.

I guess he was afraid of "provoking a wider war."