It’s become kind of a cliche to point out that the greatest beneficiary of the Iraq war was Iran. It’s a cliche because it’s true. But, as conservatives begin to ramp up their “engagement was a nice idea but now because Iran didn’t immediately give up everything we must bomb Iran” campaign, it’s worth considering who bombing Iran would really help.
First, Iran’s hardliners. Yes, we helped them by invading Iraq, but there’s so much more we can do for them by bombing Iran. As Karim Sadjadpour said here, he thinks that “Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would actually welcome a military strike,” which “may be their only hope to silence popular dissent and heal internal political rifts.” As I wrote the other day, it’s hard to think of a more efficient way to extinguish Iran’s reform movement than by either an Israeli or U.S. strike.
Second, Russia. Bombing Iran would effectively do for Russia what the Iraq invasion did for Iran: Vastly improve its strategic situation and bolster its influence in the region. While the international community is preoccupied with frantic efforts to stamp out the conflagration that would surely ensue after such strikes, Russia will see an opportunity to further expand its hegemony over its near abroad. And of course Russia will be very pleased to have oil shoot up to $200 a barrel, or more, as it very likely will.
Now look at the people who advocate strikes on Iran, and see if they aren’t the same people who are always railing against Russian and Iranian “thugs” — that is, the very people who will most benefit from bombing Iran. I’m sure there are other conservative betes noires who would be helped by conservative warmaking, I will share when I think of them.
NumbersUSA, “the leading immigration-restriction group,” is currently featuring a 20-minute video made up of a rambling patchwork of anti-immigrant activists explaining “why so many are willing to cross the border and overstay visas to remain in our country.” However, most of the video is focused on making the case against Mexican migration, despite the fact that there are also millions of undocumented immigrants from countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Honduras, India, Korea, Brazil, China, and Vietnam.
The video features Michael Cutler, Mark Krikorian, and Steven Camarota of the “nativist lobby’s” Center for Immigration Studies, Dan Stein from the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, Cuban-American “activist” Roan Garcia-Quintana, and ex-politician Starletta Hairston. The activists provide conflicting narratives which suggest that “pro-amnesty” “liberals” should be more concerned about the deplorable conditions in Mexico while simultaneously suggesting that Mexico is not as bad as people think and therefore migration to the US is unjustified, harmful, and immoral. Stein goes as far to claim that the Mexican government is deliberately exporting its poverty:
KRIKORIAN: Compassionate pro-Amnesty people…often have a misperception about what the sending countries are like…But Mexico for instance is an upper-middle income country by world standards…it’s not poor compared to Congo or Pakistan…it’s not like they’re being consigned to Treblinka or something like that.
CUTLER: If you’re truly a liberal as I am, then you should be alarmed that people are leaving their families behind out of desperation to come here. That’s what a real liberal does. They need to be compassionate and understand the terrible situation that these people are in.
CUTLER: Mexico is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. The third wealthiest man in the world lives in Mexico.
STEIN: If the objective of the Mexican government is to try to offload potential political opposition that might challenge its one-party political system, you want to try to encourage as many people who can’t find jobs to leave the country and make it not their problem, but make it our problem.
Watch it:
The video itself acknowledges that Mexico’s big problem is an unequal distribution of wealth and suggests that the Mexican government should get its act together and start providing for its citizens. Fair enough, Mexican politicians need to step up to the plate and start evenly distributing the wealth — but what about the other top-nine immigrant-sending countries whose GDP is below $168,580 million? Mexico may rank #13 in the world in terms of its gross domestic product, but other top immigrant-sending countries such as Honduras (#111), El Salvador (#95), Guatemala (#79), Vietnam (#60) and the Philippines (#47) are within the same range as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (#118) and Pakistan (#48). Of course Krikorian isn’t going to argue for an increase in immigration from Pakistan, Congo, or any other poor country. In fact, he’s even opposed to accepting political refugees from war-torn countries. Furthermore, Mexico is no Treblinka, but half the population is living in poverty with one fifth in extreme poverty. Regardless of whose fault it is (some would argue the US is at least partly responsible), the fact is that their condition will not improve overnight and for those who live hand to mouth, crossing the border into the US is the best means of survival and the only hope of breaking the cycle of poverty.
