Azar Nafisi: “In other words, the main beneficiary of an attack on Iran would be the most militaristic and reactionary elements in the Iranian ruling hierarchy.” I’m afraid I don’t entirely understand the counterproposal:

The most effective war against the tyrants in Iran is through giving voice to the workers asking for their rights, to women fighting for equality and to students, journalists, writers and intellectuals fighting for freedom of expression.

To miss this opportunity not only would be disastrous for the Iranian people, it would have dire consequences for the United States and the world.

I’m all for it, I think, but what would it mean in practice? It seems to me that America’s practical ability to impact this situation gets overstated.

And, yes, obviously if Iran decides to bomb American nuclear facilities (or something) then fighting back should be on that table. It is worth noting that if Iranian agents blew up American nuclear facilities that we would presumably (and not wrongly) consider that to be a serious act of terrorism, as well as a legitimate casus belli.

The most annoying of all possible arguments:

“In hundreds of conversations I’ve had with Iranian intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists in recent years, I invariably encounter exasperation,” writes Danny Postel in Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, a recent addition to the Prickly Paradigm pamphlet series distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “Why, they ask, is the American Left so indifferent to the struggle taking place in Iran? Why can’t the Iranian movement get the attention of so-called progressives and solidarity activists here? Why is it mainly neoconservatives who express interest in the Iranian struggle?”

Obviously, most Americans simply don’t take a ton of interest in events abroad at all, which is a fairly unfortunate trend. Among those people who do take such interest, there’s simply no sign of indifference on the left to conditions in Iran. See, for example, Human Rights Watch’s Iran page. Or Amnesty International’s Iran page. The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center does stuff on Iran. So does the Feminist Majority Foundation. In short, roughly every organization on the left that you would expect to deal with human rights conditions in Iran does, in fact, speak out on Iranian human rights issues and try to improve them.

Here on this blog and others we’re also seeking to prevent a war with Iran that, as Garance Franke-Ruta points out, will, among other things, have the consequence of crushing the Iranian reform movement. Maybe I can write the “why are liberals such apologists for North Korea?” version of this book — I don’t have evidence to back my claims up, but, hey, who needs evidence?

Issues with Democrats aside, the goofball incoherence of Rudy Giuliani on the key national security issues of the day is worth noting:

Mr. King asked if Mr. Giuliani would agree that the Senate would have voted unanimously against the war if it were known that Mr. Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

“Yes, I guess,” he said, but he added that such a vote would say nothing about whether the war was right.

Giuliani says he thinks the war was right (obviously, he has a low opinion of Republican Senators) but that if he’d been president he would have invaded with “maybe 100,000 to 130,000 more” troops than Bush deployed even though no such volume of additional troops was available. “Of course there were mistakes,” according to Giuliani, which merely proves what a great man Bush is: “Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes.”

One quirk of American politics is that leading presidential candidates normally go into the campaign with little if any foreign policy experience. Most, however, at least recognize this as a problem and try to study up as part of the campaign effort. Giuliani comes to us as a rare duck — a candidate whose signature issue is national security but who doesn’t know anything about national security, and therefore won’t study. Result: Nonsense, combined with temperamental authoritarianism.

Even the liberal Ken Pollack doesn’t seem super-psyched about all options being on the table:

I wish I could tell you that it is impossible, but I don’t think it is. I think a war with Iran would be very messy and would cost us a lot more than we would gain. While many members of the Administration agree with that, others do not, and some seem willing to risk it to accomplish other goals. I am very concerned both by the President’s military moves toward Iran (like moving a second aircraft carrier and Patriot anti-missile batteries to the Persian Gulf, and ordering the U.S. military to use “all necessary means” to shut down Iranian activities in Iraq) and his unnecessarily threatening rhetoric toward them. Some degree of quiet pressure on Iran to stop their more damaging operations in Iraq could be useful, and the Iranians probably would back down under those circumstances; but the President’s policy risks engaging Iran’s nationalist pride, its strategic interests, and its real fear of the United States.

For those just joining us, the point at issue here is Kenneth Baer’s assertion that “The reason why Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are all refusing to take the military option off the table is because there is no credible expert on Iran, nonproliferation, or any combination of the two who would advise them to do so.” Nevertheless, many experts — Pollack, Rand Beers, Joseph Cirincione, Ray Takeyh, Vali Nasr, etc. — seem to me to feel that military strikes would be counterproductive and that threatening them is useless at best, harmful at worst.

Here’s a portion of an email that went out from Rand Beers:

Military action against Iran is unwise

There is widespread agreement that although some within the administration may be pushing for war, a strike on Iran would run significantly counter to U.S. interests in the current environment. Military action would spark even greater anti-US violence in Iraq. Iran might also escalate violence in the wider region and attack American targets using its own agents or Hezbollah. There would almost certainly be a negative public reaction from the Islamic world, and that reaction would circumscribe the ability of Arab governments to work with us on issues of common interest such as Iraq or the Middle East peace process. Further, we cannot guarantee that an air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would effectively set back the nuclear program. Based on the current state of that program, even a successful military operation sustained over many days might only set back the program by as little as two to four years.

