Syria is Awfully Complicated

It's hard to take seriously those who don't understand even recent history. Even worse are those who consciously ignore it, or worse still, lie about it. All three groups of ahistorical shitheads are overly represented in today's Republican Party.

The neoconservative ideology was tested in Iraq and was found lacking by any sane and fair observer. If you want to decide whether to take a given Republican seriously about current foreign policy challenges, I'd advise you to take a look at what they say about Iraq.

First, the U.S invasion did not bring democracy to Mesopotamia, but it did bring more than it's fair share of chaos. Democracy was always a foolish goal in an unnatural country comprised of competing ethnic and religious groups. As soon as you lift out of tyranny those who very much want to kill one another, you shouldn't be at all surprised when they actually start killing one another.

Second, like everything else about the Iraq War, the 2007 "surge" did not accomplish it's stated aims. If you look back on the statements of the surge's supporters, you learn that the aim was to provide enough security in the country (and especially the famously murderous "Sunni Triangle") to allow for political reconciliation. That did not occur. Suicide bombings that kill hundreds of civilians are routine in Iraq.

What the surge did create was what the Nixon Administration called a "decent interval" in Vietnam that allowed the United States to withdraw without being humiliated.

Third, President Obama didn't withdraw from Iraq, President Bush did. In the summer of 2008, Bush signed a status of forces agreement that called for the last American troops to depart by 2011. There was to be no residual force left behind because the Iraqis would not exempt U.S forces and contractors from Iraqi law. Obama merely implemented that agreement, although you'd never know it from listening to Fox News or reading Republican blogs.

Then there's the Arab Spring. During the entirety of the Bush years, Republicans contended that the liberation of Iraq would speed the growth of democracy through the Middle East. In the earliest days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, they actually sought to take credit for it.

But democracy didn't work out exactly the way they had planned, and Islamist-leaning governments were elected, just as Hamas had been in 2005 elections in the Palestinian Authority that Bush insisted on, despite the protests of Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyone who thought that a Thomas Jefferson was going to rise up in the region is a fool. The true Democrats had long ago been murdered or exiled by the (often American-supported) tyrannies that the revolutions displaced. Just as nature does, politics abhors a vacuum, and the most organized forces were destined to win the democratic elections, and that the most organized forces were affiliated with the Islamist movement was the most predictable thing in the world to anyone that was paying attention.

So the neocons did exactly what they did in the wake of their failure in Iraq; they blamed Obama.

Now moron Republicans like John McCain want to make Syria an issue.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. But it was ultimately vetoed by the White House, Mr. Panetta said, although it was developed by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state.

“How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Mr. McCain asked Mr. Panetta on Thursday, noting that an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed in the fighting.

And did the Pentagon, Mr. McCain continued, support the recommendation by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”

“We did,” Mr. Panetta said.

“You did support that,” Mr. McCain said.

“We did,” General Dempsey added.

Of course, the implication is that Obama isn't listening to his national security team, which in this case, he thankfully isn't. And Obama isn't alone among presidents in this regard. Had President Truman listened to his national security advisers, the United States would not have recognized the State of Israel.

There are a couple of points that most Republicans won't make about Syria that you should hear;

• There is no shortage of weapons in Syria.
• The civil war there is already a regional proxy war that American allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia are already hip deep in.

Too many people who don't know what they're talking about say that when the House of Assad falls, it will precipitate the same kind of chaos that overwhelmed Iraq a decade ago. That's actually not true. The fall of Assad will more exactly precipitate the kind of chaos that overwhelmed Afghanistan twenty years ago.

When the Soviet-sponsored regime of Mohammad Najibullah disintegrated in 1992, the various rebel groups that toppled it immediately went to war with one another. Most of the factions were sponsored by foreign intelligence services, most notably Pakistan's ISI and the CIA.

Those in the cult of St. Ronald of Reagan prefer to ignore this inconvenient truth today, but the Reagan Administration's poster boy of the Afghan "freedom fighters" was one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The fact that Hekmatyar rallied his troops into battle with Soviet forces chanting "Death to America" was somehow overlooked at the time. Hekmatyar is now wanted by the United States as a war criminal and a close associate of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In wanting to arm Syrian factions, people like McCain risk doing the same thing all over again. And please don't tell me that the United States will rally around a figure like Ahmad Massoud because there likely isn't one, and the U.S  pointedly ignored Massoud until the closing days of the Clinton Administration, nearly a decade later.

Just as happened in Afghanistan, American aims in Syria are at odds with the other regional players. . In the 1980s, the Carter and Reagan Administration, along with the Chinese, sought to humiliate the Soviets, whereas the Pakistanis wanted Afghanistan to use as "strategic depth" in a possible future war with India.

The U.S wants stability and a possible Syrian accommodation with Israel. What the Turks, Saudis and Iranians want is for their preferred ethnic allies to prevail. The Turks and Saudis want a Sunni power base in Damascus, whether or not its jihadi is a secondary concern. The Iranians want to maintain their Alawite ally, and their Syrian bridge to both Lebanon and the Israeli-Occupied Territories.

In any event, none of the Syrian rebels share American national security aims and, to one degree or another, all of them will probably seek thwart them at some point in the not too distant future. While it's a fable of the left that the United States created the Taliban or al-Qaeda in the 80's, it did directly arm and train more than a few of their allied groups.

Toppling Assad is not going to stop the killing. Indeed, his overthrow is almost certain accelerate it as the competing rebel groups go to war with one another in a battle to control the country. Just as they did in Afghanistan, the neocons and liberal supporters of intervention steadfastly refuse to recognize that horrible reality.

Having said that, Syria threatens to destroy the very delicate situations in both Lebanon and Iraq. That's something that the United States should do everything in its power to avoid, either with air forces or, in a worst case scenario, ground troops. Neither country can seal their borders on their own.

If McCain wants to be somehow useful, he can introduce a resolution in the Senate holding Turkey and Saudi Arabia responsible for the actions of their proxies if they take the fight outside of Syria. Their American aid can be held hostage, along with Turkey's NATO membership.

The U.S has tried playing Great Game politics in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and failed miserably both times, to the great benefit of the Pakistanis and Iranians.

Republicans universally mocked the 2006 Biden-Gelb Plan, which would have divided Iraq into a loose federation of three countries. What they've chosen to ignore is that the Iraqis themselves have essentially implemented it on their own.

Because it should be by now apparent that you cannot have democracy or stability in artificial nations comprised of tribal ethnic groups that want autonomy from one another, Biden-Gelb should be at least looked at as a model for most of the Middle East.