A few remarks from Rector, Krikorian, and Garcia-Quintana are particularly revealing of what their real concerns are. Garcia-Quintana, who considers himself to be part of an “old wave” of immigration, makes sure people know that his “family’s roots are in Spain,” and has described Mexican and Central American immigrants as “Indo-Hispanics” who “impose” their culture on him. In the video he explains that its the “new wave of people” who come to America “to change America.” Rector warns that the US is being flooded by people who do not share the same values and who threaten the nation’s prosperity while Camarota points out that the Hispanic population is “benefiting from affirmative action,” despite the fact that they are the descendants of people who arrived after the 1970′s civil rights era.
Today in Geneva, the United States, along with Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and the EU, engaged in direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The talks produced “constructive” progress, with Iran agreeing to allow U.N. inspectors to visit the newly disclosed uranium enrichment facility. Following revelations about the secret facility last week, the right-wing instantly mobilized for war, calling for military action and “regime change” in Iran.
ThinkProgress asked Dr. Colin Kahl, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, what the consequences might be if the war hawks had their way. “We’re a long ways away from that being an eventuality,” Kahl said, adding that the U.S. “is committed” to the “diplomatic track.” Noting that “military action is not desirable,” Kahl then laid out the sobering ramifications:
KAHL: [I]t will have an unpredictable set of consequences for the region but we can imagine a number of destabilizing ones. Depending on how Iran chose to retaliate, whether they chose to retaliate through the use of proxies in places like Iran or in Afghanistan through incitement of Shia communities in places like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. Obviously if there was direct retaliation against U.S. forces in Iraq or Israeli interests. They could activate potentially activate or encourage Hizballah and Hamas to engage in reprisals and you can imagine the second and third order consequences of that on the peace process and on our outreach to the Muslim world and all of that.
“We don’t exactly know how it would unfold you have the prospects for unintended escalation and kind of losing control of what’s going on,” Kahl warned, adding that even though any military strike could delay Iran’s nuclear program, it could also “incentivize the Iranians to go all the way to weaponize” their nuclear material. Watch it:
Earlier this year, President Obama made it very clear that “regime change” is no longer the U.S. goal in Iran. When asked if the militaristic right-wing rhetoric undermines U.S. negotiations with Iran, a senior State Department official told ThinkProgress that it “could”:
I just saw the other day a quote from Ahmadinejad that talked about President Obama can’t even get his own job done let alone deal with us effectively. We should not underestimate the sophistication of Iran’s foreign policy apparatus and how they hear the messages from us and again, that’s one of the reasons we spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill is trying to make sure that the message they’re hearing from us are consistent.
Thankfully, Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to have no interest in taking any advice from the neocons, saying on Sunday that “there is no military option that does anything more than buy time.”
Surprising opposition to military action against Iran arose out of a joint American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Institution panel this morning. Entitled “Next Steps on Iran,” the panel featured three hawkish supporters of the Iraq war, Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack — whose book The Threatening Storm convinced many liberals to support the Iraq war — and AEI’s Danielle Pletka, a leading neoconservative activist behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In his opening remarks, Pollack said he believed that by early next year “what the United States and our allies are going to be looking at is containment,” a long-term process of countering Iranian influence in the region, much as was done against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “Implicit in the concept of containment, Pollack said “is the idea that there will be a change in regime over time.”
Remember George Kennan’s “Mr. X” article, the long telegraph, that was the ultimate focus of containment with the Soviet Union: Contain them until the regime changes, which it must because of its own internal problems. The same I think can be said of Iran, especially this Iranian regime after the events of June 12 and the rest of the summer.
O’Hanlon concurred. “The containment concept is ultimately where I wind up…it’s our most viable medium to long term option.” He continued that, although he believes there is “less of a downside to some of the military options” than many believe, “when I put them together, I do not ultimately support them.” He also said he doesn’t “consider it credible that Barack Obama will do this.”
