Robert Farley observes:

For the last two years, we have justified putting a missile defense system in Eastern Europe explicitly around the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. In addition to the extraordinary financial costs, this project has resulted in increased Russian hostility to the United States and to Russia’s neighbors. And are we now to believe that this expensive and unpopular system is justified by the need to protect Poland from Iranian ballistic missiles armed with conventional warheads?

Naturally, though, the exorbitant financial cost of the program counts as a point in its favor. The US would never want to build something cheap, useless, and incredibly damaging to our relationship with Russia. But since the missile defense initiatives are so damn costly, they’re also incredibly profitable to the people who build them, and thus to the members of congress who get their campaign contributions and to the think tankers who they support. The best way to kill this initiative would be a scientific breakthrough that allowed its goals to be achieved cheaply and with some efficacy. If that was on hand, diplomatic considerations just might win out.

It should be kept in mind, of course, that George Bush and Dick Cheney weren’t the only ones running around hyping the Iranian nuclear threat all out of proportion to reality. I recall, for example, the March 13, 2007 “New Dem Dispatch” scolding those of us who were too enthusiastic about the idea of diplomacy with Iran:

But let’s not get carried away. Iran still poses a major threat to global stability, regional peace, and U.S. interests. Tehran’s serial defiance of U.N. mandates to stop developing nuclear weapons capabilities is a major challenge to the world’s nonproliferation system. And its strong financial and material support for Hezbollah and Hamas makes it the number one state sponsor of Middle East terrorism.

Oh, well. And of course there were Ken Baer’s antics over the summer.

Bush on the NIE: ” I have said Iran is dangerous, and the NIE doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world.”

Indeed.

One more quick point on the Iran NIE. There’s much less new material here than the media reaction would suggest. In particular, the International Atomic Energy Agency has been making the point that there’s no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program for some time. They’ve just been subject to a lot of derision and getting ignored. In general, the entire framing of the Iranian issue has been centered on people ignoring the difference between a country pursuing a nuclear energy research program that would generate information that would be useful in building a nuclear weapon, and a country pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

When the Bush administration launched Operation Ivy and decided that the issue was Iranian “knowledge,” the White House was in effect acknowledging that there was no weapons program on hand to complain about.

At any rate, it seems to have been considered okay to ignore the IAEA’s reports on the grounds that the UN is icky or the head of the IAEA is an Arab or both, so maybe now that the US Intelligence Community is saying it too, people will listen.

UPDATE: Okay. On reflection, there is a difference between “no evidence” of a nuclear program and an affirmative conclusion of no nuclear program. My point is just that if last week someone had been going on about “the Iranian nuclear program” and you’d asked that person why he was so sure there even was an Iranian nuclear program, you’d have been dismissed as a fringy DFH, even though the IAEA had been trying to publicize its findings for some time.

From Rand Beers and Jon Wolfsthal, people worth listening to.

Every time I think nothing will surprise me anymore, the Bush administration manages to take my breath away all over again. Consider the staggering dishonesty with which Dick Cheney has been trying to mislead the American people about our knowledge of the alleged Iranian nuclear program. Here’s Dick Cheney six weeks ago:

We have the inescapable reality of Iran’s nuclear program; a program they claim is strictly for energy purposes, but which they have worked hard to conceal; a program carried out in complete defiance of the international community and resolutions of the U.N. Security Council. Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. The world knows this. The Security Council has twice imposed sanctions on Iran and called on the regime to cease enriching uranium. Yet the regime continues to do so, and continues to practice delay and deception in an obvious attempt to buy time.

As Michael Cohen says “if one looks at the language of the NIE, one could theoretically argue that Cheney didn’t directly lie here. For example, Iran’s “civilian” nuclear program continues and yes Iraq was pursuing technology that could be used to develop nukes . . . but of course wasn’t.” Indeed, the striking thing about this is the extent to which looking back at Cheney’s statement he’s tried very carefully to avoid directly contradicting the NIE while crafting phrases that are clearly designed to cause the listener to draw the precise wrong conclusion.

It’s not as if Cheney read the NIE and decided he had some reason to believe it was incorrect. Rather, he read it, decided he’d better not contradict it, but also decided that bottom line conclusions about how Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program were inconvenient, and thus decided to talk around that minor point and try to get the American people confused about what’s happening. Stunningly cynical and yes I’m resolving once again to never be stunned.

Barack Obama says:

By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program
four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy. The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president’s suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force.