With the exception of Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries were political creations of the various Versailles Conferences of 1919-1922 and maintained as expedient client states during the Cold War. They will eventually disintegrate on their own, the only question is how.

If the United States wants to extract itself from the morass of the Middle East, which it very much should, it should use its diplomatic influence to hasten the creation of a new, more homogeneous Arab states that better represent the national aspirations of their people.

Anyone who knows anything about the isolationist nature of American history should know that Americans are the very last people who should be involved in the poisonous pit of Arab politics. The region is likely to be eventually dominated by Egyptian and Iranian "superpowers" anyway, so why not expedite that?

All the status quo is likely to produce is more frequent revolutions that will be impossible to manage from outside the region. Such revolutions will make it impossible for Israel to have anything other than a war economy and remain forever dependent on an American ally that is rapidly approaching bankruptcy and irrelevance.

The map is eventually going to shake itself out. It is much better for everyone if it does so unopposed from the outside.

"... Condemned to Repeat It:" The Cuban Missile Crisis in Perspective

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana

History is important, but what people do with that history is more important. To mythologize history is to make it important and, worse, may cause it's worst mistakes to be repeated.

For a president who didn't do all that much, the mythologising of John F. Kennedy is a little odd and a lot terrifying. Most people, when pressed, can't name three things that he did in office and several of them count his assassination twice.

The assassination perverted the history of a man who shouldn't have been president at all. He was a liar and a thief. The evidence strongly suggests, although doesn't definitively prove, that the 1960 election was stolen through wholesale vote-rigging in Cook County, Illinois and South Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson stole his Senate seat twelve years earlier.

It wasn't known at the time, but when Kennedy commenced his campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church four times. We also now now that the 35th president of the United States and Commander-In-Chief was regularly dosing himself with a combination of steroids and amphetamine. This was not yet twenty years after another president who hid the perilous state of his health from the American people, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly as the country was preparing to use nuclear weapons for the first time.

The American people seem to know none of this, or not care if they do. Poll after poll of non-historians regularly puts JFK in the top four chief executives, above George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Given the paucity of Kennedy's accomplishments, it represents the triumph of style over substance more than anything else in modern history.

Other than his murder in Dallas, the event most often associated with JFK is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Benjamin Schwarz writes about in great detail in this month's Atlantic.

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

The first time I had seen the official mediation of the Missile Crisis challenged was in Gary Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Mediation on Power, which was first published in 1982. Since then, more and better literature has come out, including Kennedy's own secret presidential recordings. But the narrative remains mostly intact, due largely to a continuing flood of adoring Kennedy biographies and a singular unwillingness of Americans to study their own history.

Very few American non-scholars have bothered asking even the most basic questions about the Missile Crisis. "What's behind the half-century long obsession with a piss-ant country like Cuba?" "Why would Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev place the missiles there?" "Could the United States have resolved the crisis in a way that didn't risk a nuclear holocaust?" "What were the long-term consequences of it?"

Richard Nixon was remembered as a world-class red-baiter. In his first political campaign, Nixon tied his opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis to the suspected Communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (PAC,) although Voorhis refused to accept their endorsement. In his 1950 campaign for the Senate, Nixon called Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas "pink right down to her underwear" and compared her voting record to that of the avowed Socialist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

In 1960, it was NIxon's turn to be red-baited in a particularly insidious way. From roughly 1948 onward, the GOP enjoyed an edge on national security issues, due largely to the "loss" of China, the successful testing of a nuclear bomb by the Soviets and the stalemate of the Korean War.

During President Eisenhower's second term, the Democrats invented a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union out of whole cloth. Had they bothered to ask the Pentagon or the CIA, they would have learned that the United States had a vast ICBM superiority that would last, ironically, into the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the news media and the public believed it.

Kennedy sought to capitalize on the missile gap by making Cuba an issue. He insisted during the presidential debates that he would do more to roll back communism in Cuba than would Nixon. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to receive classified CIA briefings. He knew that the Agency under Eisenhower was planning just that. Determined not to reveal that, Vice President Nixon publicly argued against Cuban intervention, even though he was its strongest advocate in the government.

Once he was sworn in as president, Kennedy was stuck with, and haunted by, the issues of the missile gap and Cuba. JFK immediately began the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history up to that time. He also dramatically increased the nuclear arsenal, despite the U.S having as many as nine times the warheads the U.S.S.R had. In what was perhaps the most fateful decision of his presidency, he ordered Jupiter missiles deployed to Turkey, near the Soviet border.

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat above ground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

At about the same time that Kennedy deployed the Jupiters, he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, thereby giving Khrushchev the predicate he needed to give the Americans " a little of their own medicine" by moving their own missiles into Cuba.

As for Castro, he would have been crazy to refuse the missiles after after the Bay of Pigs and the numerous subsequent assassination attempts by the CIA known as Operation Mongoose. When he learned about it after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson said "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean." Needless to say, a foreign plot - let alone several attempts - to assassinate a sitting American president would be seen as an act of war and responded to forcefully. That they didn't see their attempts on Castro's life similarly is but one of America's interesting post-war double standards.

Moreover, as Schwarz reports, the Cuban missiles didn't change the strategic balance a bit and Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) knew it.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.

That the missiles were close to the United States was, as the president conceded, immaterial: the negligible difference in flight times between Soviet Union–based ICBMs and Cuba-based missiles wouldn’t change the consequences when the missiles hit their targets, and in any event, the flight times of Soviet SLBMs were already as short as or shorter than the flight times of the missiles in Cuba would be, because those weapons already lurked in submarines off the American coast (as of course did American SLBMs off the Soviet coast). Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs.

“A missile is a missile,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asserted. “It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

It stands to reason that the whole matter could have been dealt with through quiet diplomacy. Kennedy wanted the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev wanted to be rid of the provocative  Jupiters on his doorstep. In fact, that was the deal they ultimately reached, but only after the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Moscow was unaware that the missiles had been discovered until Kennedy announced it to the world in a televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962 and announced a naval blockade of Cuba. Knowing that the blockade was an act of war and that the missiles were legal under international law, the United States referred to it as a "quarantine," instead.

Wouldn't it have been easier (to say nothing of less dangerous) to have sent a back-channel message to the Kremlin that the Cuban installations were unacceptable to the United States? Nikita Krushchev himself offered to trade the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters in Turkey in the wake of Kennedy's October 22 address.

