Robert Farley says it isn’t:
In other words, war is not inevitable. Key people can still say no, with U.S. President Barack Obama being the most important among them. For now, the Obama administration seems to believe that pro-war rhetoric is manageable, and that it can tack between the demands of the Israeli government, the sanctions coalition and the presidential candidates of the Republican Party. This process involves pushing back against the idea that an immediate attack is necessary, while reaffirming the general idea that Iran represents a major threat to the United States.
However, it could become more difficult to avoid war in the future:
As a political strategy, this may be viable. It runs the risk, however, of creating a rhetorical trap for the Obama administration. At some point, it may be hard for Obama to step down from the idea that an Iranian nuclear weapon is unacceptable and worth a war to prevent. In that case, saying no may become too politically difficult for the president. The task for hawks, whether in the United States or Israel, will be to draw this box as tightly and narrowly as possible. It behooves the president, and opponents of conflict with Iran, to remember that nothing about war removes the threat of uncertainty. Rather, most of the problems that exist before a strike against Iran will remain afterward, just in a much less predictable environment [bold mine-DL].
This appears to be a case where military action has little or no prospect of success while also being unnecessary and therefore likely to make the situation worse than it is now. If an Iranian war can’t eliminate the perceived threat (and it can’t), there is no reason to expose Israel or the U.S. to the risks it would involve.
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Rod compares Santorum to Savonarola, which is frankly unfair to Savonarola. Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar preaching against church abuses and immorality in the context of a Florentine republic recently freed from the tyranny of the Medicis. His enemies resented him for a number of things, not least of which was his opposition to the Medicis. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s brief sketch of Savonarola’s career in his history of the Reformation sums up the views of some of his contemporaries about him:
Machiavelli, who knew him well, pointed out that he was an ‘unarmed prophet’, and his last words had the serene dignity of a martyr. He left many admirers: throughout Europe, pious humanists valued the deep spirituality of his writings and overlooked the nightmare years of his republic–far away in the kingdom of that would-be Henry VIII, Savonarola’s meditations continued to be much read, and two of his meditations were incorporated in an officially approved English primer in 1534. Ignatius Loyola felt constrained to ban members of the Society of Jesus from reading his writings, despite seeing a lot of good in them, simply because his fate still stimulated unseemly disagreement between his supporters and his detractors. (p.95)
Dominicans have advocated his canonization, and Erasmus reportedly cited Savonarola’s example as a major reason why he remained in the Catholic Church rather than going over to one of the Reformation churches. Savonarola is probably one of the more misunderstood figures from early modern history.
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Michael picked up on this report on Santorum’s early political career (the article’s title is at the top of this post):
They [the authors of the story] found a December 1995 interview with Philadelphia Magazine where Santorum admitted he had been basically pro-choice until he got into politics.
Elsewhere in the original 1995 article, it describes Santorum’s evolving politics:
He has forgone a past that was unexaminedly moderate for a platform that is unexaminedly conservative, including reversing, rather quietly, his pro-choice stance on abortion.
Another anecdote about Santorum’s earlier involvement in Republican politics confirms this picture:
It was the dawn of the 1980s, and the Reagan Revolution was stirring. But Santorum was not yet politically impassioned, and what political orientation he did have was quite moderate. “There was a Youth for Reagan group on campus, but Rick shunned them,” remembers a friend who was active with him in the Pennsylvania College Republican organization. “He always described them as right-wing fringe. But I don’t think he gave it much thought. Through three years in the College Republicans with Rick, I never heard him actually discuss issues.”
It makes it a little easier to understand why Santorum wouldn’t have had too much difficulty endorsing Arlen Specter’s presidential bid in the same year.
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Rod finds the controversy over a Brooklyn co-op’s pending BDS vote absurd, and it is. The part of the story that sums up how ineffective the BDS movement came towards the end:
“It’s kind of silly,” he said afterward. “We expect an Israeli company that makes flat bread to influence their government’s policies?”
More to the point, the organizers intend to boycott firms solely because of where they are based, and not because of any contribution these firms make to the occupation they are protesting. It’s a self-satisfying protest move that isn’t going to change anything, and it is one that is likely to punish Israelis who share the organizers’ political objections to government policies. Michael Desch discussed the futility of the BDS movement for TAC back in 2010. Part of what I said at the time bears repeating:
To the extent that boycotts, divestment and sanctions successfully cut off the people imposing them from the country they are targeting, all that this does is open the field to other investors and competitors. It deprives the boycott and divestment participants of whatever influence they might have had, and it will tend to make the target government even less responsive to the demands of the supporters of the boycott. BDS movements might work if the country being targeted were entirely dependent on one or a few other countries, but every remotely modern economy is diversified enough and connected to so many other so others that any company or institution’s decision to divest from a targeted state simply becomes a buying opportunity for its competitors overseas. Even if a large number of American and European firms could be pressured into supporting such a movement, which I very much doubt they could, there would be Indian, Chinese and other firms lining up to take advantage of Western withdrawals from the Israeli market. The same would hold true at the state level. As unlikely as U.S. and EU sanctions are, other major and rising powers would readily take advantage of them if they ever happened. If Western governments are going to be able to change Israeli policies in the territories, which seems less likely all the time, it would have to be through using what leverage they have rather than depriving themselves of influence through imposing morally-satisfying, useless sanctions.
