Norman Podhoretz’s Big Sandy

John McCain made a fool of himself during a campaign stop not long ago. Asked what to do about Iran’s nuclear development program and its president’s well-publicized desire to “wipe Israel off the map,” the Republican senator channeled the Beach Boys’ hit, “Barbara Ann,” amending the lyrics to chant, “Bomb, bomb, bomb — bomb, bomb Iran.”

If you missed his performance, you can catch it on YouTube by clicking <here>.

McCain may have hoped that this bit of “straight talk” would boost his poll numbers, but he has so far been disappointed. The American electorate, judging from its ever-diminishing support for the Iraq war in public opinion surveys, is unlikely to set aside its misgivings to take on a presidential candidate who wants to take on Iran.

But leave it to Norman Podhoretz to barge in where others tread warily now that neoconservative dreams of “remaking” the Middle East have come a cropper along the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates.

His latest opus, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” appears in the June issue of Commentary magazine, whose previous sponsor, the American Jewish Committee, may be breathing a sigh of relief that it divested itself of bomb-thrower before it unleashed this latest salvo. [Click <here> for the article.]

Originally presented in April as an address “in somewhat different form” at a conference sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” amounts to a seal of hechsher — approval that an item is kosher — for ideas (some neoconservative, some plain lunatic) that have been floating around on the Jewish right since before last autumn’s midterm Congressional elections.

On March 22, this blog posted my entry, “Tehran Willies” [read it by clicking <here>], summarizing some choice examples which counseled President Bush that bombing Iran would save the neoconservative movement and/or secure his place in history as “God’s agent.” By then, the Republicans’ loss of the Senate and House, combined with steadily plummeting poll numbers for the president and the Iraq war, appeared to have put a damper on the White Houses’ ability to launch another war of choice.

But neoconservatives pride themselves on disdaining public opinion. True to the Trotskyist origins of many of the movement’s founders, they have never disavowed their belief that they constitute a “vanguard” — if not of the proletariat, then of US foreign and military policy strategists. And though none of their sons and daughters and grandchildren are serving frontline tours in their Iraq debacle, it fazes them not one whit to propose trudging even further into the Big Sandy, where yet more American lives — albeit those of other Americans, as well as unfortunate local inhabitants — will be sacrificed.

“The Case for Bombing Iran” has many classic earmarks of Podhoretz polemic: the portentous assertion that a doomsday clock is about to strike midnight and the fate of Western civilization hanging in the balance if no one pays heed to his warning; the clarion invocation of “American will,” seen as currently flabby and wavering, but which can triumph over any deficits of treasure and materiel that may be hobbling his call to arms; and crocodile tears for the innocents who may happen to be in harm’s way when a “responsible” America finally awakens from its sloth to save them (and civilization) from a fate which he assures us is worse than death itself.

But also on view are signs of a certain calcification of the polemical faculty.

Take, for example, his use of the term “Islamofascism.” We are now, Podhoretz informs us, engaged in World War IV — number III having been the Cold War. And we are told that, as in the forty-year confrontation with the Soviet Union, “the war we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of Communism ….”

As I noted in a lengthy essay for the Autumn 2006 issue of the Jewish Peace Fellowship’s newsletter, Shalom [available on this blog by clicking <here>], “Islamofascism” is a term devoid of substantive intellectual content and useless for any serious analysis. Rather, it is an epithet, like “Judeo-Bolshevism,” “imperialist lackey,” “capitalist roader,” etc., designed to short circuit thought by arousing visceral fear and loathing. The French describe this sort of verbiage as la langue de bois — literally, “the wooden tongue”; more felicitously translated as “cant” — and it is disheartening to see Podhoretz’s polemical talents degenerate to this level.

