Leaving Options on the Table
U.S. Readies Options Against Iran
You have to give it to them, the Bush Administration is certainly persistent. After an NIE last year took the wind out of the administration’s momentum towards war with Iran, they are now using the unrest in Iraq as a new pretext. Forget about the fact that it was the Maliki government’s desire to settle scores in advance of Iraqi elections this fall that prompted the fighting in Basra recently, that is now being used a justification for military conflict with Iran.
Unfortunately, this is not just a Bush/Cheney initiative. The “necessity” of keeping all options — including military ones — available against Iran is very much the conventional wisdom. The argument is that diplomacy only works when backed up by force, or that at the very least putting a little fright into the Iranian leadership (maintaining strategic ambiguity) is unambiguously a good idea. Well, it doesn’t and it isn’t.
Diplomacy does not always rely on implicit threats, and even when it does rely on threats, those threats need not be military. And strategic ambiguity is not particularly useful when it unquestionably strengthens extremist demagogues in Iran by seeming to support their rhetoric. Just like Chekov’s gun which if placed on the mantle in act one must be used by act three, placing the threat of force on the bargaining table also increases the likelihood it will be used. As a general rule, people don’t like to make concessions at the point of a gun, and any concessions they make under such circumstances will likely be overturned at the first opportune moment. There would undoubtedly be some emotional satisfaction in lashing out at Iran, but there is no coherent long-term strategy sustaining that course of action. As a wag once argued, “the only thing worse than a nuclear Iran is a nuclear Iran that we recently bombed.”
There are many time when force is a reasonably option. Today we are still deeply involved in Iraq and not deeply involved enough in Afghanistan. The use of force is a bad idea in this circumstance, and the threat of it is not much better.
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