But Kennedy had cynically used both the missile gap and Cuba as wedge issues in the 1960 election and he was going to be publicly seen as having solved them, even after he knew just how catastrophic the slightest miscalculation might have been.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that there wasn't a miscalculation because JFK's negotiating posture seemed to be designed to humiliate the Soviets. Even when the trade of the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters was agreed to secretly, through Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kennedy brothers insisted that the Jupiter part of the agreement not be announced publicly, fearing that such an agreement would politically damage the president.

Amazingly, Krushchev agreed to it. And he was removed from power less than 18 months later, becoming the first (and until Gorbachev, the only)  Soviet leader to leave office alive. It isn't a stretch to assume that sent a powerful message to Nikita Krushchev's successors. They would not be played by the Americans. Superpower relations went into a deep-freeze for a decade afterward.

Prior to Kruschev's March, 1964 removal, the Soviets were basically conservative in the conduct of foreign policy. Yes, they sponsored revolutionary movements; most notably in China, Korea and Vietnam, but the only used their own military within what they considered their traditional sphere of influence to put down uprisings. Beginning with Brezhnev, the Soviets become much more aggressive and far more intractable.

Would that have been the case absent the missile crisis? There's no reason to believe so.

As Schwarz points out in the Atlantic, the missile crisis had even greater consequences on the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve. This recondite calculation led to the American disaster in Vietnam: in attempting to explain how the loss of the strategically inconsequential country of South Vietnam might weaken American credibility and thereby threaten the country’s security, one of McNamara’s closest aides, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, allowed that “it takes some sophistication to see how Vietnam automatically involves” our vital interests. Kennedy said in his address to the nation during the missile crisis that “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He explained that “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe,” then the United States could not tolerate such conduct by the Soviets—even though, again, he had privately acknowledged that the deployment of the missiles did not change the nuclear balance.

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. After all, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t deter Muammar Qaddafi; America’s war against Yugoslavia didn’t deter Saddam Hussein in 2003; America’s liberation of Kuwait did not deter Slobodan Milošević; America’s intervention in Panama did not deter Saddam Hussein in 1991; America’s intervention in Grenada did not deter Manuel Noriega; America’s war against North Vietnam did not deter Grenada’s strongman, Hudson Austin; and JFK’s confrontation with Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba certainly did not deter Ho Chi Minh.

How many American troops would have been spared in the last half century were it not for Kennedy's duplicity before, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis? U.S policymakers learned exactly the wrong lesson from the October crisis. And the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis is almost exactly what we're seeing today in relation to Iran's nuclear program, albeit in slow motion.

The United States has had bad presidents both before and after John Kennedy, but none nearly ended life on earth as a result of his own deliberate and cynical machinations. In that, he might be the most dangerous man ever to have lived.

Yet he remains a hero to tens of millions of Americans and a worldwide icon, due largely to the machinations of his own lies and the personality cult developed over several decades by his palace guard.

Unless the real history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is more widely known, there's a very real chance that there will someday be another president as reckless as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The next time we might not be so lucky.


Benjamin Schwarz's piece in the Atlantic is actually a book review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern, which I very much look forward to reading. However, Schwarz's article is impressive on its own and can be read for free here, which I encourage you all to do.

Confirm Chuck Hagel

Presidents, regardless of who the president is at any given time, can and should be afforded broad latitude in who he chooses to sit in his Cabinet. Cabinet officers are different from Supreme Court nominations in that the president sets policy and the Cabinet leaves with the president, neither of which is true of the High Court. Unless there's something in a nominee's history that is indisputably disqualifying, the president should have whomever he wants.

Again, you don't have to like the nominee or be happy about the nomination, but elections, as they say, have consequences. Congress should not be dictating executive policy - especially war policy - to a duly elected president, which I remember any number of Republicans telling me about a decade ago.

That's particularly true of a nominee who comes from the Senate. Sitting and former senators are afforded extraordinary deference during confirmation hearings. The only former senator denied confirmation that I'm aware of was John Tower, who the first President Bush had nominated to be Secretary of Defence. Tower had a drinking problem, which reasonable people can see as a disqualification for someone in the military chain of command.

It would be unprecedented for Republican senators to vote against the confirmation of President Obama's nominee for Defense, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

If you're a modern Republican, you see Hagel as a contrarian pain in the ass, especially if you're of the neoconservative foreign policy school. Senator Hagel was an early opponent of the Iraq War (although he voted for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force in October 2002), he's for cutting the Pentagon's budget, and he has interesting views on America's relationship with Israel.

All three of these things are not only perfectly defensible, they're admirable.

LIke Hagel, I initially supported the Iraq War. This was mostly because Saddam was going to have to be taken out sooner or later, and better to do it when he was weak than after the sanctions disintegrated and he strengthened his military capability. But I thought that the Bush Administration was lying about all of that democracy nonsense. I also assumed that enough force would be deployed to secure the peace after the war. Had I had known otherwise, I would have opposed the war.

Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than any other country. It was thrown together against the will of the ethnically diverse population and held together by tyrannical force. Just as happened in Yugoslavia, when Iraq's people were given a measure of freedom, they immediately began slaughtering one another.

Traditionally, when the United States overthrows a foreign government, they install a military junta that governs the country to the satisfaction of the White House. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule, such as Germany and Japan, but there aren't many, and none in countries as confounding as Iraq.

Instead, Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority called for elections, disbanded Iraq's police and military, and implemented a flat tax before there was even the most basic security in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. In attempting to turn an unnatural country into a laboratory for the Heritage Foundation's ideas, Bush created the ideal conditions for the civil war that would soon engulf Iraq, cost 4,500 American lives and create upwards of 4 million refugees. Moreover, it turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign jihad insurgents who are now set to overrun neighbouring Syria.

The single biggest reason that the Democrats have the upper hand on the issue of national security (which they haven't enjoyed since at least the Kennedy Administration) is the GOP's reflexive and wrongheaded support of George W. Bush's disaster in Mesopotamia. Had Republicans not had such a herd mentality over the war, they wouldn't have all gone over the cliff together. Hagel was almost alone among Republicans for calling it exactly as he saw it early on.

As I've said repeatedly in this space, because military budgets are wholly dependent on a given nation's foreign policy, they are the very definition of discretionary spending. A country that will soon be unable to pay its own bills has no business "remaking the world in its image."

For all of the talk about Hagel's ideas being "out of the mainstream," it is the Republican Party itself that has moved out of the mainstream. In the last dozen years, the GOP has shunned the foreign policy conservatism of Eisenhower and Reagan, to say nothing of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines, and adopted an almost evangelical Wilsonian foreign policy. The Republican answer to any foreign challenge seems to be "bomb first and ask questions later." And we've seen how well that worked in Iraq.

