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Hubris Unlimited: Tom Cotton versus Reality

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A Tomahawk cruise missile (TLAM) is fired from...
A Tomahawk cruise missile (TLAM) is fired from an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer during the fourth wave of attacks on Iraq in support of Operation Desert Fox (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Freshman Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) wants the United States to pick a fight with Iran. Not an all-out brawl, he says; just an itty-bitty bout along the lines of 1998’s Operation Desert Fox, in which US aircraft carried out four days of airstrikes on Iraq.

Setting aside the fact that there’s just no reason for such an exercise  — P5+1 negotiation theater aside, Iran doesn’t seem to have an active nuclear weapons development program for airstrikes to target — the whole concept of “limited war” is bogus and dangerous.

One big problem with “limited war” is that it seldom produces the results its architects envision and instead becomes a gateway to UN-limited war.

Desert Fox was just one link in a chain of “limited” measures connecting 1991’s Desert Storm to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, followed by seven years of occupation, civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State.

Vietnam started out with US advisors training and accompanying South Vietnamese troops — “limited,” see? It ended with nearly half a million US troops engaged in all-out combat and 60,000 of those troops dead.

A second problem with “limited war” is the naive notion that the United States alone gets to define its wars’ scope, setting, tempo and duration.  The enemy usually has different ideas as to those variables. September 11, 2001, the culmination of a decade of “limited war” against al Qaeda, didn’t feel too terribly “limited,” did it?

US military interventionism in the 21st century sports a sorry record. The twin unwinnable quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, sprinkled with smaller fiascoes like Libya, Syria and Yemen, make it clear that neither “limited” nor “unlimited” war in the Middle East and Central Asia will ever produce good results.

Bringing the same failed doctrine to bear on Iran, a country with three times the population and a far more modern military apparatus than Iraq circa 2003 or Afghanistan circa 2001, is pure folly. It would be a bloody and unprofitable investment in an enterprise doomed to failure.

So, what’s the alternative? Peace, of course.

The United States has incessantly intervened in Iran, covertly and overtly, politically and militarily, for lo on 70 years now, with uniformly negative results.

The first step in getting out of a deep hole is to stop digging. Contra Tom Cotton, it’s time to take war — “limited” or not — off the table.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter addresses this same topic in more depth and from some other perspectives in “A Really Bad Idea: A ‘Limited’ War with Iran.” While this piece doesn’t cite or quote Carpenter’s commentary, it was certainly informed by that commentary, so credit/linkage is very much in order.

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Yes, Mr. Waldman, the Iran Nuclear Negotiations ARE Munich in 1938

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Neville Chamberlain showing the Anglo-German D...
Neville Chamberlain showing the Anglo-German Declaration to a crowd at Heston Aerodrome on 30 September 1938. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Paul Waldman nay-says comparisons of the Lausanne nuclear talks to UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler with respect to Czechoslovakia (“No, the Iran nuclear negotiations aren’t Munich in 1938,” Washington Post, April 1).

I get where Waldman’s  coming from — it’s annoying to hear American hawks on both sides of the aisle draw that analogy — but I disagree. Not so much because he gets it wrong as because he gets it backward.

The nuclear talks ARE a lot like Munich in 1938. But it’s Iran acting out the role of Chamberlain in response to a US strategy that’s textbook Hitler. There’s little doubt the Iranians will regret going to the trouble of hammering out the just-announced “framework.”

The Hitlerian method is this: Invent a “controversy” (for example, “ethnic Germans in Czech Sudetenland are oppressed”). Make a set of demands. If the demands are met, add new conditions. When you’ve pushed things as far as they can go and the other party finally refuses, accuse that other party of acting in bad faith and claim justification for doing what you wanted to do anyway (invade and occupy Czechoslovakia).

The Iran “nuclear weapons controversy” is an invented crisis of that Hitlerian type.

The US intelligence community says Iran doesn’t seem to be developing nuclear weapons, nor to have had a program to do so since at least as long ago as 2003. Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says that development and possession of nuclear weapons is a sin against Islam and that his regime won’t engage in it. The International Atomic Energy Agency cites some resistance to its inspection protocols, but has never claimed that Iran is, or even might be, developing nuclear weapons. There’s just no “there” there.

Meanwhile, under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is fully entitled to develop civilian nuclear power without submitting to US demands concerning how it may do so.

Nonetheless, the US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Iran to force it to do … well, something. That something changes every time the Iranian government agrees.

At the end of March, all parties seemed ready to sign an agreement — so the US piled on new conditions, concerning export of spent nuclear material, at the last minute. After which the US immediately issued a statement blaming the Iranians for the impasse its own negotiators had intentionally created.

As I write this, the tentative outlines of an agreement have been announced. That agreement consists mostly of up-front demands on Iran with the dangling fruit of lifted sanctions in the future.  I’m confident in my prediction that the US will break or void the agreement and trot out a new list of demands within a few months, having never lifted the sanctions. It’s the Hitlerian method in spades.

Appeasing the US  in 2015 is a bad idea, for the same reasons (and likely to produce the same results) as appeasing Hitler was in 1938. But like Czechoslovakia back then, Iran now finds itself isolated and without friends.

It’s time for Americans to stand up for peace and demand that our government mind its own business. End the fake talks, the raw deals and the real sanctions.

Note: This op-ed was updated shortly after publication to reflect the announcement of an “agreement framework.”

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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No, Mr. Muravchik, War is Not the “Best Option”

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Early weapons models, such as the "Fat Ma...
Replica of the early “Fat Man” atomic bomb. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

“What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons?” asks Joshua Muravchik in the Washington Post (“War with Iran is probably our best option,” March 13). It’s a serious question that deserves some critical parsing before following Muravchik to his conclusion that “[t]hat, in fact, is probably the reality.”

What, precisely, does Muravchik mean by “reality?” He seems to go with the definition offered by an unnamed George W. Bush aide to writer Ron Suskind in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

In non-Muravchik reality, the US and Israeli intelligence communities say Iran doesn’t seem to have an active nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency, while publicly less sure, has reported no evidence of such a program. Why should we believe Muravchik instead of them?

In non-Muravchik reality, Iranian “Supreme Leader”  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says that pursuit or possession of nuclear weapons is a sin against Islam which his regime will never commit. Anti-Iran hawks like Muravchik insist we must take Khameini at his word when he threatens to destroy Israel or plant the flag of his Islamic Republic atop the White House. Why shouldn’t we take him at his word on this as well?

In non-Muravchik reality, Iran has cheerfully gone along with, even offered, various proposals to furnish its civilian reactors with enriched (but not weapons grade) material while forgoing enrichment itself — a concession it’s not obligated to make under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Finally, in non-Muravchik reality, the US has spent the entirety of the 21st century at Muravchik-approved war or proxy war in the Middle East and central Asia, leaving things worse rather than better in each and every instance.

Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Yemen. Syria. Where the US goes to war, it inevitably leaves radical Islam, rather than stable democracy, empowered and emboldened behind it. If we’re searching for irresponsible belligerence in the region, our gaze must necessarily come to rest on the stars and stripes.

And if Iran does develop nuclear weapons … well, so what? That genie’s been out of the bottle for 70 years and isn’t going back in. Yes, Iranian nukes would change the regional dynamic. But that dynamic sucks. Perhaps it’s time for an Iranian counterweight to Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly.

The “best option” — for America, for Iran and for the world — is for the United States to simmer down, take war off the table, and learn to mind its own business.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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