Unsurprisingly, Pletka was somewhat more sanguine about the military option. “The fact is that the Iranians have told us where they’re going. The president of Iran has said that it would be worth sacrificing half of Iran to destroy the state of Israel. There’s no reason on earth not to believe him.” Compared to that, Pletka said, “military action starts to look a lot less unattractive.”
The president of Iran never actually said that, rather it was former Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland in an interview with The Jerusalem Post characterizing what he believed to be Ahmadinejad’s views.
The consensus of the Brookings panelists regarding the preferability of containment to military action differed starkly from the alarmism of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who introduced the event. In his opening remarks, Lieberman insisted that “the fanatical regime” in Tehran “will only consider stepping back from the nuclear brink when they are convinced that if they fail to do so there will be consequences so severe that the continuity of their regime will be threatened.” Lieberman also warned that “A nuclear-armed Iran will overturn the balance of power in the Middle East and tilt this critical region toward extremism,” ignoring the fact that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he helped sell and continues to defend, has done precisely that.
“I promise you,” Lieberman went on, “in a globalized world, the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran will sooner or later come to threaten the American people here at home.”
We must be prepared to use all means at our disposal to prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons. Everybody in a position of authority agrees with that last sentence.
That’s a questionable claim — not least because the U.S. intelligence community still maintains that there is no evidence that Iran actually wants a nuclear weapon, as opposed to breakout capacity — and at least two of the panelists who spoke after him disagreed.
Yesterday, Foreign Policy Initiative co-founder Bill Kristol appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, where he said that he now believes “for the first time that he will not accept General McChrystal’s recommendation in Afghanistan.” “I really worry now about the next few years to a degree and in a way that I really hadn’t before,” said Kristol.
When Hewitt asked him if a resignation by one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers “would mobilize public opinion” against Obama’s decisions, Kristol said “it would help.” He added that he had “just heard this morning from someone who’s been in touch with people in the administration, a foreign gentleman who deals with this government, that people are talking about Secretary Gates leaving at the end of the year, and being replaced by Chuck Hagel.” Hewitt and Kristol then took the opportunity to attack Hagel:
KRISTOL: People are talking about Secretary Gates leaving at the end of the year, and being replaced by Chuck Hagel…
HEWITT: Ugh.
KRISTOL: Yeah, exactly, as Secretary of Defense. I think that’s quite a plausible rumor, and a very worrisome one, because he is an advocate of retreat everywhere, I think.
HEWITT: Yeah, it’s sort of neoisolationism replacing neoconservatism as the driving intellectual force behind the intellectuals on either side.
Kristol is typically off-base when he describes Hagel as “an advocate of retreat everywhere.” Instead, Hagel is simply in favor of smarter engagement with the world. As he wrote in the Washington Post earlier this month, “global collaboration does not mean retreating from our standards, values or sovereignty”:
Development of seamless networks of intelligence gathering and sharing, and strengthening alliances, diplomatic cooperation, trade and development can make the biggest long-term difference and have the most lasting impact on building a more stable and secure world. There really are people and organizations committed to destroying America, and we need an agile, flexible and strong military to face these threats. How, when and where we use force are as important as the decision to use it. Relying on the use of force as a centerpiece of our global strategy, as we have in recent years, is economically, strategically and politically unsustainable and will result in unnecessary tragedy — especially for the men and women, and their families, who serve our country.
Indeed, Kristol has long been antithetical towards Hagel’s concern with thinking through the potential negative consequences of military engagement. Before the Iraq war — which Hagel supported before becoming an aggressive critic — Hagel wanted to know, “What comes after a military invasion? Who rules Iraq? Does the United States really want to be in Baghdad, trying to police Baghdad for twenty or thirty years?” Kristol dismissed Hagel with the assertion that “predictions of ethnic turmoil in Iraq are even more questionable than they were in the case of Afghanistan.” Kristol was wrong.
Perhaps, Kristol is lashing out because Hagel has so publicly chastised the foreign policy vision that Kristol supports. In his book, America: Our Next Chapter, Hagel wrote: “So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called neo-conservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice … They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience, who keenly felt the burden of leading the nation in the wake of the deadliest terrorist attack ever on American soil.”
Yesterday, Foreign Policy Initiative co-founder Bill Kristol 
