The Bush/Cheney attack on Iran would have stopped the current Iranian revolution

Do you realize where the young people in Iran would have been today if we or the Israelis had attacked Iran? Iran would have been on a war footing, just as America was after December 7, 1941 and Ahmahdinejad would have been reelected with no questions asked.Those same young people who are today demonstrating in the streets would instead be volunteering to attack the enemies who attacked Iran.

Think not? Bernard Avishai provides the in-depth analysis.

Think war brings peace? Ask the Palestinians in Gaza. The Israelis did not secure peace, or secure their borders, or secure the the long term existence of Israel by attacking Gaza. Nor did the Gazans obtain peace and stability by shooting rockets into Israel. Nor did the Iranian hardliners secure Iran by shipping rockets and weapons to the Palestinians. All the hardliners of all the nations have to offer is a perpetual cycle of more war and killing and starvation for their people.

War does not bring peace and social stability. War begats more war.

Peace and stability require a political solution - along with careful and appropriate policing to deal with individual crazies and bandits.

White House to insanely market another war.

The idea that our government would market a war that only a few top leaders considered necessary would have seemed incredible back before Bush stole toe Presidency in 2000. Then, beginning in about September 2002 they did exactly that, marketing and conducting the disaster in Iraq. That peremptory war in Iraq solved the problem of the essentially toothless intransigence of Saddam at the cost of totally destroying Iraq as a nation and - so far - destroying the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and at present conducting an occupation of Iraq that is burning through $3 billion per week.

No one would be stupid enough to try double-or-nothing and begin marketing another war even before there appears to be any resolution of the mess in Iraq would they? Not if they were sane they wouldn't. But if an organization can be described as "insane" the Bush administration would be the prime example.

Just because an idea is crazy and unworkable doesn't seem to stop the Bush administration. That said, the current rumors that the Bush administration is starting to roll out the marketing for another peremptory war, this time with Iraq, needs to be considered seriously. So this article in the New Yorker should be considered a warning of the intended actions of the insane Bush administration.

Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely. It follows the pattern of the P.R. campaign that started around this time in 2002 and led to the Iraq war. The President’s rhetoric on Iran has been nothing short of bellicose lately, warning of “the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” And the Iranian government’s behavior—detaining British servicemen and arresting American passport holders, pushing ahead with uranium enrichment, and, by many reliable accounts, increasing its funding and training for anti-American militias in Iraq—seems intentionally provocative. Perhaps President Ahmedinejad and the mullahs feel that they win either way: they humiliate the superpower if it doesn’t take the bait, and they shore up their deeply unpopular regime at home if it does. Preëmptive war requires calculations (and, often, miscalculations) on two sides, not just one, as Saddam learned in 2003. When tensions are this high between two countries and powerful factions in both act as if hostilities are in their interest, war is likely to follow.

Just because a proposed action is insane does not mean that some supporters might not consider it useful to them. Both the Bush administration in the U.S. and the administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both losing support inside their respective nations.

Bush and Cheney are both willing to take on ideas others consider not only wrong and unworkable, but even insane. Both consider disagreement to be disloyalty. They ignore both expert opinion and the experts themselves. Mahmoud Ahmadinehad has a reputation for similar behavior. Both are in political trouble at home, and both appear likely to run the risk of another war just to maintain power.

The rumors of the roll-out of another effort to market a war need to be considered seriously.

What was Iran doing kidnapping the 15 British military people?

I couldn't see any reasonable international goal for Iran that could have been achieved by kidnapping the 15 British military people, and the sudden return of them for no apparent gain strengthened my feeling. But I know very little about Iran, so it was just a feeling that something was being played out that I couldn't see.

Fortunately, Steve Clemons has provided an explanation that makes sense to me. Here is the core part of what he wrote:

I'm of the school -- though only speculating -- that the Supreme Leader did not authorize the capture of the British military unit. But there are others who tell me that there is no way that such an action would take place without the Supreme Leader's full support and approval. At this point, many tell me we will never know whether there was a gap or not between Iran's chief Ayatollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that took this action.

If a gap were acknowledged, such information could destabilize Iran on many levels. I think that there was a gap. The more I learn about Iran's power structures and political contours, the more I believe that the arrest of the British soldiers was designed to warn the Supreme Leader Khamenei and other political nodes in Iran that the Revolutionary Guard cannot be pushed, constrained, mismanaged, embarrassed, or forced to accept an acquiescent position on its own nuclear pretensions.

I think that the Revolutionary Guard took action first to warn other parts of Iran's political order that it could provoke war whenever it wanted. I think too that the Revolutionary Guard was probably not instructed by Khamenei to conduct the arrest of these soldiers -- though I respect those who see this differently. It's simply too irrational a move for the Supreme Leader to have taken.

This is just to core of what he wrote. I suggest reading the rest of Steve's article for the context.

This makes a lot more sense to me than does looking at the kidnapping as a message to America or other powers outside Iran. It looks like it was a power move between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG)and the Mullahs who run the country. If the Mullahs were getting ready to negotiate the nuclear development with the UN, this was a statement by the IRG that they will severely damage Iran internationally before giving up their efforts to develop nukes. If this is the case, then the sudden reversal and return of the 15 British was an additional statement (by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who came out of the IRG) that he could be dealt with by the Mullahs, but they were not going to run roughshod over the IRG. So what we watched was internal Iranian politics being played out in the Persian Gulf.

The real problem I see now is that Dick Cheney and the NeoCons will not accept that explanation. It won't suit them, because it means that they and America generally were totally irrelevant to the whole drama except as spectators. Cheney and the NeoCons are going to believe that it was all played out to send THEM a message, because no one and nothing else besides the big, bad Americans led by Cheney and the NeoCons could possibly be of any importance to the Iranians. Besides, Cheney and the NeoCons take a very simplified view of nations. When a nation takes international actions, those actions must have been approved by the government. There are no sub-governmental units which can act unilaterally without the blessing of the governmental leaders. [That is their complaint with Nancy Pelosi talking to the Syrians, for example.)

So if Cheney and the NeoCons don't believe in an Iranian internal politics explanation for the kidnapping of the 15 British military people, the question is going to be what the Americans can do to Iran because of the kidnapping. Iran will have to be punished for what they did. Since it will be based on assumptions having little or no connection to reality, once again we will see Cheney and the NeoCons prove their utter incompetence at running government.

Let's hope Cheney and the NeoCons aren't allowed to do anything as stupid as they usually do. We really won't like the results if they slip the leash.