Is Tehran the Key?

I don't know nearly enough about Iran, but I'm working on it. 

I have picked up a little bit over the years, though, and that little bit tells me that the handful of  experts calling for a rapprochement with Iran are onto something. 

After sixty years of nonsense - on both sides - it's time to build a working partnership with Tehran.

Why?

First, Iran is a power in the Middle East - with or without nuclear weapons - and it's not going to go away.  The reason is that Iran is a real nation. 

What does that mean?

Since the creation of the UN, it has been necessary to pretend that every part of the globe - except for Antarctica - is part of one nation or another.  And it's a fundamental precept of international law that all nations are sovereign equals. 

But that's a legal fiction.  Many so-called "nations" aren't much more than lines on a map.  In much of Africa and the Middle East, national borders are awkward remnants of 19th century European colonialism or post-World War I decisions by the victorious Allied powers.  

These borders don't define real nations.  In many cases, they never will.

Iraq, for example, was created by the British in the early 1920s.  The Brits needed a suitable kingdom for an Arab prince who had been a wartime ally, so they cobbled together three vilayets - provinces - of the defunct Ottoman Empire and called the result Iraq.

Iraq never worked very well.  It only held together into modern times because Saddam Hussein ruled it with an iron fist.  In 2003, when we blundered in and ousted Saddam, the fictitious nation of Iraq began coming apart at the seams. 

We tried holding it together - at the cost of thousands of American and Iraqi lives.  But that was foolish.  Iraq isn't a nation - just lines on a map.

Iran, on the other hand, is real.  Human civilization has existed in Persia for five thousand years.  Despite waves of migration and conquest - specifically including the Islamic conquest in the 7th century - Iran has enjoyed considerable linguistic and cultural continuity over millennia.

It's also a relatively modern society.   In 2012, an Iranian film, A Separation, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  I wish more Americans had seen it.  A Separation had almost nothing to do with politics.  It was a domestic drama about the marital difficulties of a middle-class, urban couple trying to do the best thing for their clever daughter while caring for the husband's father, who was sliding into dementia. 

The remarkable thing about A Separation was how much the people in the film - the couple, the daughter's teachers, the lawyers and judge in their divorce case - resembled urban, middle-class Americans. 

I'm not sure we should be so quick to talk about bombing these people

The great obstacle to understanding between the US and Iran is our long history of mutual bad blood.  Most Iranians would date that bad blood from 1953, when the CIA brought about the overthrow of Iran's popular, constitutionally-elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh's ouster came at the instigation of the Brits, who resented Mosaddegh's nationalization of the British-run Anglo-Persian Oil Company - now BP - which exercised monopoly control of Iran's oil.

America's heavy-handed intervention led to our replacing Britain as the Western power most resented by the Iranian people.  Most Americans paid little attention to this resentment - or even knew it existed - until it boiled over in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when activists seized the US Embassy and held its staff hostage for 444 days.

Those of us alive at the time were outraged by the behavior of the Iranian "students" - and by the failure of its revolutionary government, headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to secure the hostage's prompt release.

At this point, the bad blood became mutual - and it has remained so to this day.

But the question remains:  Should why mistakes the US made during the Eisenhower administration - and mistakes Iran made during the Carter administration - doom our two countries to perpetual animosity?

Iran is a serious country - a real nation with 75 million people, enormous oil reserves, and an advanced nuclear-weapons program.

It is also, as Syria's strongest ally, the potential key to resolving that not-so-real nation's civil war.

Iran is also a potential force for stability in Afghanistan, its neighbor to the east.

Recently, Iran elected a new President - a reasonable fellow named Hassan Rouhani - who replaced the truly dangerous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  President Rouhani has expressed a willingness to negotiate seriously about everything - including nuclear weapons.

Forty years ago, in one of the unlikeliest moves in American diplomatic history, President Richard Nixon - the old Cold Warrior - went to China.  The results of that mission transformed our world forever.

Perhaps it's time for President Obama - winner of a Nobel Peace Prize he has yet to earn - to follow Mr. Nixon's example. 

"No" on ObamaWar

Four years ago, President Obama - newly elected, with majorities in both houses of Congress - and holding a ton of the imaginary currency pundits term "political capital" - passed up a chance to move toward genuine health care reform.  Instead, we got a complex, Rube Goldberg contraption called "Obamacare".

