| December
7, 2007
When
One's World Turns Upside Down
Bush,
Iran and the Politics of Doomsday
By Col.
DAN SMITH
Today
is the anniversary of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor
by the Imperial Japanese Navy. For the individuals who died, for
their families, it was a day in which the personal worlds of thousands
were suddenly turned upside down. When President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war, the entire country’s
political, economic, and social worlds turned upside down as 12
million men and women donned uniforms and women entered new jobs
on the home front.
As
I write this Thursday morning, December 6, it has been about 100
hours since excerpts from the latest U.S. National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear capabilities became public
knowledge around the world.
It
is also about 75 hours since President Bush’s news conference
on December 3 during which he declared the NIE’s findings
changed nothing. Quite the contrary, Bush insisted that the NIE
reinforced the administration’s approach: hold low-level discussions
in Bagdad between the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors to Iraq; insist
that Iran comply with UN Security Council demands that Tehran halt
uranium enrichment as a precondition for any high-level direct negotiations
with Washington; and impose another round of stiff international
sanctions on Tehran.
And
it is roughly 50 hours since President Bush arrived in Omaha, Nebraska
Tuesday and declared that Tehran must “come clean” about
its nuclear weapons ambitions and programs.
The
phrase “come clean” recalled to mind two essays written
in July and September 2003. Unbeknownst to the public, press, and
pundits at the time, this was the transitional period for the invading
forces. In these three months, the foreign soldiers lost the image
of liberators and were saddled with the stigma of occupiers –
their world turned upside down. It was also the period during which
the full extent of the administration’s tampering with intelligence
began to be apparent to all but the most doctrinaire observers.
Next
door in Iran, the ayatollahs saw new instability in an already instable
region of the world. Afghanistan and Iraq, two neighbors, had been
invaded by U.S. forces, their governments overthrown and replaced
by pro-western regimes, and now hosted 160,000 U.S. troops.. And
while the Afghanistan venture was obviously retaliation for the
al-Qaeda terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the March 2003 assault
on Iraq was an example of the “Bush Doctrine” of “preventive
war” applied to regimes that, in addition to secretly pursuing
nuclear technology and knowledge, were deemed by Washington to be
unfriendly.
The
challenge for the ayatollahs in 2007 is in many ways the same one
that Saddam had faced in 2003: how to prove a negative – that
there were no weapons or programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction
when the U.S. government incessantly insisted that there were. The
only way to do this was to expose the manipulation of intelligence
by the Bush White House as it sought congressional support against
first Iraq and now against Iran.
All
the ayatollahs can offer in defense are the lessons of the Iraq
confrontation. In the four months before the invasion, UN inspectors
had found no weapons and no programs for acquiring weapons of mass
destruction – facts that at least denied the administration
any official UN backing for attacking Iraq. Similarly, during the
six months after the invasion, the 1,400 hand-picked inspectors
of the U.S. Iraq Survey Team also failed to find any of the nuclear,
biological, or chemical weapons the Bush administration alleged
Saddam possessed.
So
it seems that Saddam had been playing an elaborate shell game right
up to the end. His nuclear weapons ploy not only kept regional enemies
at bay but was convincing enough to fool western analysts that Iraq’s
nuclear program remained potentially active. Analysts succumbed
to classic mirror imaging because they simply could not imagine
why Saddam would endure harsh UN sanctions and scores of foreigners
running around his country unless he had a hidden program he planned
to restart after inspections ended.
Whether
it’s about Iraq in 2003 or Iran in 2007, the Middle East is
a rough neighborhood. Any perception of weakness risks another country
taking advantage of the situation. Thus the best defense is the
appearance of a strong offense, which Saddam tried to portray –
and did until his son-in-law, Hussein Kemal, “betrayed”
him to western and UN intelligence agents. These, unfortunately,
simply did not believe that the weapons of mass destruction had
been destroyed in 1991 and programs stopped.
As
is clearly evident with this new NIE on Iran, the intelligence professionals
have relearned something about their craft: when everyone agrees
on everything, start over and find the contradiction or the omission
that, if pursued, “turns the world upside down.”
That
is the message of the key findings of the NIE: the Intelligence
Community finds with “high confidence” that Tehran “halted
its nuclear weapons program in 2003” and further finds with
“moderate confidence” that this program has not been
restarted.” The question remaining is for how long Tehran
will sustain this hiatus – especially if the Bush administration
refuses to change its stance.
The
other fact -- highly dangerous -- the ayatollahs must weigh is Bush’s
insistence that Iran “come clean,” a demand that indicates
that Bush, unlike the Intelligence Community, still has learned
nothing of the psychology of the Middle East. In the end, it is
the political professionals, not the intelligence analysts, who
make policy and implement programs. When the politicians let ideology
override the facts, the mistakes of the past inevitably become the
mistakes of the future. How else can one explain the efforts by
conservative fear-mongering pundits to embrace a tortured interpretation
of the latest report of the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear programs?
The
moral is simple. If one believes in witches and warlocks, one will
be able to find evidence they exist and eventually the actual beings.
The administration and the world believed Saddam had weapons, and
he obliged by dropping hints and acting as if he were hiding something.
The
White House is trying to convince the public that Iran is another
Iraq and is an imminent danger to the world. But this time, the
world is not buying. The administration’s ploy this time will
not turn anyone’s world upside down.
Col.
Dan Smith, a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a senior fellow
on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Email at dan@fcnl.org.
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