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My new column for The Week on U.S.-China relations is online.
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Edward Luce wrote this a few days ago in a column on Iran:
On Wednesday they hold the first presidential debate in three weeks. As in previous ones, commercial breaks are likely to air a spot calling on Mr Obama to remove the MEK – the Mujahideen e-Khalq, the armed Iranian opposition group – from the US list of foreign terrorist organisations.
The MEK is believed to have carried out the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists on Israel’s behalf. Its US front organisations have paid hefty speaking fees to dozens of prominent figures, from Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, to Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Many of the Republican candidates also support lifting the ban.
Michael Auslin overreacts:
Yet even more incomprehensibly, Luce then notes that at the upcoming Republican presidential debate, there likely will be televised commercials calling for the delisting of Iran’s armed opposition group from lists of terrorist groups. Not only does this have nothing to do with the issue at hand, does Mr. Luce think the commercials are being paid for by the GOP? If not, then what’s his beef with the free market — whoever can afford a commerical can buy it. Just ask SEIU, which kept up a constant barrage in favor of Obamacare last year.
As the quote from Luce shows, the MEK issue is perfectly relevant to a discussion of Israel and the Iranian nuclear program because Israel has allegedly used MEK operatives to kill Iranian nuclear scientists. I assume Luce’s point is to draw attention to the fact that there is televised advocacy for de-listing a terrorist group that has recently been implicated in acts of terrorism against Iran, and these attacks form one part of the covert war being waged against Iran because of its nuclear program. Some of Romney’s advisers have publicly supported de-listing the MEK, and Gingrich and Santorum are on record endorsing the assassinations the MEK has reportedly carried out. One problem is that the MEK’s American advocates are often paid for their advocacy, and the other is that three of the Republican presidential candidates apparently have no objection to acts of terrorism so long as they are committed against the right people.
If this were any other terrorist group, it would be unthinkable that its advocates could run television commercials calling for the group’s removal from the FTO list during presidential debates or at any other time, but because it is a group dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian government it is somehow considered acceptable and unobjectionable. I am guessing Luce’s inclusion of the MEK material in his column was intended to highlight how biased in favor of confrontation the Iran debate in the United States is. That Auslin thinks it is plausible or appropriate to compare advertisements on behalf of a recognized foreign terrorist group with legislative advocacy by an American union confirms it.
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The Wall Street Journal is troubled that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not irrational:
In a single sound bite, General Dempsey managed to tell the Iranians they can breathe easier because Israel’s main ally is opposed to an attack on Iran, such attack isn’t likely to work in any case, and the U.S. fears Iran’s retaliation. It’s as if General Dempsey wanted to ratify Iran’s rhetoric that the regime is a fearsome global military threat.
Viewed more soberly, Gen. Dempsey’s statement was an attempt to reduce worsening tensions and to state the merely obvious. A “successful” Israeli strike will delay Iran’s nuclear program by just a few years, and the U.S. has good reason to be concerned about retaliation against our forces in response to an action that would be widely perceived as U.S.-supported and approved, so there is no reason to incur dangerous risks by launching an attack that isn’t going to achieve its objective. Reinforcing the impression that an Israeli attack is inevitable gives Iran the incentive to concede nothing and to assume that the diplomatic track is nothing more than a distraction. If the U.S. were not openly discouraging Israel from attacking, Iranian hard-liners would conclude that nothing can be done to satisfy Israel and the U.S. in any case, so they may as well brace for what is coming.
The WSJ makes the same slippery use of the word rational that I was discussing yesterday:
This would be the same rational Iran that refuses to compromise on its nuclear plans despite increasingly damaging global sanctions, and the same prudent actor that has sent agents around the world to bomb Israeli and Saudi targets, allegedly including in a Washington, D.C. restaurant.