Now, to be sure, Obamacare isn't all bad.  I'd be very much opposed to repealing it.  After all, Obamacare has lowered some folks' insurance bills, at least for a while.  It has allowed many folks with pre-existing conditions to buy insurance.  It has made insurance companies more accountable for how they spend their money.

But there's a lot Obamacare didn't do.  It did nothing serious about reducing medical care or prescription drug costs.  It did nothing at all to increase the supply of doctors - the most obvious step toward both increasing the availability and decreasing the cost of quality care.  It did nothing serious about promoting healthy lifestyles - the single most dramatic step we could take toward cutting the cost of medical care.

Most important, it did nothing to move us toward a single-payer system to replace the embarrassing hodgepodge of conflicting systems which makes America unique - and embarrassingly so - among developed nations.

Obamacare, for all its merits, was basically a can of worms.  With better leadership, and better use of the President's bully pulpit, we could have had a far more progressive, more efficient, less complex law.  Instead, we got a typical, cobbled-together, congressional mess.

Because the new president didn't lead.

Flash forward four years, and we're about to see the same approach taken to war.  With respect to Syria, President Obama - after two years of dithering - has decided, once again, to toss the whole mess to Congress.

And Congress, true to its habits, is beginning to cobble together a complex, Rube Goldberg mechanism to define the conduct of military operations.

And that is something that - as far as I know - has never, ever worked.  Not in all of human history. 

If Congress takes the President up on his invitation to authorize military action against Syria, we're going to get a declaration of something less than war - with a whole lot of restrictions and no clear objective.  And it will solve absolutely nothing.

And I say to hell with it.

But let me be clear as to why. 

I have no problem - none at all - with military operations to depose Bashar al-Assad.  I have no problem with putting him on trial before an international court, or before a court representing a new Syrian government.  Frankly, I have no problem dealing with him as we dealt with Osama bin  Laden - two in the head, two in the heart, and a quick burial at sea.

But that is not what Mr. Obama propose to do.  He proposes some sort of limited, "proportional" response - which essentially means bombing some Syrian military assets.  Some your Syrian soldiers will die.  And some officers.  And probably some unlucky civilians.

Not Assad.  He's supposed to get the "message".

But what's the message?  To obey international law on the subject of chemical warfare? 

Assuming there is such a law, wouldn't that be better done by an international organization - maybe a court, with due process - not the United States and a few allies acting on their own, like some sort of international lynch mob?

Honestly, it's time we outgrew the notion that bombs are some sort of messaging system.  It isn't a way to enforce laws.  And it certainly isn't a way to build a nation.

The purpose of war isn't to communicate, it's to defeat someone - to conquer them and impose your will on them. 

War is a blunt instrument.  And it tends to run out of control - no matter how many pre-conditions you try to write into your plans.

That being so, our Founding Fathers made it clear that they wanted Congress - and only Congress - to have the awesome responsibility of declaring war.  But they did not say that Congress should conduct the war.  That was left to the Commander in Chief.

The Founders, as men of experience and good sense, knew that declaring war is a very big deal - the release of uncontrollable forces which could lead to triumph or disaster.  Only a cautious, bicameral legislative body should decide to commit the country to war.

Only a single individual could then decide how to wage it.

Obviously, we're not doing that.  We're going to pretend that a legislative body can design a compromise war - in the process, handcuffing the President who will then have to conduct it.

So we're going at this all wrong.  The Founders told us how to do it, and we're ignoring everything they said.

Here's what we should do:

The President should go to Congress - not with a few, limited things he plans to do and a lot of promises about what he won't allow to happen - but with a clear, military goal. 

And in this case, the only possible clear goal is the elimination of the Assad regime and - perhaps - the seizure of its chemical weapons stocks. 

That's a military goal.  That's a war goal.

It would, of course, take more than a stand-off attack with cruise missiles.  It would require "boots on the ground".  Men and women would die.  But that's what armies and navies and air forces are for - to engage and destroy an enemy.  The necessary concomitant of that is that some of your own men and women will die. 

But in a war, they're at least dying for something concrete - not so send a message.

But that's not what the President has called for - not what Congress is going to determine.  

They're going to design some legislative compromise, and pretend it means something.

Four years ago, they gave us Obamacare.

Now, we get ObamaWar.

What Now? (Part Two)

In my previous post, I suggested that there were four ways in which Congress could respond to President Obama's request for their endorsement of action against Syria. 

They could say Yes.

They could say No.

They could ask for a more detailed plan, with serious undertakings as to the President's further plans in the event that bombing Syria doesn't result in its abandonment of chemical weapons.

