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When There Is Always Another Choice

The Bush administration has demonstrated, in too many ways, that it’s better at starting fights than finishing them. It shouldn’t make that same mistake again. Threats of war will be more convincing if they come slowly and reluctantly, when it has become clear that truly there is no other choice. ~David Ignatius, The Washington Post […]

The Bush administration has demonstrated, in too many ways, that it’s better at starting fights than finishing them. It shouldn’t make that same mistake again. Threats of war will be more convincing if they come slowly and reluctantly, when it has become clear that truly there is no other choice. ~David Ignatius, The Washington Post

Via Leon Hadar

There are two occasions when war becomes truly unavoidable: another state (or possibly, to make the 4GW folks happy, a group of “non-state actors”) attacks your country or when it has mobilised its forces for that purpose. Except on those occasions, every war is something that at least one belligerent government deliberately opts for as being preferable to the alternative loss of face or reputation and concessions that would take place instead. In the case of Iran, conventional pundits, such as Mr. Ignatius, seem to be under the impression that war right now may not be preferable, but unless Iran fundamentally alters its long-standing ambition to acquire nuclear technology (be it for energy and/or military purposes) they are equally committed to the idea that a time will come when war will become “unavoidable.” If enough policymakers follow this same conventional thinking, war certainly will become unavoidable.

Not because Iran will have done anything to the United States, or indeed to any other country. Not because it serves American interests to extend, and thus weaken, our military any more than it already has been, nor because it serves American interests in Iraq or anywhere in the Near East to launch first-strike air raids, possibly with nuclear weapons, against that country. No, it will have become unavoidable because of the presumption that the United States must guarantee a treaty that our own putative allies do not respect that prevents the development of weapons and technology that we happily endorse when they are in the hands of allegedly allied nations. In other words, it will have become unavoidable for no good reason.

Historians of WWI will frequently point to Russian mobilisation as the point of no return in the July crisis of 1914, when what might have stayed a Balkan war became a continental one, especially because it set off German mobilisation, which allegedly was not really able to be halted once it had begun. There is also a certain political momentum that probably must accompany mobilising forces that lends itself to escalation.

Because Russian mobilisation was so slow, it had to occur earlier rather than later, and because their mobilisation plans were ridiculously inflexible they could only mobilise their entire front and not only their southern flank facing Austria, which consequently provoked the Germans into their mobilisation and the start of their war plan. Confronted with a not-so-rapidly mobilising enemy, and squeezed between two powers allied with one another against them, the Germans persisted in the belief that their quick knock-out blow against France would succeed and allow them time to turn back to the Russians before the latter could advance. The rest, as they say, is history.

If we adopt Mr. Ignatius’ suggestion of a slow, steady, incremental build-up of pressure with the obvious conclusion of starting a war against Iran, the Iranians might have sufficient justification in their own minds and would sufficient strategic reasons to attempt to hit American forces first to take the initiative away from our planners and attempt to widen the war to our disadvantage. The lesson that invading Iraq will have taught other targeted countries is that expecting the United States to be bound by anything like international law, the U.N. Charter or basic principles of nonaggression is a fool’s game. Attacking Iran will reconfirm that lesson, which will only encourage other targeted countries in the future to escalate the conflict more rapidly to maximise their advantages against us.

If we take the long view, attacking Iran, whatever form it takes, will badly destabilise the entire international system, such as it is, and confirm the effective “right” of great powers to launch preemptive strikes as it suits them. Some day one of those powers may find it to be in its interest to launch a large-scale devastating preemptive attack against us–not necessarily because we will have done anything to them, but because we might. (That is the entire justification for the proposed attack against Iran.) Those who do not want to live in a world like that, which I assume would be most reasonable people, will be well advised to stop barking for an attack on Iran.

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