An interventionist American foreign policy was excusable during the Cold War, when the economies of the former great powers were shattered by the Second World War. That is no longer true. There is no threatening global hegemon that requires an American military presence in each of the world's time zones. Even at the height of their power, al-Qaeda did not pose the threat that the Soviet Union did, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not to be taken seriously.

Republicans, as enamoured as they are with "the Founder's intent," should be the first people to recognize this. The Founders didn't agree on much, but they were in universal agreement on what President Washington later called "foreign entanglements." The Constitution gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" (note the plural) specifically because the Founders unanimously opposed a permanent standing army and repeatedly warned against the establishment of one.

The idea that entitlement spending can be slashed while defense is increased as a proportion of GDP is ridiculous and politically suicidal. That supposedly conservative politicians make assertions to the contrary is further evidence of how delusional they've become.

To avoid a wholesale meltdown of the U.S economy, deep and immediate cuts are going to have to be made, but the Pentagon cannot be spared. This is obviously going to require a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy and what constitutes a "vital national interest."

For most of America's history, its vital national interests were limited to Mexico, Canada and keeping sea lanes open for international trade. The Middle East only became a factor during the Second World War, and only because denying Nazi Germany the region's oil was a military necessity. Afterward, the Soviet threat to the region necessitated U.S engagement. However, the blowback of American support for despotic Arab and Persian regimes was the jihadi threat the United States faces today.

Then there's Israel, which seems to be the epicentre of Republican opposition to Senator Hagel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the U.S foreign policy establishment understood that American support for Israel had to be balanced against its interests in the Arab world.

There is a difference between a moral interest and a strategic interest. Support for Israel couldn't be more of a moral interest, which very few sane people would dispute. However, there are 100 million Arabs, who have oil and would very much like nuclear weapons. There are another 80 million Persians of whom the same thing could be said. That is the the definition of a strategic interest.

As a supporter of the Jewish state, I question the the morality of  backing Israel regardless of the wisdom of its policies and how damaging they might be to U.S interests in the Arab world.

First, it's ahistorical. The presidents that took the hardest line on Israel were Eisenhower, Reagan and the first Bush. All of them, to one degree or another, threatened the continuing relationship to protect America's Arab interests and none of them were labelled as anti-Semites, as Chuck Hagel recently has.

For all the rhetoric regarding the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, Obama hasn't threatened the diplomatic abandonment of Jerusalem (which Eisenhower did over Suez,) describe their military actions as a "Holocaust" (which Reagan did regarding Lebanon,) or cut off loan guarantees (which Bush 41 did when Israel expanded settlements.) Obama has been more tolerant of Israel's conduct than any Republican president except Nixon and the second Bush.

Second, unquestioning American support for Israel; military, diplomatic and financial is only significant if there's a reasonable chance that that support will always be there, and that can hardly be guaranteed at this point. We're are not long from the day when serious people will begin to question whether the United States can afford to provide $3 billion in foreign aid every year. Without that aid, Israelis will be forced to choose between their defense and their economy because they won't be able to afford both.

Washington has to persuade Jerusalem that it is in its long term interest to make a deal with both the Palestinians and the hold-out nations of the Middle East, if only because they can't and won't be subsidized forever. Europe is less accommodating of Israeli intractability every day, and the Chinese and Russians are fully allied with the Arabs and Iranians. Who does that leave in Israel's corner?

It's hard to imagine many Americans tolerating cuts to their Medicare and Social Security benefits while their government provides billion in military aid to an ally that thinks that it doesn't have to make a serious bargain with its neighbours. I believe that's more than the domestic political traffic will bear once America's economic decline becomes a recognizable reality.

Israel can make a tolerable deal now, or a considerably worse one later, when they've been financially and diplomatically abandoned. It is deeply immoral for a nation rapidly facing bankruptcy to provide assurances to the contrary to Israel.

Senator Hagel's views on a possible conflict with Iran are not unlike my own. Military will not destroy the Iranian program, only delay it and paradoxically prove to Tehran that it's necessary. Even if the current theorcacy were replaced tomorrow, Iran's security situation would still be such that it would feel it needed a nuclear deterrent because any country in Iran's position would feel that way.

Given the geography and demographic facts, war with Iran would be much more challenging than the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan are by several degrees of magnitude. The American people might support armed action in theory, but the reality is almost certainly going to be quite different. Sending troops in there when public support will evaporate almost immediately isn't just unfair to the military, it's immoral.

Bob Woodward wrote an interesting article about Hagel in yesterday's Washington Post;

This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is an option, but very much a last resort.

So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.

The bottom line: The United States must get out of these massive land wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, if possible, avoid future large-scale war.

Although much discussion of the Hagel nomination has centered on his attitudes about Iran, Israel and the defense budget, Hagel’s broader agreement with Obama on overall philosophy is probably more consequential.

Hagel has also said he believes it is important that a defense secretary should not dictate foreign policy and that policy should be made in the White House.

He privately voiced reservations about Obama’s decision in late 2009 to add 51,000 troops to Afghanistan. “The president has not had commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was president,” Hagel said privately in 2011.

The Republican party line on Hagel is that "his views are out of the mainstream." But if there's one thing that's proven indisputably true over the last fifteen years, it's that the "mainstream" isn't just wrong, it's increasingly dangerous and unaffordable.

How well has "the mainstream" served American strategic interests in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both countries are almost certainly going to worse than the United States found them a decade ago, and the potential for both destabilizing their neighbours in unpredictable ways is enormous. "Mainstream thinking," particularly in the GOP, is precisely what put America where it is today: broke and militarily broken.

Hagel describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican. President Eisenhower also stood outside of the mainstream and in direct conflict with the military he commanded and the prevailing political attitudes of both his party and the country. Ike understood that the greatest threat America faced was the unintended consequences of poorly considered action.

Had Eisenhower remained in office, it's impossible to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring because the series of events that led to it never would have been set in motion. It's entirely possible that the Soviets would have reacted militarily to the British, French and Israeli hostilities in the Suez Canal if Eisenhower hadn't stopped it first.

If the United States is to survive as anything resembling the country we recognize today, it had better start adopting views "outside the mainstream" immediately.

For that reason, the Senate should confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

"Rock, Rock Me, Dave Petraeus!"

Look, pretty much everybody loves strange poontang. I guess that isn't taught in journalism school, but it's hardly news.