They could declare war against Syria, insisting upon a full-scale military effort to oust the Assad regime, corral Syria's stockpiles of WMD, and pull out.

Obviously, the first two options are what they are.  If Congress says "Yes", they must hope that this President - not the most decisive or experienced of presidents - will be able to avoid the slippery slope which seems, too often, to lead from limited intervention into invasion, protracted conflict, and a failed attempt at nation-building.

If Congress says "No", apparently, that's it.  We stay out, and let what happens, happen.

If Congress asks for a more detailed strategy - and the President complies - Congress will then be left to decide whether to say yes or no to that plan.  Which doesn't really change anything, since plans are just plans - and the slippery slope still looms.

Which brings us to option four:  What if Congress upped the ante by insisting that we go all-in?  What if we just declared war - essentially giving the bird to Vladimir Putin, Iran's ayatollahs and China's new mandarins of  - and started landing the Marines?

I'm not recommending it, understand, but there's something to be said for waging war in pursuit of a decisive result.

Indeed, there was a great deal to be said for it two years ago, when we dithered around hoping an ill-sorted, disorganized bunch of rebels would be able to topple a well-organized, ruthless regime fighting for the existence of itself and the religious minority it leads.

At that point, there was at least some prospect that a quick, decisive victory would leave in place the sort of civil society necessary as the prerequisite for nation-building. 

Now, all the people we could have relied upon then - the educated, relatively secular businessmen, lawyers, doctors, teachers and bureaucrats who are the best hope in every society seeking to move toward enlightened self-government - are either dead or fled.  Of the millions of Syrians now in exile, it's a safe bet that their number includes nearly everyone who could afford to get out.

And that number will include nearly everyone in Syria who doesn't believe, deep down, that it is the will of Allah that his particular group crush, humiliate, and rule over all the other groups.  

Which is to say that - while there might possibly have been a good ending to the Syrian rising had we acted promptly and decisively to eliminate Assad - there is no good ending possible now.  No matter who wins, Syria will be devastated for decades - and the eventual ruler will be the survivor of a particularly ruthless war of all against all.

Speaking personally, had I been President two years ago - and had the military been able to put together a plan which involved limited costs - I would have taken advantage of the opportunity to eliminate the Assad regime.  Period. 

There are a lot of bad rulers in the world - many of them hostile to the United States.  Most of the time, we have to live with that.

But when there's a chance to support a group of people who are making a serious effort to topple one of them - and there's a reasonable chance of succeeding - my instinct is to take it. 

But again, that was two years ago. 

And my guess is that the President's present desire to do something arises largely out of the desire to compensate for the mistake he made in not doing something then.

There's a good deal of that in recent American foreign policy.  We miss an opportunity, and later, we try to go back for a redo.

Like the urgency of a bunch of retreads from Bush 41 talking his son into invading Iraq after 9-11 - on a fabricated pretext - in order to make up for their failure to finish off Saddam ten years earlier.

They missed that chance.  The attempt to get it back was a waste of lives and treasure - and a profound distraction from the  mission of catching Osama bin Laden.

At any rate, that's my sense of what's going on here.  A lot of people in Washington - including the President - are having regrets about missing the boat in 2011.  But they did miss the boat, and it's now too late to go back and fix things.  Syria's educated middle-class is gone.  There's no one left to build a nation with.

Which leaves the American people - now that we've been belated invited into this debate - to make the best of our remaining options.

And they are two:

Either stay out - completely out - and let Syria gone on destroying itself.  Perhaps by focusing on something a lot more important - and about which we  could actually do something - like global climate change.

Or go in - hard and fast, boots on the ground - to take out Assad and his military, capture his chemical weapons stocks, and leave. 

And then let the Syrians go on killing each other until someone forms a new government.  Or several new governments.

For my money, since there are al Qaeda and Hezbollah fighters on the ground in Syria, I'd vote for the limited incursion to decapitate the Assad regime and grab the weapons.  If our military thinks that's possible.

If not, I'd vote to stay out completely and just stop talking about it. 

Because the bottom line is this: 

Two years ago, we had a magnificence, once-in-a-presidency chance to topple a truly evil regime and allow a relatively educated, sophisticated people to try for something better.

And we missed the  boat.

Since we can't turn back the clock, we shouldn't waste any more time with it.  If we can grab Assad's weapons at a reasonable cost, let's go.

If not, let's go home.