I Put My Money On War

Ethan Heitner

September 20, 2006

I made a bet with my friend over beer yesterday after work. “If the Republicans retain control of at least one house of Congress after the November elections, we will be bombing Iran within four months.” That puts us at early February. At stake is a melon shisha at our favorite shisha bar. And, you know, the assured death and suffering of innocents, the predictable backlash around the world, the continuing madness of life in Bush's America, the despair of the impotent antiwar movement, etc.

Then I biked over to Camp Democracy to hear Ray McGovern be much less optimistic. He brought up this weekend's Time magazine article that revealed a “Prepare To Deploy” order has been given to “a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two minehunters,” to Iran's eastern coast. McGovern thinks there are 50-50 odds on a military strike on Iran before the elections. The orders call for the naval vessels to be ready to leave port by October 1. According to McGovern, that makes the end of October prime-time for striking. “An October surprise par excellance ,” he says.

To be fair, there is another credible explanation: “Such orders may in the short term have more to do with planning to prevent possible effort by Iran to close the straits of Hormuz, in the event of sanctions,” as security and foreign policy correspondent Laura Rozen points out. An entirely less paranoid reading of Bush's current weakness and inability to engage in military action these days is expressed by Robert Dreyfuss on TomPaine.com today.

But I found Bush's speech at the U.N. yesterday less reassuring than Robert Dreyfuss did. Bush's statements directed to the Iranian people clearly show he still buys into one of the key premises of neocon plans to attack Iran—that the Iranian people would somehow support such a strike and that regime change, not nuclear disarmament is the true goal we should keep in mind:

The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation's resources to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Col. Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force officer who has taught strategy at the Air Force college, the Naval College and the National War College, has just published a lengthy analysis called "The End Of Summer Diplomacy" (via Kevin Drum) of military options against Iran and Bush's possible strategies leading up to a massive bombing run. He makes a number of excellent points, the most provocative and noteworthy being that it has already begun . News reports place American and Israeli commandos inside Iran since the summer of 2004. He points out correctly we were bombing Iraq months before we went to the United Nations asking for permission to invade.

Gardiner doesn't think that the diplomatic track that Bush has publically endorsed since at least this spring is in good faith, which is no shocker, but he makes the further point that sanctions against Iran will not weaken the regime, but will likely make it stronger, as Iranians rally around their besieged government. And this is what the war planners want:

If the experience of 1979 and other sanctions scenarios is a guide, sanctions will actually empower the conservative leadership in Iran. There is an irony here. It is a pattern that seems to be playing out in the selection of the military option. From diplomacy to sanctions, the administration is not making good-faith efforts to avert a war so much as going through the motions, eliminating other possible strategies of engagement, until the only option left on the table is the military one.

Matthew Yglesias  has some rumors to pass on that should chill us even with the possibility they are being discussed: the idea of using tactical nukes in a first-strike against Iran.

But, back at Camp Democracy, Ray McGovern made a case for one of the few remaining ways we could conceivably stop this juggernaut (other than getting arrested at a protest, which he's more than happy to do as well). He urged the crowd to read and widely distribute an article by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in protest of the Vietnam War, in the October issue of Harper's magazine. Ellsberg castigates himself for only leaking the Pentagon Papers after the war was well underway, and urges any current member of the defense or intelligence establishment or the Bush administration to do what he did not have the courage to do: act now, before the war starts, and sacrifice their career by publically revealing the machinations of the Bush regime:

Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities of officials rightly 'appalled' by the thrust of secret policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the sober decision—accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk of prison—to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably, official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the military plans being considered.

What needs disclosure is the full internal controversy, the secret critiques as well as the arguments and claims of advocates of war and nuclear 'options'—the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East. ...

The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over 130,000 young Americans—with many yet to join them—in an unjust war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and civil courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before the next war begins.

We know Iran poses no threat to us. What else can we do?

McGovern reached back to his days as a student at Fordham and quoted the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas quoting John Chrysostom, a third-century father of the church.

"'He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger, sins,'" McGovern told the small crowd. " Why?  Because anger respicet bonum justiciae —anger looks to the good of justice, and if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are unjust. Thomas added his own corollary to what John Crysostom wrote, Thomas used very harsh words in criticizing what he called 'unreasoned patience.' He said, 'Unreasoned patience sows the seeds of vice, nourishes negligence, and invites not only evil peope but even good people to do evil.' Unhappily, most of the Germans of the thirties hadn't heard that."