Tough, no-nonsense diplomacy with Iran is working


This administration’s choices have often been more about posturing and rhetoric than effective engagement. Sadly, these actions are also inadvertently or consciously escalatory, possibly pushing America down a path toward a conflict that we neither want nor need. Following Ahmedinejad’s humiliating defeat in the Iranian elections in December, he was ferociously attacked (including in newspapers associated with Supreme Leader Khamenei) for having brought down sanctions on Iran. There is now a vigorous debate in Tehran over whether Iran’s nuclear program is worth the risk of additional international opprobrium. The diplomatic “carrots and sticks” seem to be working. Unfortunately, the administration’s ham-handed military posturing and rhetoric risk torpedoing these efforts and offering Ahmedinejad a reprieve. We should be fostering this debate with a mix of sanctions and diplomacy, not undermining it.

Beers, we’ll recall, has worked on the National Security Council under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Nevertheless, Ken Baer keeps assuring me that there are no experts out there who think airstrikes should be off the table.

People may have missed it, but in comments yesterday Marty Lederman left the following remarks with regard to presidential war powers:

1. The War Powers Resolution does not prohibit any initiation of hostilities. Section 2, which Jim Henley quotes, is merely hortatory — it expresses Congress’s view of when the President can act unilaterally as a matter of constitutional authority. It does not itself impose any limitations. (And as Dellinger pointed out, *everyone* agrees that section 2 is inadequate as a descriptive matter, although there’s a lot of dispute about how far the President’s constitutional powers extend.)

2. The War Powers Resolution does require the President to get congressional approval if hostilities last beyond 90 days. The OLC Opinion that Matt links concluded (controversially) that appropriations statutes for Kosovo provided the requisite congressional approval for going beyond 90 days there. A similar question would arise if an Iranian conflict goes beyond 90 days; but we’re not there yet, obviously.

3. The big question here is not the War Powers Resolution, but the Constitution. What sorts of hostilities can the President initiate unilaterally under the Constitution? Matt is right that the Clinton Administration took a very broad view — see Haiti, Bosnia Bosnia and Kosovo, for starters; we basically concluded that congressional pre-approval is only required for a complete, or total, war (see footnote 5 of the Bosnia opinion, hinting that the Korean War might have been unlawful because Congress had not authorized it in advance).

The Bush Administration view is broader than that, if that’s possible. There is no doubt Bush believes he has the authority to initiate all-out war with Iran, although of course the initial forays will be more limited than that (e.g., “surgical” strikes) — which even the Clinton Administration would have viewed as constitutionally permissible.

So as a *practical* matter, the issue is determined — the President believes he has the power, and he won’t hesitate to exercise it.

Unless.

Unless Congress actually passes a statute, probably over Bush’s signature, that would *prohibit* military action against Iran. Bush might go ahead anyway, in the teeth of such a statute, because in this respect his views of executive authority go way beyond Clinton’s. But that truly would be an unprecdented constitutional showdown.

And it, too, is hypothetical, because Congress won’t enact such a statute.

Therefore, what’s most interesting about this whole incident is Hillary Clinton taking a narrower view of presidential authority than Bill did as President — that *any* use of force against Iran requires congressional approval! Frankly, I’m surprised she has expressed such a view. Be interesting to see how Edwards and Obama respond.

Clearly, as long as George W. Bush is president, I think presidential war powers, like presidential powers in all respects, should be as sharply limited as possible. On the actual merits of the issue, I’m not really sure how I think the congress-president balance in such matters should go. As a general matter, I tend to think parliamentary systems as seen in Britain or Canada are superior to our method of government. A system like that puts less formal restraint on the head of government in terms of his ability to act, but also makes it much easier to dump a head of government whose policies have failed and whose leadership is widely considered inept.

Ken Baer, author of Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton, an excellent sympathetic history of the DLC, on Iran policy: “The reason why Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are all refusing to take the military option off the table is because there is no credible expert on Iran, nonproliferation, or any combination of the two who would advise them to do so.”

Really? None? Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and author of two books on Iran along with Vali Nasr, another CFR fellow and author of three books on Iran or Shia politics, think we should eschew military threats in favor of engagement. Joseph Cirincione, formerly senior associate and director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and currently something or other at the Center for American Progress, thinks there’s no military option whatsoever here. Baer vents some more:

And as for those who doubt the strategy of no nukes, no options off the table, my only question is: what is that based on? Again, is there any person with real experience with the Iranians, diplomacy, or nonproliferation who has argued that? If so, let’s hear it. But – to my mind – rightly, the major candidates are listening to seasoned experts on this issue, and are thus sticking with the above formulation of no nuclear Iran, no options off the table.

With all due respect, it seems to me that Democratic candidates are saying what Baer thinks they should say because this is what people like Baer — consultants and speechwriters — are saying they should say. Takeyh, Nasr, and Cirincione aren’t obscure figures; the only way you could reach the conclusion that all credible experts think military options should be on the table would be if you hadn’t made any effort to canvass the experts. Contrary to Baer’s assertions, one can think the military option should be off the table without either being a pacifist or having one’s head in the sand about the potentially problematic consequences of a nuclear Iran. The problem with the military option is that it’s more likely to speed up Iranian acquisition of a nuclear bomb than it is to halt it. Thus, if you’re concerned about an Iranian nuclear weapon — as opposed to, say, “looking tough on defense” — you’ll favor policies likely to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, rather than policy likely to “look tough” while failing.