We need to start planning our foreign policy based on more realism and less emotionalism. Every presidential candidate should write this on the blackboard 50 times a day. We're always staring into a great, dark unknown. But we're armed with Historical Analogies and Truisms- Chamberlain and Munich, JFK's near-miss with the Soviets, Vietnam, Nixon reproachment w/China, Reagan's stare-down of the Soviets, Israel and the Osirak facility, Desert Storm, 9/11, GWB's preemption of a non-WMD Iraq. Just last week, I read a blog that proclaimed that we're in a Weimar Republic moment vis-a-vis Iran and radical Islamists. Perhaps. Perhaps not. We (myself included) reach way too quickly for a historical analogy while sidestepping specific facts. It's tricky and dangerous business. We need to avoid the temptation and choose deliberate dispassion, as you suggest.

The Walrus wrote that historical analogies are good tools for understanding and rotten ones for predicting. I like that.

While I appreciate your efforts to give a rational response to claims that any attack on Iran or Iranians will be defensive, that still grants an objectionable legitimacy to those claims. Realism requires a clear-eyed look at the threat posed by the U.S. Exclusive focus on how Iran might threaten us promotes an emotional and highly distorted assessment of the situation.

We have had covert operatives mounting attacks in Iran for at least months now. U.S. bases and troops ring Iran. We've taken Iranian diplomats and personnel by force in Iraq. We've set two carrier groups nearby (planes from which, I have no doubt, are buzzing Iran on a regular basis).

If what "Newsweek has learned" is true, that it's likely a third carrier group will join the Eisenhower and Stennis, then war is also, at a minimum, likely. ('The Hidden War With Iran' - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17086418/site/newsweek)

Big-picture realism: We need to get troops out of Iraq in an orderly manner, and to minimize the regional consequences of the disaster we've created.

Therefore, we need to engage Iran (and Syria and all the other countries in the region). Warmongering postpones the day when that becomes possible. "Coercive diplomacy" is not diplomacy; it's warmongering.

Nothing about the situation we are in with respect to Iran is defensive.

Nell,

The intent of the piece is to point out that, even stipulating all of the administration's claims, there is no case for attacking Iran. Since I don't have access to the data, I can't intelligently discuss the actual evidence, whatever it may be, but I think it is important to note that the evidence doesn't matter if attacking Iran would be a bad idea regardless.

There is certainly a purely consequentialist case to be made against attacking Iran. You're not alone in making it.

I'd have more confidence in the effectiveness of such arguments if they contained more realism about the threats already posed by our government to Iran, and about the way in which the world will receive a major U.S. attack on Iran. That requires taking on the mindset that such an attack could justifiably be regarded as defensive.

So there is no way that Iran is providing any aid whatsoever to Iraqi insurgents? You can prove that beyond a reasonable doubt? The administration can't come up with a few EFPs that were made in Iran?

It is my opinion that if we make our stand on the argument Iran is not doing anything in Iraq, we'll lose. That argument is too easy to discredit, and there are many logical reasons to believe that Iran would provide some aid to the insurgency. The argument against invasion needs to rest on the consequences, all of which I did not address here, but it is my opinion that the consequences I've outlined here are quite sufficient to derail the argument for war.

I believe I understand where you're coming from, but I am firmly convinced that your argument will lose. Jacksonians are not going to buy off on it, and America still has a very strong Jacksonian tradition. Lose them, and we lose the argument and the war comes.

Of course it would have been better *for spain* to have been liberated in 1944, rather than endure another 30 years of facist dictatorship. Perhaps the same is true today in Iran?

Invasion would be vastly more difficult than in Iraq, but there would be unlikely to be such factionalism and terrorism in the aftermath.

Nevertheless, given the cost in loot and lives it would be tremendously selfless for the US to invade, and they are unlikely to do so.

The outcome of bombing without invasion is less clear. Can Iran help terrorists a lot more than it is doing now? Would reformers be repressed (almost certianly yes)? Could the nuclear program be stopped, or delayed long enough for there to be a change of government who might end the research voluntarily? The trouble is, the nuclear program will become more popular after bombing, and without imposing a lot of suffering on the general population, it is unlikely there will be much pressure within Iran to end it.

Serious sanctions might be a possibility - but these didnt work in Iraq - soon pictures of starving babies start appearing and generating anti US feeling. And we need Iranian oil...

AO: "So there is no way that Iran is providing any aid whatsoever to Iraqi insurgents? You can prove that beyond a reasonable doubt? The administration can't come up with a few EFPs that were made in Iran?"

Who said anything of the kind? My point is, again, that _exclusive focus_ on the ways Iran threatens the U.S. leads to an emotional and distorted view of the situation.

A consequentialist argument nicely short-circuits the mountain the admin is making of the Iranian-arms-to-Iraqis molehill. What I'm objecting to is the lack of focus you and other supposed realist/pragmatist voices put on the ways in which the U.S. is menacing and provoking Iran already.

Maybe that's because it seems as natural as the air we breathe that the U.S. should (for instance) place covert operatives into another country to stir up separatists, blow things up, and assassinate whoever we decide needs assassinating. This is noted occasionally in our press, but only in passing.

Or maybe it's because I've seen no evidence that the U.S. is, for instance, "plac[ing] covert operatives into another country to stir up separatists, blow[ing] things up, and assassinat[ing] whoever we decide needs assassinating." I try very hard to avoid commenting on what I can't point to some kind of verification on, and I've seen nothing about any of the three claims you've made.

Hell, you've got your own blog. You can focus on what I'm missing all day long and twice on Sundays. I am always fascinated by the theory that so many people seem to hold about blogging, that if anyone doesn't mention someone else's bete noire, they're doing so deliberately. Has it occurred to you, even for a second, that perhaps I present this argument because I believe it's a pretty good one against attacking Iran? I ask because, reading your comments, the subtext seems to be that I'm somehow covertly shilling for the administration, although I'd prefer to believe that's not really what you intend to imply.

Andrew, I'll be off after this, since attributing motivations to others is a sure discussion-killer (whether directly or in the 'I'd prefer to believe you're not implying that' formulation).

I'm not accusing you of shilling for the administration, in text or subtext, but to consider what's missing from your realism -- since you called for policy to be based on realism rather than emotionalism. Overlooking the ways in which a U.S. war on Iran is already on -- which I am not assuming, much less asserting, that you are doing deliberately -- prevents a fully realistic assessment of the actual situation.

This passage from a recent Washington Post article is an example of what I'm referring to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020902294_pf.html
"With the aim of shaking Tehran's commitment to its nuclear program, Bush also approved last fall secret operations to target Iranian influence in southern Lebanon, in western Afghanistan, in the Palestinian territories and inside Iran."

"Targeting Iranian influence" _inside Iran_. Hard for me to come up with a benign interpretation of that, though I'm open to any efforts by others. My guess is that it has something to do with scattered reports over the last nine months of various explosions in western Iran. Or the story from the Financial Times last spring about the U.S. Marines studying ethnic tensions in Iran:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ed436938-a49d-11da-897c-0000779e2340,s01=1.html

Based on what we now know about the ways in which the war on Iraq was underway well before the authorization of force resolution, much less the official invasion, these kinds of stories deserve some attention from realists. There is also substantial precedent for such behavior in the history of U.S. intervention around the world over the last fifty years.

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