Col. Sam Gardiner's Report on Iran

In Col. Gardiner's report for The Century Foundation that was quoted often this week, he begins with a quote from National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, "The doctrine of preemption remains sound and must remain an integral part of our national security strategy. We do not rule out the use of force before the enemy strikes."

That quote was made in March of this year and it's stunning in its blind assessment of reality. The preemptive strike principle is either a failure, if we take the notion seriously, or it is a complete fraud used only for public relations purposes. Stephen Hadley, who has no initiatives or accomplishments to his name, or at least any that have made the news, fails to recognize that the failure to find WMDs in Iraq means the whole preemptive strike principle is bankrupt. When the time comes to leave Iraq—and that time will come—we'll be no safer then than we were in 2002. Given the report in today's New York Times, the war in Iraq has contributed to terrorism, not made the world safer from terrorism. Col. Gardiner has no illusions about the failed foreign policy of the Bush Administration.

Here's more from Gardiner's report:

Introduction
The summer of diplomacy began with a dramatic announcement on May 31, 2006, Secretary of State Condolezza Rice declared that if the Ahmadinejad government agreed to halt Iran's nuclear enrichment program, the United States would talk directly with Tehran. Secretary Rice crafted the statement working alone at home. She called Bush and received his approval. The Bush administration announced it as a significant initiative; it appeared to reflect a major change in policy.

I've been uneasy about this initiative from the beginning. Criticizing an initiative that may be real and that may have some chance of succeeding is generally not a good idea (unless the criticism is focused on improving the initiative), but it was hard to know how seriously to take something put together at home on a single weekend without a serious discussion of where the United States was trying to go with its policy towards Iran. Was it more a publicity stunt or just the kind of clumsy statesmanship that seems par for the Bush Administration? Given the rhetoric of the last few weeks, and the failure of Bush to hold back his neocon friends in the media, it appears what we saw was tilted more towards domestic consumption than towards serious policy.

Back to Gardiner's report:

This shift [towards diplomacy] was not uncontroversial within the administration; Vice President Dick Cheney had opposed the announcement. But the rationale that prevailed seems to have been that if the United States were going to confront Iran, the diplomacy box had to be checked. The secretary of state was given the summer to try it.

Well, the summer is over. Diplomacy was given a chance, and it now seems that the diplomatic activity of the past several months was just a pretext for the military option.

Diplomacy is a funny thing. We've seen occassions in the past when diplomacy didn't seem possible. In the 70s, it didn't seem possible to negotiate with Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, but an interview by Walter Cronkite opened a small chink in the door and the Carter Administration was quick to pursue the opportunity that led to the Camp David talks. You never preclude diplomacy but the Bush Administration repeatedly does a poor job of setting up the conditions that make diplomacy possible and even following opportunities to talk (Bush muffed two opportunities to improve relations with Iran in 2001 and 2003). Diplomacy is not luck. You have to work at it and you have to pursue multiple opportunities to make it happen. If diplomacy is possible with Iran, the Bush Administration has repeatedly refused to the do the work necessary to make it possible.

Is diplomacy still possible? Yes. Will diplomacy with Iran be some kind of October Surprise? Not likely, not with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld around. Or rather, if such a thing did happen, it would be hard to take seriously with Cheney and Rumsfeld still in office and would have to be regardedly as a midterm election publicity stunt. Gardiner suggests the Bush Administration may seriously be considering the military option, which I believe would be nothing more than a high-stakes roll of the dice with low odds.

Let's end, for now, with Gardiner's next paragraph:

Unfortunately, the military option does not make sense. When I discuss the possibility of an American military strike on Iran with my European friends, they invariably point out that an armed confrontation does not make sense—that it would be unlikely to yield any of the results that American policymakers do want, and that it would be highly likely to yield results that they do not. I tell them them they cannot understand U.S. policy if they insist on passing options through that filter. The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran.

In other words, no one should expect the Bush Administration to be rational, not with the amount of ideological baggage that weighs it down. There's a way for voters to think about this: if you have rats in the attic, you don't hire an exterminator that attacks them in the basement. But that's essentially what the American voters are getting from Bush, because, from day one, Bush has sold himself with the slickest ads in town, and for people too busy too check how good a job or poor a job Bush can do, those targeted ads sound pretty good. That's why today we are where we are: in a mess.