But if you've done half as much with the last decade as General David Petraeus (U.S Army, Retired) has done, you should get all the strange poontang your heart desires. If there's one single thing you need to know about me, it's that I'm all about positive reinforcement.

Throughout his military career, Petraeus was the go-to guy when everything goes to shit. If policy objectives were unobtainable, the general could at least make it look as though he won. We saw that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where he saved the Bush and Obama administrations endless foreign policy embarrassment, if only at home. Most foreign observers knew that both wars were hopeless by the time Petraeus was brought in to command them.

Petraeus was the architect of the surge in Iraq, which, if you remember its original policy objective, was a failure. The surge was supposed to have created a security situation that would allow the political reconciliation between Iraq's warring ethnic factions that was necessary to facilitate a transition to full democracy. As you might have noticed by now, political reconciliation never happened and democracy in Iraq is more or less in a state of suspended animation.

On the other hand, the surge did do something even more important. It created a "decent interval" for the United States to get the fuck out of there. American servicemen stopped being killed at a monstrous clip, which allowed the departing Bush administration to negotiate a deeply flawed Status of Forces Agreement. Better still, that agreement could later be used by Republicans to blame the Obama administration for "losing Iraq."

Essentially, the same thing happened in Afghanistan, which had started collapsing back into chaos as far back as 2005, but everyone was so preoccupied with the ongoing debacle in Iraq that it wasn't noticed. It wasn't until 2010, after the Stanley McChrystal-Rolling Stone clusterfuck, that Petraeus was brought in to save the day.

Pertaeus, like McChrystal, is a counterinsurgency guy. Given the size and population density of Afghanistan, classical counterinsurgency doctrine demands that the United States and its allies would need something along the lines of 300,000 troops to succeed there. That would have been a political non-starter in Washington even before the mess in Iraq. And by the time Obama took office, American public opinion had drifted sharply against the war that Bush ignored for six years.

In 2009-'10, Obama "surged" troops into Afghanistan to about 120,000, or roughly the same level that the Soviet Union had there in the 1980s. It would never be enough to win, especially against the Afghans, who love nothing better than war, but it was enough to create the appearance of a security situation that would allow withdrawal.

I should note that none of this is Petraeus' fault. He was brought into both Iraq and Afghanistan well after both wars were essentially lost by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Given what he had to work with, Petraeus was never going to be able to do more than address appearances. But he did that outstandingly well.

Along the way, he became something of a Dwight Eisenhower-Colin Powell-type figure in the eyes of the American people. I would suggest that he's even more impressive, since Ike and Colin were at least given winning wars to fight, a luxury not afforded to Petraeus.

Soon there was talk of General Petraeus running for president, which I myself encouraged. He was certainly more impressive than almost anyone else running in this past cycle. In my opinion, I think he could have been a revolutionary president in the way Eisenhower was, but elective politics wasn't in Petraeus' blood, which I still think is too bad for the country.

Instead, he went to the CIA, where he was an ideal director because you never saw him on television. I've been paying attention to such things for a long time, and I can't remember the last DCI (and yes, I know that the position is now D/CIA) who didn't live on TV. The talk of Petraeus as a shameless self-promoter seemed to end the day he went to Langley.

Which is where we get to the poontang part of the story.

Let me start by saying that I haven't read Paula Broadwell's biography of Petraeus, the retrospectively hilarious titled All In yet. I plan on starting it today. But even here, the general was a strategic genius. If you want a fawning book written about you, I can think of no better way of ensuring that than to give your biographer a good, deep dicking. One can only wonder how much different history would be if Nixon tried it.

Of course, Petraeus had to resign. As sad as this whole stupid mess is, he had no other practical choice. But the narrative is retarded and misleading.

The great Stephen Kinzer - whose books All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq you really should read because they're awesome - wrote an interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times about former CIA director Allen Dulles.

As it happens, Dulles was boning everybody, including during his tenure as DCI. While David Petraeus had one (or maybe two) affairs, Dulles - according to his sister - had "at least a hundred." Among his conquests was the friggin' Queen of Greece!

And while we're on the topic, if Petraeus' appreciation of strange pussy compromises national security to the point that it demands resignation, why wasn't Bill Clinton's?

In his 2000 memoir, Midnight Diaries, former Russian president Boris Yeltsin wrote that he knew about Monica Lewinsky's cocksucking frenzy with Clinton before the American people did, and actually warned him about it! If that doesn't compromise national security, then Barack Obama can start selling America's nuclear launch codes to Bangledesh without fear.

This story wouldn't be complete without Republican new media types - who spent five years giving David Petraeus an even more thorough (to say nothing of public) ball-washing than Paula Broadwell ever did - inserting themselves into it. They're indignant that Petraeus won't testify before Congress this week about Benghazi, because of course he's the only person at CIA who has even heard of it. Assholes.

But there's one important fact that I think everyone is overlooking in this tawdry tale. Paula Broadwell is pretty fucking hot, especially for a 40-year-old Army chick. I'd most assuredly hit it, and I think that's really the most important thing to remember here.

Senor Citizen: Dan's Unlikely Journey

Blaming the debacle in Iraq on the Coalition Provisional Authority is far from fair. Because Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and President Bush all decided that the State Department was going to be frozen out of the post-war occupation and because there never was any planning for the occupation at the Department of Defense, the whole adventure was doomed from the very start.

The history now pretty clearly shows that the White House and DoD didn't seem to think that a long-term occupation was necessary. Rumsfeld and Cheney seemed to think that they could hand the entire country over to Ahmed Chalibi and everything would be fine, despite a decade's worth of warnings from State and the CIA that Chalabi was as dishonest and corrupt as an Iraqi could be without being a blood relative of Saddam's.

Granted, that didn't stop everyone in the Bush Administration from blaming their proconsul, L. Paul Bremmer for everything that went wrong. Read any of their memoirs. The one recurring theme is "Our ridiculous lack of any planning whatsoever had nothing to do with it. It was all Bremmer's fault!"

If you've read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's magnificent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone - and if you haven't, you really should - you know that the CPA was its own, completely separate disaster. It was staffed from top to bottom with Republican political hacks that were determined to engage in weird social experiments directly out of the American Enterprise Institute. For example, Bremmer saw to it that the Iraqi people had a flat tax before they had reliable electricity. It was the single most unserious occupation operation in American history.