More striking to observe is the atrophy of his reasoning by historical analogy. Renaming the Cold War “World War III” is an interesting rhetorical maneuver. By doing so, Podhoretz evidently means to conjure up images of the national mobilization and sacrifice necessary to confront the challenges he posits the West faces from a nuclear-capable Iran. Moreover, he invokes the legacy of Ronald Reagan who, with “the grace of God [and] the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain … we won” that war.

But before joining Podhoretz to enlist in World War IV, it is instructive to look more closely Reagan’s legacy. Like Bush Jr., the Gipper made a disastrous foray into the Middle East, when in 1983 he sent U.S. troops to Lebanon as peacekeepers. After a Marine barracks was destroyed by a suicide truck bomb, with the loss of 241 American service personnel, Reagan in short order withdrew the remaining military contingent. In our day, right-wing bloviators would call this a policy of “cut and run” — except that it was one of their political heroes who did the cutting and running.

Obscured, too, in Podhoretz’s rendition of Reagan’s conduct of the Cold War is the inconvenient fact that following a thoroughly bollixed proxy war in Nicaragua — during which, at one point, his national security advisor personally hand-delivered a cake to Tehran’s mullahs — Reagan thereafter essentially relied on negotiation in dealing with the Soviet “evil empire.”

If, indeed, Reagan “won” the Cold War, then it ended not with a bang of “shock and awe” cruise-missile barrage on the Kremlin, but rather with a simper of broad smiles and hearty handshakes exchanged with Mikhail Gorbachev. Similarly, Reagan’s predecessor, Richard Nixon, wound down World War III’s Asian front by engaging in much the same strategy (minus the backslapping) with Mao Tse-tung. (There is, of course, the inconvenient matter of 90,000 American and countless Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives sacrificed in what is now almost universally regarded as an ill-conceived and unwinnable military conflict that Nixon nonetheless continued even after he “opened China” and bequeathed to his successor to wind up in a flurry of helicopter airlifts from the U.S. embassy in what was then Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City …)

What Podhoretz’s analogy fails to acknowledge is that whereas the first two world wars were conducted as head-on armed contests between competing states, the central opposing powers of “WWIII” did everything in their power to avoid such direct confrontation. He confuses rhetorical preludes to negotiation with battle orders, and he does so with little concern for the price that others might have to pay for his tin ear.

So, too, with Podhoretz’s call to World War IV against Iran.

For the moment, President Bush — though, according to recent reports, not necessarily Vice President Richard Cheney — has stopped rattling his saber and is calling upon Europe, Russia and China to support stiffened sanctions against Iran for refusing to halt its nuclear development program and allow unhindered inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Podhoretz has no use for sanctions. “As it happens,” he writes, “sanctions have rarely worked in the past” — purposefully ignoring the fact that Saddam Hussein dismantled his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs in response to the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq during the 1990s, which is why no WMD have been found in Iraq during the five years after our invasion.

“Worse yet,” Podhoretz continues, “[sanctions] have usually ended up hurting the hapless people of the target country while leaving the leadership unscathed.” On this, paradoxically, he and elements of the wackadoodle left agree. One need only recall the prewar outcries against the sanctions regime for depriving Iraqi children of medicines, milk and clean water, and unconfirmed (and still unverified) estimates of tens of thousands of resulting deaths. Such arguments hold water only if one considers the death toll from sectarian violence unleashed in the wake of our military overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime a lesser or worse form of violence than the sanctions regime — as, by inference, Podhoretz evidently does.

However unwilling Podhoretz is to admit that sanctions may have worked in pre-invasion Iraq, he nonetheless circuitously acknowledges that U.S. military action there has seriously undermined this nation’s capacity to confront Iran with an ultimate demonstration of American “will.” He writes:

Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran’s nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs.

But then again, maybe not.

Acknowledging that “it would be foolish to discount any or all of these scenarios,” Podhoretz concedes — grudgingly — that opponents of his proposed bombing campaign possibly have a point in predicting that “shock and awe” alone might not topple the Iranian regime — any more than it did Saddam Hussein’s.

