Rolling Out the New War Product

Tehran

Following-up on his post last week at Global Affairs, Barnett Rubin writes:

On the morning of Thursday, August 30, someone who is a professional in handling information called me to recount a conversation from the previous Thursday or Friday (August 23 or 24). In this conversation, someone whose proximity to knowledge of such things is so great that I cannot identify him in any other way, told my interlocutor that President Bush would be inclined to accept suggestions for withdrawing some troops from Iraq and moving as many as possible into more secure bases, as a safeguard against reprisals in the event of a U.S. attack on Iran.

In today’s reports from Iraq (see for example the New York Times and the Washington Post) President Bush is quoted as saying, “If the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.” The president made a point of visiting and lauding the progress in predominantly Sunni Anbar province, where the U.S. would be more secure from reprisals by Shi’a militias sympathetic to Iran. Anyone who follows political thinking in the Middle East will realize that throughout the region this will be interpreted as confirming a shift in U.S. strategy toward allying with Sunnis to encircle Iran. The British withdrawal from Basra is also said have been accelerated to avoid reprisals on their highly exposed position there. 

Bush’s recent trip to Anbar Province may have illustrated his shifting policy away from support for the central Baghdad government to bolstering local Sunni leaders. Rubin writes:

Of course the government of Iraq, dominated by Shi’a groups with close ties to Iran, would oppose an attack on Iran. But it turns out that the central government in Baghdad is now irrelevant to success in Iraq!

The Wall Street Journal reports (from the news side) that: The new policy is a profound shift away from the Bush administration’s original goal of building a multisectarian democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Instead, the new strategy seems likely to lead to an Iraq with a very weak central government and largely self-governing and homogenous regions. Over the long term the goal is to connect these local leaders to the central government by making them dependent on Baghdad for funds. To qualify for U.S. assistance, local groups must pledge loyalty to the central government, though many Sunni leaders who are working with the U.S. complain the Shiite dominated government is illegitimate.

So when the central government in Baghdad opposes a U.S. attack on Iran, the administration can still announce success, because of support in Anbar, at the grassroots, where it really counts. If this war happens, we can count on journalists and “experts” traveling to Ramadi on Pentagon-escorted tours to report on Iraqi popular support for the attack on Iran and widespread opposition to the position taken by the “illegitimate,” pro-Iranian government in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, as Bush’s Iraq policy may be shifting, the Heritage Foundation has been running war-game scenarios against Iran for the past few months. The conclusions of those scenarios are being passed along to military and civilian war planners in the Bush administration. For example:

Administration officials are studying the lessons of the recent war game, which was set up to devise a way of weathering an economic storm created by war with Iran. Computer modelling found that if Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, it would nearly double the world price of oil, knock $161 billion off American GDP in a single quarter, cost one million jobs and slash disposable income by $260 billion a quarter.

The war gamers advocated deploying American oil reserves – good for 60 days – using military force to break the blockade (two US aircraft carrier groups and half of America’s 277 warships are already stationed close to Iran), opening up oil development in Alaska, and ending import tariffs on ethanol fuel. If the government also subsidised fuel for poorer Americans, the war-gamers concluded, it would mitigate the financial consequences of a conflict.

The Heritage report concludes:

The results were impressive. The policy recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes from the blockade.

While Bush rolls out the new war product, New Yorker’s George Packer says the news media ought to be asking the following questions:

“News organizations should ask certain questions, and keep asking them: Does the Administration expect the Iranian regime to fall in the event of an attack? If yes, what will replace it? If no (and it will not), why would the Administration deliberately set about to strengthen the regime’s hold on power? What will the Administration do to protect highly vulnerable American lives and interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world against the Iranian reprisals that will follow? What if Iran strikes against Israel? What will be the strategy when the Iranian nuclear program, damaged but not destroyed, resumes? How will the Administration handle the international alarm and opprobrium that would be an attack’s inevitable fallout?

“If this really is a return to the early fall of 2002 all over again, then I’m fairly sure that no one at the top of the Administration is worrying about the answers.”

Further, Dan Froomkin suggests that reporters stop talking to neoconservatives and instead seek out experts who actually understand the Middle East.

UPDATE: As predicted by the New Yorker’s George Packer, Fox News has begun a post-Labor Day push for war with Iran by interviewing Michael Ledeen on Hannity & Colmes. Not at all coincidentally, Ledeen has a new book out titled The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.