Of course, that's not why some 4,500 American soldiers and innumerable Iraqi civilians died after Saddam was driven from power. That was directly caused by CPA Orders Number 1 and 2, which de-Baathified the Iraqi civil service and disbanded both the military and police. As a consequence an insurgency that was estimated to be about 3,000 immediately ballooned to 300,000, or roughly twice as large as the U.S military presence in Iraq. Because the Americans were devoting their resources to finding weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist instead of providing security until it was too late, anarchy prevailed for the next four years.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's spokesman was Dan Senor. During his time in Iraq, he gave Rajiv Chandrasekaran one of the greatest quotes I've ever read.  "Off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq."

With a record like that, how could he not become a senior foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney? If you've been following Governor Romney's international travels this past week, you'll see that it's going swimmingly.

Mr. Senor, 41, is an unusual hybrid: He is a policy wonk, media maven, successful author and financier. He made headlines last weekend when he told reporters that if Israel launched a pre-emptive unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Romney “would respect” that decision, a claim Mr. Senor softened somewhat in a later statement.

For his part, Mr. Romney said in an address on Sunday that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons “must be our highest national-security priority,” but made no mention of an Israeli attack.

If in fact Mr. Senor used the word "pre-emptive" strike in regards to Iran, that's a cause for concern because it indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I've gone over this before, but it bears repeating. An attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would not, as a matter of both international law and common sense, be pre-emptive. Pre-emption rests entirely on the imminence of a threat. Since there wouldn't be a deployable weapon, let alone a stated threat that one would be used forthwith, the Iranian program does not pose an imminent threat.

Such a strike by Israel, the United States, or anyone else would meet the definition of a preventative war, and those are illegal under any reading of international law and tradition. President Eisenhower spoke eloquently when he said "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

The point is that pre-emption and prevention, despite what most Americans currently choose to believe, are not interchangeable. They are separate and distinct from one another. One is legal and righteous, the other is criminal. Someone who can reasonably be expected to hold a senior national security post in a potential Romney Administration should know the difference.

Then it got worse.

The trip has attracted its share of controversy. Mr. Romney departed from official U.S. policy and described Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel,” “culture.” Such a comment is “racist” and “shows a lack of knowledge,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.

From time to time,  conservative politicians will ward-heel their way over to Israel and promise that they'll move their embassies to Jerusalem when they get themselves elected. Canada's Joe Clark did this in 1979.

But, like Clark, they never actually do it, mostly because they get a good look at reality as soon as they take office. There isn't a Muslim country in the world that will accept foreign embassies in Jerusalem so long as that city's status remains unresolved. And we still have to deal with Muslim countries, mostly because there are so many of them and they have so much oil. You might not like that, but it remains a fact.

The Israelis never really expect said politicians to follow through on this stupid promise, but those politicians have their credibility damaged in Israel's eyes for having made it in the first place, as I'm sure the aforementioned Joe Clark will tell you. In making such a colossally stupid promise, you manage to pull off the impressive feat of enraging Muslims and Jews. And for what?

As for the "Palestinian culture" remark, not only was that an enormous foreign policy gaffe, it was incredibly idiotic as a domestic political matter. Romney's home state of Michigan is much closer than it has any business being. Because it has more Arabs per square foot than anywhere else in America, I'm pretty sure it won't be for much longer.

Not only was Romney himself born and raised in Michigan, Dan Senor himself was the communications director for the first and only Arab-American United States senator, Spencer Abraham ... of Michigan. If Mitt were to win the Wolverine State, his path to the White House become immeasurably easier, since he'd also probably pick up Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota with it.

The Governor then went on to praise Israel's health care system, citing all kinds of spending to GDP numbers and health outcomes, while ignoring that a central facet of it is, you guessed it, an individual mandate. As I said at the great and good Velociman's place this morning "If one created an individual mandate in the state one governed, suggested that his party campaign on Wyden-Bennett (which contained an individual mandate,) and then went on to praise a foreign health care system with an individual mandate without being asked ... Well, reasonable people might begin to suspect that one doesn't have a huge problem with individual mandates."

Everyone is still focusing on Romney's Olympic disaster in England, which was more funny than anything else. But what he did in Israel was worse by several degrees. They were not only entirely self-inflicted wounds, they were wounds of some consequence.

Look, I don't know if either of those gaffes were Senor's idea, but I do know that it's his job to stop Romney from making them. When his candidate is overseas (which I think is a brutally stupid thing to do in a modern campaign, anyway. The deepest wound John McCain inflicted on Obama four years ago was the "Celebrity" ad that used footage from the The One's Berlin visit.) Dan Senor's single biggest responsibility is to keep his fucking mouth shut! The single easiest way for a candidate to get himself in trouble is to make with the goddamned talkee-talk, especially when he's anyplace more foreign than Wayne County.

I don't take any pleasure in writing this. Whenever I've seen him on TV, Senor has struck me as a decent breed of cat. We're roughly the same age, we grew up in the same hometown (although I only learned that this morning,) we both have a deep interest in foreign policy, and we both have bad hair. The only difference between Dan Senor and I is that he has a great education, a cool job, a ton of money and a hot wife. Oh, and I never took part in destroying the Middle East.

Other than that, it's like we're connected at the soul.

But if you were still wondering why I think Mitt Romney's going to lose this election, the Israel trip is instructive.

Hey, how about we stay out of Syria?

If you've ever been curious as to when a proposed war is a really bad idea, consider the following. If people who can be reliably expected to oppose armed conflict in all of it's shapes and sizes find themselves in agreement with folks who think that there just aren't enough wars at any given time, that's as clear an indication as any that everyone has stopped thinking. And when people with lots of bombs stop thinking, no good ever comes of it.

That's pretty much what we're seeing today in regards to the continuing massacres of civilians in Syria. What's happening there is an outrage and affront to humanity's very dignity. And yes, Bashar al-Assad should be stuffed into an aluminium tube and dropped directly into Hell. I felt that way about his father when he bombed the city of Hama into rubble and paved it over.Those feelings are perfectly normal and, to be honest, I share them. The deliberate, wholesale slaughter of children by their own government is something not to be tolerated.

However, our being swept away by our emotions doesn't answer some fairly important questions, such as "Will foreign intervention make matters better or worse?" People as diverse as John McCain and everyone who opposed the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are unified in not even asking that question, let alone answering it.

Those who suggest that our (and that raises the important question of who "we" are) intervention will makes things better are generally silent about precisely how that will happen. No one is suggesting a ground invasion and a march to Damascus to topple the human monument to cruelty that is the Assad regime. They're just saying that we should bomb the shit out of them and arm the insurgency. After all, it worked in Libya, right?