On the contrary, [opponents of a bombing campaign] are certain that all Iranians, even the democratic dissidents, would be impelled to rally around the flag. And this is only one of the worst-case scenarios they envisage. To wit: Iran would retaliate by increasing the trouble it is already making for us in Iraq. It would attack Israel with missiles armed with non-nuclear warheads but possibly containing biological and/or chemical weapons. There would be a vast increase in the price of oil, with catastrophic consequences for every economy in the world, very much including our own. The worldwide outcry against the inevitable civilian casualties would make the anti-Americanism of today look like a love-fest.

Strip away the rhetorical evasions shot throughout Podhoretz’s essay and here is the train of logic: We shouldn’t apply sanctions because sanctions hurt innocent civilians while leaving the leadership intact. But a bombing campaign brings with it no assurance that Iran’s leadership will be toppled — or that it won’t retaliate in Iraq or against Israel, the U.S. and the world.

Rarely has the difference between an armchair general and a bona fide military strategist been on plainer view. Podhoretz, the hawk, has only entry strategies. There are no exits in his Hobbesian universe. On to Tehran! — even though there can be no guarantee that resorting to violence, with its attendant costs in blood, treasure, chaos and collateral damage, will eventually bring peace.

For Norman Podhoretz, there is only war. There is a word to describe this kind of worldview. That word is madness.

— Adam Simms

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“America’s Moral Menopause”

That’s the title of an article in the April 19 on-line edition of al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading daily newspaper.

The article starts off:

For almost 200 years, the US has claimed the moral high ground in world affairs. As it prospered, it looked on a wretched global scene of war, poverty, dictatorship, conquest, exploitation, colonial rule and the denial of human rights. Imbued with a new sense of global power following allied victories in World War I and World War II, the US soon changed from the acclaimed position of moral guru to that of the scion of imperial power. When the US withdraws from Iraq in defeat it will leave the Middle East/Gulf region in a state of unparalleled chaos and instability, a political vacuum remaining that not even massive US military presence in the region could fill. It has unleashed forces it cannot control and is trying to contain them by maintaining a decrepit status quo. The short-lived American empire is inexorably entering its period of political and moral menopause. It would do the US, and the turbulent world it has created, well if it retreated from its failed ideology of neo-conservatism into an era of neo- isolationism.

I never thought I’d find in al-Ahram with which to agree. But that’s what six years of George W. Bush can do to you.

The entire article is here.

— David Gradis

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Iran Watch: Tehran Willies

George W. Bush may have gotten a thumpin’ in November’s midterm elections, but there are signs that the Bourbons in and around the White House have forgotten nothing and learned nothing from their Iraq quagmire, and have now set their sights on Iran. Chief among this clueless crowd are their cheerleaders among our domestic neocons and their extreme hard-right Israeli acolytes who are now beating their war drums for the U.S. to make the same mistake all over again.

Exhibit A. Joshua Muravchik’s article in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy entitled “Operation Comeback,” which is cast in the form of a memo “To: My Fellow Neoconservatives” about “How to Save the Neocons.”

Early on, Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, acknowledges that both the Bush administration and the neocons “were glib about how Iraqis would greet liberation.” But nothing, it seems, is capable of defeating neocon hubris. Rather than finding that experience a reason to display greater humility — much less to call for scaling back or pulling out of Iraq — he’s off to launch the next war.

“Make no mistake,” Muravchik half prophesies, half prescribes, “President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office . . . Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there.” And what role should neoconservatism’s armchair generals play in preparing for Armageddon? Enlist their sons and daughters in the military? Nah. Cheerlead from the sidelines, as they have always done, of course: “We need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes.”

Neocons pride themselves on being “realists,” no matter how cold-blooded and crackpot their so-called “realism” may be, and so Muravchik seems almost rational when compared with his Israeli counterparts. Take for example Exhibit B: Michael Freund, an aide to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose essay, “A Faith-Based Appeal to President Bush,” appeared in New York’s Jewish Press on Nov. 1.

