Notes on a Crisis

Over holiday I had an opportunity to pick up John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History (recently out in paperback), and I’d heartily recommend it to pretty much everybody. As a relatively short overview of the Cold War it’s peerless (come to think of it, I don’t know what its peers would be in this case), and Gaddis has always been a great history writer, the type who can elucidate a giant, global point and then without missing a beat zoom down to earth to illustrate it with the perfect individual example (his description of John Paul II’s first visit to Communist-ruled Poland after being elected pontiff is worth the price of admission alone).

I could go on and on about this book, but that may be grist for another post. I bring up Gaddis and his work here merely to state what may seem like an obvious point about the conduct of foreign policy. In his scholarship, Gaddis has focused on the question of strategy and how it is formulated and executed. In foreign policy, a wise strategy, grounded in reality and the possible and feasible, yet navigating towards a fixed and attainable point on the horizon, can survive the blunders of an incompetent captain or two. Yet when the stakes are high, a shoddily formulated or blindly utopian strategy is gambling with catastrophe. If I’m reading Gaddis correctly, one of the chief reasons he gives for why the world survived a 45-year standoff between two nuclear-armed superpowers is that the underlying American strategy of containment, formulated during the earliest years of the Cold War, was sound. None of the presidents that were left to implement it was perfect, and they all made mistakes; yet by sticking by the template we survived while the USSR eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Yet what we are seeing now from the Bush Administration is the utter collapse of this tradition, and the substitution of an approach that is characterized by its fantasist, ad hoc, and politically expedient characteristics. Simply put, there is no strategy the Bush team is consciously pursuing in any region of the globe, save a blind faith in the idea that American power trumps everything, including reality. I’m obviously not the first one to say this, and this is obviously not a new trend. The “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war gave way to the “Freedom Agenda” when it became clear that the neither of the criteria established for intervention under the Bush Doctrine, WMD and links to international terror networks, were present in the test case of Iraq. The Freedom Agenda, of course, fell largely by the wayside when it was established that American foreign policy in the Middle East was empowering extremists and emasculating moderates, rather than the desired reverse.

For everything there is a season, as they say, and this appears to be the season of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian menace. The chatter now seems to be about the possibility of forming an American-Israeli-moderate Arab states alliance to counter rising and malevolent Iranian influence across the region. The focal point of all of this tension is the Iranian nuclear program, but Iranian activities in Lebanon, Syria, and especially Iraq could also serve as flash points. Iran is clearly a potent and worrying source of trouble, but at this point anybody who believes that Bush and his team have the requisite judgment and ability to contain Iran’s ambitions while navigating around a violent confrontation probably chugged the Kool-Aid long ago.

It is frightening the extent to which those in the know are frightened about the prospects and probability of war with Iran (the situation is similar in Israel, where a “1938”analogy has apparently become the conventional wisdom). James Fallows, the Atlantic correspondent whose pieces on the Iraq war were so illuminating chiefly because of the exemplary source network he has built up within the national security bureaucracy, writes in his latest piece that if Congress really wants to do the U.S. some good, it will lay down the Iraq issue and instead focus what power it has on making it exceedingly difficult for the Administration to launch airstrikes against Iran.

The fear among the well-informed is not that there is an incubating plan to hit Iran, exactly. It is, rather, that the Bush Administration has resolved that to salvage Iraq and American influence in the region, it must demonstrate strength and intimidate Iran into backing down on the nuclear front and standing down in Iraq; that to do so, the U.S. will engage in a campaign of rhetorical and on-the-ground escalation, and that this will be mirrored by the Ahmadinejad and the Iranian mullahs. The truly frightening scenario is that in a desperate bid to save his presidency, or else as the result of a chain of blunders with tensions running high, Bush will decide that airstrikes against Iran are the only way out of the trap. And this, as has been aptly documented and speculated upon elsewhere, would be cataclysmic and seed a disaster that would eventually make Iraq pale in comparison.

We now receive news that an Iranian diplomat has been kidnapped in Baghdad, and the Iranian government has stated that it is holding the U.S. accountable. It is incidents such as this, surely not the last, which will tempt leaders of both countries into a spiral that they will not be able to control.

It is also excruciating to note that even absent a direct U.S.-Iran conflict, the collapsing Iraqi state and the incipient Iraqi civil war threaten to engulf the entire region, with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt likely to back Sunni proxies while Iran tends to its coreligionists. As the Baker-Hamilton Commission made abundantly clear, the U.S. must not hesitate a second longer in engaging in serious regional diplomacy, with all relevant actors, to prevent this scenario from becoming an inevitability.

It is terrifying to confront this situation with leaders in whose judgment we have lost every shred of confidence, and yet that is the situation we now face.