Actually, that remains to be seen. I'm almost certain that the overthrow last year of Gaddafi regime is going to have unanticipated blowback over the next generation or so.

First, we still - a year after the fact - have no idea who the new government of Libya is or what they represent. We still know very little about their commitment to democracy, human rights, or where their sympathies lie in regards to the struggle against Islamist extremism. It remains entirely possible that NATO created a monster worse than the one that we had.

Second, while Muammar Gaddafi was a son-of-a-bitch, he was increasingly our son-of-a-bitch. Like Assad, Gaddafi was willing to play ball when it came to sharing intelligence and torturing America's terror suspects through the rendition process.

And exactly where did that get Gaddafi? Well, it got him bombed, deposed and ultimately murdered. Co-operating with the United States didn't stop Omar al-Bashir of Sudan from getting indicted by the International Criminal Court, did it? At some point, despots are going to understand that getting along with the West isn't good for their health.

All things being equal, I'm fine with that. The United States would be far better off today if they didn't get into bed with these monsters in the first place. The fact that it did is one of the primary reasons that Islamist militants are presently at war with America.

If, however, you get into bed with monsters and don't follow your word to the letter, everybody is going to be less inclined to trust you. A singular argument by Republicans against Jimmy Carter was that he damaged U.S foreign policy by not giving safe haven to the Shah of Iran after he was such a faithful ally for so many years.

More importantly, we have a pretty good idea of what a U.S or NATO intervention in Syria would look like. As Fareed Zakaria points out, Syria is too small a country with too many people for the insurgents to retreat. Nor is there a single leadership faction behind it, which means even if they did manage to topple Assad, there's a better than even chance that they'd immediately go to war with one another, just as happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. And that, one can assume, will kill more children than it saves.

Before I go further, I should point out that Syria is not unlike Iraq. A religious minority, the Alawites (an offshoot of the Shia), control the government and oppress the majority Sunnis. Remember what happened in Iraq when a domineering minority was overthrown? Who killed more kids, the American bombing or the sectarian war that followed?

What is now a low-level civil war in Syria is likely to explode if we get involved, and there will be no shortage of outsiders taking sides. If NATO acts to intervene on the side of the Sunni rebels, Russia, Iran and Iraq will  do everything they can to support their Alawite ally short of introducing their own ground forces, while Hezbollah will likely fight directly for them on the ground. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the United States will support the Sunni  insurgency. The Chinese will likely arm the highest bidder, which one should expect to be Assad. And then there's the question of if intervention would create an al-Qaeda in Syria, paradoxically fighting on our side.

Absent NATO (and let's be serious about this, massive numbers of American) ground troops, an all-out civil war will ensue in Syria, dwarfing anything that we've seen in Iraq thus far. As Mr. Zakaria points out, Syria would rapidly look like Lebanon did in the 1980s. And always remember, Syria intervened in Lebanon for a reason. You might not like that reason, but there was a logic behind it.

Henry Kissinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post this past Friday which makes other prescient points. There is a decided absence of consensus, both in the United States and the international community, about yet another war in a Muslim country. And after the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it isn't clear that the American military has the resources to bring a Syrian conflict to a conclusion that isn't far worse than it is now.

A full-scale civil war might not necessarily result in more babies being shot in the head at point-blank range, but it almost certainly will result in mass starvation of those babies and a refugee nightmare for the countries surrounding Syria. Where will those people flee to? Iraq? Lebanon? Turkey? Israel? Can they all go to the summer cottages of those calling for intervention in the first place? They might like being near a cool lake. But only on the weekends that you're not there, of course.

I don't want to minimize the horror of what happened in Houla. But I also refuse pretend that it's as simple as   "confront (ing) the meanness in this world", which is a simplistic and silly view of the world. And to suggest that anyone who prefers to think long and hard before making things worse is trafficking in "chronic misanthropic indifference" is nothing more than cheap propaganda, counter-productive, and likely to kill more innocent Syrian babies if it's even halfway successful, rather than less.

What some people on both sides of the political spectrum don't get is that war shouldn't be about talking points, particularly on the left, which spent the last decade decrying exactly that.

But if you have a head for selective war, may I suggest the following: Start campaigning for a military draft in all of the NATO countries. Asking American volunteers to get dead over the last line of a Bruce Springsteen song is pretty easy when you and your kids have no skin in the game. When you're willing to sacrifice the lives of your children in a mission that will almost certainly kill more Syrian children than it saves, you might be worthy of being taken seriously on foreign and military affairs.

If fighting universal evil in the world is the new raison d'etre of the Left and the Neocon Right, then maybe it's time you start dressing up your kids and teach them to march because there all kinds of it out there. If and when you're prepared to do that, I also expect you to stop the constant fucking whining about tax increases and domestic spending cuts that war demands.

War is a serious fucking business. And it if you ultimately want less of it, it should start being treated as such. If you want to go to war, Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught you one thing. You need need to expect to spend a lot more in blood and treasure than the "experts" say you will and you need to sacrifice something,

Nothing was more frustrating to me - and I've spent eight years saying this - than Republicans proclaiming that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the American way of life and that all that 99.5% of the population had to do to support "freedom" was enjoy their tax cuts and go shopping.

If progressives start picking up this mantra, we're all doomed as a society. Between them, there will be no end to wars that accomplish their stated ends, and no end to the debt they accumulate.

Unless war starts meaning something other than a partisan talking point, we're fucked.

Conservatism and me, part three: Foreign policy and war

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Don't Bomb Iran, Part Four: What Would War Look Like?

Make no mistake about it, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel, the United States, or both, would be an act of war. And it’s about time that we start thinking about what that war would look like.

There’s something else that needs to be clarified; the difference between a pre-emptive war and a preventative war. As a matter of both international law and national honor, it is an important distinction. Too often, a possible attack on the Iranian facilities is described as pre-emptive, just as the 2003 war in Iraq was.

Pre-emption requires an imminent threat – something so immediate that it cannot be ignored. This was the case when the Syrians and Egyptians massed their forces on their borders with Israel in June of 1967. Israel struck before it could be struck first, which is what constitutes a pre-emptive war. Interestingly, Menachem Begin, himself no flaming liberal, is said to have believed that even the Six Day War didn’t qualify as pre-emptive, although Begin is in the clear minority on this.

Barring an imminent threat, such wars are properly described as preventative.  As I’ve discussed earlier, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq are all examples of preventative war.

Barring an imminent threat, such wars are properly described as preventative.  As I’ve discussed earlier, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq are all examples of preventative war.