Writing to the Decider as “one man of faith to another,” Freund apparently figures that an administration given to faith-based science and faith-based economics might just as easily adopt a faith-based foreign policy, too.

“I appeal to you now . . . ,” Freund wrote, “please strike Iran hard with military force, and dismantle their nuclear weapons program before it is too late.

“I know you believe, as I do, that God guides the destiny of men and of nations. And I know you believe, just as I do, that He raised you up to the helms of power precisely at this critical period, to serve as His agent and His instrument in this world.”

After advising “God’s agent” not to pay attention to “the opinion-mongers at The New York Times,” Freund reassures “His instrument”: “The one and only verdict — the one that really, truly counts — is the one penned in Heaven, by He Who gave each of us life. It is to Him, and Him alone, that we will all have to answer. . .

“Remember the promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis chap. 12: ‘I will bless those that bless you, and those that curse you I shall curse.’

“Note that when it comes to standing with Israel and the Jewish people, there is no middle ground. God delineates two categories and two categories only: those who bless Israel and those who curse it.”

Freund, however, need not worry — if Seymour Hersh’s article, “The Next Act,” in The New Yorker’s Nov. 17 issue is accurate. Heeding the adage that God helps those who help themselves, Israel apparently is up to its elbows in “helping” the Bush administration with Iran.
Item: Hersh reports that Israel is providing a Kurdish resistance group with “equipment and training” to make undercover raids into Iran (though, he notes, Jerusalem denies any involvement).

Item: Israeli personnel have cooperated with U.S. counterparts to station radiation-detection equipment close to Iranian sites suspected of producing nuclear-weapons components (though no appreciable radioactivity has been detected).

Item: Last summer Israel passed along a report that its agents operating in Iran had determined that the Iranians had produced and tested a device to trigger a nuclear explosion.
A former U.S. intelligence officer told Hersh that the Israeli tip, though sensational, was unverifiable: “We don’t know who the Israeli source is . . . there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site?”

Nonetheless, the former official noted, hardliners within the White House latched onto the Israeli report as proving “the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track” in developing a nuclear weapon.

But by far the most revealing insight contained in Hersh’s article is a quote from Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy defense minister, who in November acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post that the greatest threat Israel faces at the moment is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mouth, rather than Iran’s nuclear development program. Said Sneh (quoting from Hersh):

“The danger isn’t so much Ahmadinejad’s deciding to launch an attack but Israel’s living under a cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction. . . . Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will . . . I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”

In 2003, the Bush administration stampeded Congress and compliant mainstream news media into going to war with Iraq after Colin Powell flashed photos of “mobile WMD laboratories” to the UN General Assembly. When the US military finally caught up with those “laboratories,” they turned out to be trailers — the kind that could have been shipped back to the States and retrofitted to provide housing in New Orleans for homeless refugees from Hurricane Katrina.

What the Bush administration, the neocons and jittery Israelis will never acknowledge, and what all too many American seem only vaguely to remember, is that there were no weapons of mass destruction in those trailers because Saddam Hussein had dismantled whatever WMD programs he’d had under the grinding pressure of a decade of internationally imposed economic sanctions.
True, the sanctions regime was porous, subject to corruption on the part of many of those nations that signed on to restrict or forbid trade with Iraq, and took a heavy toll on ordinary Iraqis. But it worked. Neocons and Israeli hardliners will never acknowledge this last fact because their worldviews are at once simplistic and apocalyptic.

If Iran produces a bomb, it could be a real danger to regional and world peace, given the regime currently ruling that nation. But before the U.S. or anyone else decides to launch another war in order to respond to that possibility, we would do well to remember — and to remind the White House and Congress — that nonviolence, in the form of sanctions, made it unnecessary to go to war with Iraq to dismantle its weapons program. And that the only thing we have accomplished by going to war in Iraq is to make this troubled world a more dangerous place.

— Adam Simms