More Thoughts on Iran and Col. Gardiner

When a president has low credibility and when it becomes difficult to trust him because of his record of political games, anything becomes possible. However, the lower the credibility, the more dangerous a president becomes because there is no rule of thumb by which to gauge possible moves or possible outcomes. Such a situation might work in politics. In world affairs, a president with low credibility who makes a seriously wrong move can have things blow up in his face or drag us into danger we quite obviously don't need.

I notice many people have different reasons for why Bush took us into Iraq. In general, I still stand behind the idea that first of all I don't believe there's a clear coherent reason why we're in Iraq and where reasons do exist in the Bush Administration, they are frequently at cross-purposes. If one can't make coherent sense of Bush's Iraq policy, it's therefore difficult to make any sense of Bush's Iran policy.

This week, we have heard more about the possibility of a military strike against Iran. Among several blogs I've been reading, here's Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly with his own reaction:

BOMBING IRAN....Over at The Century Foundation, Sam Gardiner has published a war-gaming analysis of possible military action against Iran. His narrow conclusion is similar to what Wes Clark told me in February: contrary to conventional wisdom, which suggests that Iran's research sites are too widespread to be destroyed via bombing, a military strike could probably do a pretty good job of taking them out. Although Gardiner warns that there's a lot of uncertainty over this, his baseline guess is that five nights of bombing would set back the Iranian nuclear program significantly.

He also notes that this very definitely seems to be the goal of the Bush administration, which has been carefully designing its diplomatic maneuvering to guarantee failure...

Destroying Iran's nuclear program with five days of bombing is a clear act of war. Perhaps the Bush Administration is thinking of the Israeli raid on Iraq's nuclear facilities as a model of what will happen. When Israel bombed Iraq's program in the 1980s, Israel had the advantage that Iraq was in the middle of a war and Saddam Hussein had enough to deal with in his war with Iran without taking on a nuclear-armed Israel. There were no significant consequences to Israel at the time.

It's possible the Bush Administration honestly believes that Iran will not respond to five days of bombing. Even if the Bush Administration is correct, the reaction in the rest of the world may not be what they expect. Matt Yglesias has a post on an uncomfirmed story on how delusional the Vice President's office may be. The story may or may not be true but it has a ring of truth to it because we have grown used to hearing strange things and even stranger predictions from the offices of the president and vice president. The thing to keep in mind is that this is not 1981, nor is it even 2001 when the US had a very different reputation than it does now; the world today is very different and the credibility of the United States is lower than it has been in well over a hundred years.

Here's more from Col. Sam Gardiner in a report he wrote for the The Century Foundation.


Note: I'll have more on this in the next day or two.