As this is being written, Iran has no imminent nuclear capability, as even the most hawkish of voices are prepared to concede. They seek war - without actually describing it as that - with the stated objective of preventing such a capability. By definition, this would make any such military action purely preventative in nature.

Let’s assume that – as currently seems likely – Israel unilaterally launches a preventative war against Iran.  Given the hardening, redundancy and reported dispersal or Iran’s nuclear facilities, there is little chance that such an air strike would accomplish its objective. It’s entirely possible that Tehran has duplicated enough of its program in major population centers that Israel wouldn’t hit, or in hardened areas that it can’t hit, that an attack wouldn’t even significantly set back the program.  We already know that Iran hasn’t made the same mistake that Iraq and Syria did, placing all of their eggs in one easily destroyed basket.

The Israeli air force would have to travel further without refuelling than it ever has before, hit more targets in a larger area than it has previously attempted, evade Iran’s formidable air defenses without losing too many of its pilots, and fly over several unfriendly countries just to get there and back.

Let’s further assume that Iran didn’t presume that strike had American authorization, which they almost certainly would. If Israeli fighter planes crossed the airspace of Jordan, Iraq or Saudi Arabia without defensive manoeuvres by those countries, or their warning Iran of those planes headed toward it, Tehran could properly assume that they were complicit.

That being the case, Iran could treat those nations, and especially the Saudis, as belligerents. The most obvious place for Tehran to launch a retaliatory strike would be the Saudi oilfields, which are well within the range of Iran’s conventional short-range missiles.  While the United States might be able to reopen an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz in short order, they would be unable to rebuild the Saudi oilfields anytime soon. The destruction of those fields, combined with even a temporary closure of the Strait would cause the world price of oil to double or triple overnight, crippling he world economy.

The Shiite populations in Iraq, the UAE and eastern Saudi Arabia would also likely explode, further destabilizing all three countries and further driving up the world price of oil.

Iran would almost certainly retaliate against Israel with its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies, who would rain missiles and motors down on Israeli population centers from Lebanon and Gaza. Israel would massively respond to both, causing mass civilian causalities, and losing whatever support Israel had left in Europe in the process.

Fearing domestic unrest, Turkey might break off diplomatic relations with Israel completely, and any chance of peace with Syria and Iraq would be gone forever. Indeed, “democratic Iraq” might actively start supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, giving both groups greater legitimacy than they enjoy today.

At this point, there would almost certainly multiple resolutions introduced before the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly condemning Israel, which the U.S would be hard-pressed to veto. China and Russia could use this as an excuse to not only violate the existing sanctions against Iran, but to publicly and massively resupply Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria.

The democracy movement in Iran would immediately evaporate, possibly for as long as a generation. The only thing that they hate more than the mullahs is foreign interference in their affairs, and the country – including the opposition - would rally around the government, just as it did after Saddam Hussein’s invasion.  It’s much more than noteworthy that the Iranian opposition has never spoken out against the nuclear program. That seems to suggest that Iran’s strategic situation demands a nuclear capability, and that strategic situation would be highlighted by an Israeli strike.

This would be the result of an attack that didn’t end the Iranian nuclear program, or even set it back very far, if it all.

The above, again, is premised on the idea that Iran doesn’t blame the United States for the attack, which it most definitely would.

Hezbollah, which has long thought to have more deeply penetrated America than al-Qaeda ever had, could attack civilian targets deep in the homeland  Mass shootings or bombings in shopping centers or mass transit in a dozen or so U.S cities – such as Israel has seen for decades – would result in economic and political anarchy in the United States.

The heavily rumoured relationship between Hezbollah and the Mexican drug cartels - which Fox News actually reports as fact - could become fully operational on the southern border, causing violent chaos in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The Mexican government would almost certainly fall in such an eventuality, creating mass refugees and even more violence.  

A total breakdown in homeland security, combined with skyrocketing oil prices, would cause the stock market to crash in ways that it hasn’t since September of 2008, when it lost half its value.

Unless he went to Congress for an declaration of war, Barack Obama would-be defeated for re-election by almost any Republican that isn’t Ron Paul. Either way, the United States would be committed to war.

The problem is that Iran is three times the size of Iraq or Afghanistan, the wars in which have demonstrably broken the American military. And even more than Iraq and Afghanistan, a war against Iran couldn’t be won solely by air power. Nor do I believe that you could dismantle the nuclear program from the air. There would have to be regime change, which necessarily requires boots on the ground.

Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran lacks a significant ethnic opposition to the regime that could be counted on to support the American invasion. The military resistance, and subsequent guerilla war, can be expected to be unlike anything American forces have seen since at least Vietnam.

After nearly a decade of almost constant deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan, you should expect large-scale desertion in the event of a war with Iran. Because of the sheer size of the country and its population, you couldn’t just rotate between the regular Army and the National Guard and Reserves.  You would need a draft, particularly given how weakened the professional military is after the last decade of constant deployment. The United States would also need to devote significant military resources to homeland security, particularly along the southern border.

It’s also possible that under such circumstances, Iran would transfer chemical weapons to their terrorist allies for use against the U.S, Israel, or both.

The U.S isn’t like “Old Europe”, which used to name its wars after how many decades it took to fight them. After about 18 months of serious combat, American popular support declines precipitously, particularly when there’s no clear path to victory in sight. Since Iran is more militarily advanced – and would have a more unified popular opposition to invasion - than either Iraq or Afghanistan did, it stands to reason that such a war would last longer, and inflict even more in the way of causalities.

As we saw during the Vietnam era, there could be massive civil unrest and anti-war agitation. That could be worse, if combined with anti-government protests against security measures by the Tea Party right. If those people don`t want to get patted down before getting on an airplane, it`s reasonable to assume they`d like it even less just to get groceries.

War has a trajectory all its own. If, in 2001, you suggested that the United States would be in Afghanistan or Iraq a decade later, without actually winning, most people would have condemned you as a fool. Those folks don`t look so foolish now.

For the last thirty years, policymakers have been planning warfare based almost entirely on the best possible scenarios.  It strikes me as well past time that we begin to consider how things can go terribly wrong, if only because over the last ten years, they have.

And you know what the worst case scenario is? That we spend all of that blood and treasure creating a fully democratic Iran that still decides it needs nuclear weapons, because the regional strategic calculus hasn`t changed at all.



Barring a really cool fight in the comments that I feel deserves its own post, this should be the end of my Iran series. I know that it was really long and didn't involve sweet, sweet pussy in any way. I appreciate your indulgence.