Frank Rich is sticking his head in the sand:
A full-scale regional war, chaos in the oil market, an overstretched American military pushed past the brink — all to take down a little thug like Ahmadinejad (who isn’t even Iran’s primary leader) and a state, however truculent, whose defense budget is less than 1 percent of America’s? Call me a Pollyanna, but I don’t think even the Bush administration can be this crazy.
Yet there is nonetheless a method to all the mad threats of war coming out of the White House. While the saber- rattling is reckless as foreign policy, it’s a proven winner as election-year Republican campaign strategy. The real point may be less to intimidate Iranians than to frighten Americans. Fear, the only remaining card this administration still knows how to play, may once more give a seemingly spent G.O.P. a crack at the White House in 2008.
Rich’s assessment is that all this Iran-talk is more campaign strategy than foreign policy. Why, then, has the FBI been desperately searching the falafel purchasing habits of Iranians? It’s clear that the FBI has been given the task of anticipating a domestic backlash from Iranian expatriots/agents. Backlash from what?
Rich should know better. The advocates of a preemptive strike on Iran are not wallflowers. They are men and women of action. Their members are staffed throughout the government, from the State Department, to the National Security Council, all the way up to the vice-president’s office. The Pentagon has provided a steady drip of misinformation. If we do not strike Iran, it will not be for lack of advocacy.
There are things that can make a strike more or less likely. If it becomes clear that the Democrats are going to win the presidency, the advocates of preemption will become more strident through desperation. After all, although Iran is nowhere near having a nuclear weapon right now, who can tell where they’ll be eight years from now? For those in a panic about Iran, they will feel compelled to act now, while they still have the chance. However, if they think Rudy Guiliani will win the presidency they may be content to give the job to him. They may even become convinced the job can be entrusted to Ms. Clinton, as she has done little to dissuade them from such an idea.
And this time Mrs. Clinton’s straddling stood out as it didn’t in 2002. That’s not because she was the only woman on stage but because she is the only Democratic candidate who has not said a firm no to Bush policy.
There is a method to the Clintons’ straddling. It is to be all things to all people. For the Iran-Hawks she is sending a message that she will not allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon and she will not abandon Iraq to Iranian domination. To the peaceniks she is saying that she will end the war as soon as she gets into office. With such a wide swath to cover, it pays to read what she says very carefully. Here she is in the recent debate:
Clinton:…You know, I have said, repeatedly, that I will begin to bring our troops home as soon as I am president, because it is abundantly clear that President Bush does not intend to end the war while he is still president.
In order to do that, we’re doing to have to get the Joint Chiefs and my secretary of defense and advisers together to start the planning to move as quickly as possible, because I don’t believe that the planning has been sufficiently undertaken in the Pentagon under this administration…
As with her husband, you have to make sure you know what the meaning of the term ‘is’ is before you can be sure you’ve heard correctly. She may be correct that planning has not been done for a military withdrawal, but she isn’t particularly clear on that point, is she? She says she will begin bringing our troops home as soon as she is sworn in, and then she implies she cannot do that because the planning has not been done. People will hear the parts they want to hear, and that is by design. Did you think she was going to bring the troops home as soon as she became president? Keep listening.
Clinton: Number one, when we talk about combat missions in Iraq, my understanding is that we had the same agreement — most of us on this stage — that we would bring out combat troops but we would pursue a mission against Al Qaida in Iraq if they remained a threat.
Now, I don’t know how you pursue Al Qaida without engaging them in combat. So I think we’re having a semantic difference here. I think we should get as many of the combat troops out as quickly as possible.
If we leave any troops in, like special operations, to go after Al Qaida in Iraq, I assume that we don’t want them just sitting around and watching them. We want them to engage them. That is a very limited mission…
…We’re going to have troops remaining there, guarding our embassy. We may have a continuing training mission, and we may have a mission against Al Qaida in Iraq. So that’s a very big difference than having the 160,000 troops that George Bush has there today.
Obama made the main point, by noting Hillary’s support for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment:
Williams: Senator Obama, was Senator Clinton’s answer to the opposition of the Iraq war question consistent, in your view?
Obama: I don’t think it’s consistent with the Iran resolution, for example, which specifically stated that we should structure our forces in Iraq with an eye toward blunting Iranian influence. It is yet another rationale for what we’re doing in Iraq, and I think that’s a mistake…
Ms. Clinton wants to make sure that the Iran-Hawks understand this position, but Democrats need Obama to spell it out for them because Hillary sure isn’t going to make this policy explicit. The Hawks hear, the rest of us? Not so much.
There is a real foreign policy debate about how to deal with the aftermath of our failure in Iraq, and Iran’s increased influence is a part of that debate. But Ms. Clinton dare not engage in that debate openly…she will only speak in code. The reason? Democrats are not interested in ‘blunting the influence of Iran within Iraq’. They’re interested in a less imperialistic and overreaching foreign policy.
Finally, in case you haven’t noticed, events in Pakistan seem quite likely to outstrip this over-hyped debate about Iran.
I don’t know whether we will strike Iran before the end of Bush’s presidency or not. But, for the advocates of such a strike, it is no mere campaign strategy. Frank Rich is wrong about that.