There’s a very subtle dig here at Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, noting that both of them, unlike you or I or Barack Obama, had access to the classified version of the 2002 NIE on Iraq, a document that debunked substantial elements of the administration’s case for war, but which neither Clinton nor Edwards (nor a great many other members of congress) bothered to read before voting to authorize the use of force. Meanwhile, the John Edwards says:

The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney’s rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war. The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy. This is exactly the reason that we must avoid radical steps like the Kyl-Lieberman bill declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war. And it’s why I have proposed that we pursue a comprehensive diplomatic approach instead.

Typically, the dig here is less subtle. What’s more, it seems appropriate. Keep in mind that the contents of this NIE have been known to the Bush administration for over a year. Under the circumstances, the push for Kyl-Lieberman and similar measures looks an awful lot like a deliberate effort to change the subject away from Iran’s alleged nuclear program specifically because the main actors in the administration knew their case on this point was about to collapse. Democrats who voted for Kyl-Lieberman look, under the circumstances, likes dupes at best.

The Bush administration has proclaimed a doctrine of unilateral preemption as a core part of its National Security Strategy. The limits of this approach are demonstrated daily in Iraq, where the United States is bearing the burden for security, reconstruction, and reform essentially on its own. Yet the world cannot afford to look the other way when faced with the prospect, as in Iraq, of a brutal ruler acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Addressing this danger requires a different strategy, one that maximizes the chances of early and effective collective action. In this regard, and in comparison to the changes that are taking place in the area of intervention for the purposes of humanitarian protection, the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.

It’s not the most scintillating paragraph ever written, but it sure is a provocative claim. And, indeed, it’s all the more provocative for the fact that one author was the highly-regarded Anne-Marie Slaughter and the other was Lee Feinstein, currently heading the Hillary Clinton campaign’s foreign policy shop and certainly in line for a fairly important post in a Hillary Clinton administration.

The article in question appeared in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs and I hope people will be able to convince the magazine to make the article available for free online since it’s of considerable public interest in light of Feinstein’s role. Thus far, the other Presidential contenders haven’t seen fit to agree with John Edwards that unilateral preventive war should be discarded as a tool of non-proliferation policy, but they haven’t seen fit to agree with him, either. Hillary and (especially) Bill Clinton have been attempting to muddy the waters on the question of what they thought about Iraq back in 2003, but the best evidence available from their conduct back then would be that they are supporters of unilateral prevention.

Feinstein’s views as expressed in this article seem to offer further confirmation of that. Particularly telling are his ideas of how international institutions and international law fit into the picture:

The contentious issue is who decides when and how to use force. No one nation can or should shoulder alone the obligation to prevent a repressive regime from acquiring WMD. Although the Security Council, still reeling from the Iraq crisis last March, now seems more interested in papering over its differences than in tackling these questions, it remains the preferred enforcer of collective measures. The unmatched legitimacy that the un lends to Security Council actions makes it easier for member states to carry them out and harder for targeted governments to evade them by playing political games. On the other hand, rifts within the council allow states to pursue WMD to advance their programs, leaving individual nations to take matters into their own hands, which further erodes the stature and credibility of the United Nations.

Given the Security Council’s propensity for paralysis, alternative means of enforcement must be considered. The second most legitimate enforcer is the regional organization that is most likely to be affected by the emerging threat. After that, the next best option would be another regional organization, such as NATO, with a less direct connection to the targeted state but with a sufficiently broad membership to permit serious deliberation over the exercise of a collective duty. It is only after these options are tried in good faith that unilateral action or coalitions of the willing should be considered.

This seems like a longwinded way of saying nothing. International organizations are very important and we should always work through them except in those instances when doing so might require us to do anything other than exactly what we wanted to do in the first place. For all the words, their guidelines turn out to be no guidelines at all. Force should only be used under such and such occasions and the appropriate group to decide whether or not the conditions apply is either the UN or a local security organization or an out-of-area organization or else unilateral action. Nice work if you can get it, but if applied universally it’s just a recipe for endless war and universal chaos.

But one assumes that like Bush-style prevention, this isn’t meant to be applied universally, it’s supposed to be a For America Only license to attack other countries. That, however, isn’t an international non-proliferation regime that’s going to secure broad loyalty around the world. And without active cooperation from officials all around the world, it’s very difficult in practice to make a non-proliferation regime work. Which is going to mean more nuclear programs and ultimately more nuclear weapons — the precise reverse of what the policy is supposed to achieve.

It’s a seriously flawed vision: One that’s phrased calmly in the language of international law and pragmatism but that’s lacks substantive differences with the way the Bush administration has been conducting itself.