Is it actually irrational for a government that perceives enrichment as a national right to continue to insist on that right despite intense pressure from other governments to give it up? Not really. If the Iranian government perceives the nuclear program as important for Iranian national interests, why is it going to sacrifice those interests to satisfy avowedly hostile states? Let’s understand that Iran is not just being called on to compromise, but to capitulate completely on enrichment. It is possible to be rationally self-interested and nationalistic at the same time. Even rational actors have non-negotiable positions that they are unwilling to abandon.
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Peter Beinart asks:
How can it be, less than a decade after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that the Iran debate is breaking down along largely the same lines, and the people who were manifestly, painfully wrong about that war are driving the debate this time as well?
Beinart must know the answer to his question. The simple answer is that there has been zero accountability for any public figure or politician that agitated in favor of the invasion of Iraq, so all of the unrepentant advocates of the Iraq war know that there is no professional or personal cost attached to advocating for equally or more irresponsible foreign policy decisions. Inside the GOP, the opposite continues to be true. Even after Iraq, refusal to endorse irresponsible and reckless foreign policy views is still the bigger liability among Republicans. Democratic supporters of the Iraq war may have mostly repudiated their support for that war, as Beinart has done, but many of them have failed to learn from the mistake of Iraq. Just look at the list of co-sponsors for S. Res. 380. There are fourteen Democrats in the Senate already on board with the absurd demand to reject containment of Iran as an alternative. Irrationality on Iran is a truly bipartisan affliction.
Advocates of preventive war drive these debates because they are the ones most interested in the issue, their arguments appeal to the desire to take action and “do something,” and they are usually successful in framing the debate in terms of doing what they recommend or doing nothing. Another reason that advocates of preventive war retain the advantage in the debate is that even many skeptics of military action accept that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat that needs to be countered in one way or another. Preventive war supporters offer the illusion of “quick” and “decisive” action, even though a preventive war would be neither quick nor decisive, while those promoting containment and deterrence necessarily cannot pretend that their alternative will “solve” the problem, because their alternative is an attempt to manage Iran’s nuclear program rather than holding out the unreasonable hope of ending it. Arguments for containment have the advantage that they are far more realistic, but that is because they do not minimize the costs and risks involved. Advocates for preventive war minimize costs and risks of their preferred course of action as a matter of course, and they always grossly exaggerate the dangers of inaction, so their horribly skewed presentation of costs and benefits makes an irrational policy appear much more appealing to those who aren’t paying very close attention.
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Victor Davis Hanson dusts off the martyr-state myth:
But if a head of state can feign insanity, or, better yet, convincingly announce a wish for the apocalypse, then he can, in theory, circumvent some traditional rules of deterrence.
One of the many flaws in this argument is that the only people who seem to be convinced that Iranian leaders wish to bring about the apocalypse are the ones most vocally agitating for an attack on Iran. Another small problem with the theory is that the so-called evidence to support the “wish for the apocalypse” interpretation of how Iranian leaders think doesn’t come from the head of state, but instead comes from the comparatively powerless president, and even then the interpretation is misleading. Circumventing rules of deterrence doesn’t really work to the advantage of the Iranian government, since Iran is badly outmatched militarily. It wants to deter the U.S. and Israel (and anyone other threat in the region). Probably the most significant flaw in the myth is that Khamenei issued a fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons. Even if a head of state fits Hanson’s description, there are many other people involved in any modern state apparatus that would never permit a head of state to launch a disastrous first-strike. To believe the martyr-state myth about Iran, one has to believe that the top echelons of the Iranian government are all committed to starting a self-destructive nuclear war. No one actually believes that.
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Paul Pillar observes that the ridiculous anti-containment resolution, S. Res. 380, makes completely unreasonable demands that Iran could never accept:
The new resolution—despite ostensibly aiming for an agreement with Iran—would damage the prospects for negotiating any such agreement. The resolution calls for terms that are understandably non-starters for Iran. In referring to “the full and sustained suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities,” the resolution appears to rule out an Iranian enrichment program under international supervision and inspection, which almost certainly would have to be part of any formula that could gain the agreement of both Iran and the western powers. Incredibly, the resolution also calls for “the verified end of Iran’s ballistic missile programs.” This goes beyond any United Nations resolutions on Iran, which talk about nuclear capability of missiles, and even beyond anything ever demanded of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for which range limits were imposed. It would be understandable if Tehran reads such language as further evidence that the United States is interested not in any negotiated agreement but instead only in regime change.
The goal of any provocative ultimatum is to make such excessive demands that there is no way that the other government could ever agree to all of them without suffering complete humiliation. Undermining a possible negotiated settlement is the purpose of the resolution as far as many of the resolution’s co-sponsors are concerned. By declaring containment to be intolerable as an alternative, the co-sponsors are doing their best to make war with Iran unavoidable.
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