Redrawing the borders

From John McCain's interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC's Good Morning America (July 21st). A second gaffe comes at the very end, when McCain falsely states that Barack Obama advocates that the U.S. "attack" Pakistan.

To enlighten Mr. McCain on the geography of the region, I humbly offer this CIA map:


Note the rather large country that separates the borders of Iraq and Pakistan by approximately 800 miles. Iran hasn't gotten much attention recently, so it's understandable that McCain would overlook it.

MAP: Wikipedia Commons

"Operation Iranian Freedom"? Seven reasons why it's not going to happen

"You cannot reason a man out of something that he did not reason his way into."

—Jonathan Swift

Summarizing the confrontational trend in U.S. relations with Tehran, an anonymous blog commenter recently concluded: "...it all leads in one direction: war with Iran."

Just last week, John McCain received some rare bad press after he provocatively declared that it's "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaida is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known." This gaffe was quickly corrected by his consort, Joe Lieberman (I-CT, or "R-CT" to be more accurate).

As the campaign intensifies, there's little doubt that this kind of counterfactual rhetoric from McCain and the administration will increase. After all, a confrontation with Iran would appeal to McCain's alleged strengths in national security and foreign policy. Fear, along with tax cuts for the wealthy, is the foundation of the Republican party's dwindling appeal.

So the bombast from the right is likely to intensify. But an actual war with Iran? Regime change in Tehran? Absent some startling new development, followed by a military mobilization on the scale of Vietnam, it's simply not going to happen.

In the context of all the neocon bluster and the hysteria that it has incited among liberals, few things could be clearer than this reality: the U.S. lacks the military capability to launch a ground invasion or regime change in Iraq. In fact, force levels in Iraq are so precarious that Bush has been pressuring the U.K. to engage its small residual force near Basra to aid the Maliki government in the current fighting there.

The catastrophe in Iraq has amply shown that Bush, Cheney, and McCain are capable of defying overwhelming realities by favoring ill-prepared military adventures, and of course they should be constantly challenged for any displays of bellicosity. But it takes more than rhetoric to launch offensive operations on such a scale: you need to have the military infrastructure to accomplish it.

Iran's military has been weakened by lack of spare parts due to sanctions, but it's still quite formidable compared to Saddam Hussein's vestigial army in 2003. Here are seven reasons why a U.S. ground invasion or forcible regime change are not likely to happen:

1. Military resources: Iran could quickly mobilize a well-armed force of one million, not to mention another 12 million in the Basij paramilitary groups. Due to sanctions, Iran has been forced apply its prodigious oil revenues to the development of its own armaments industry, which has produced thousands of missiles, many of them quite sophisticated.
   
2. Popular resistance to invasion: While the Ahmadinejad regime of fanatical clerics certainly lacks the wholehearted support of the population, there's little reason to believe that Iranians wouldn't rally to vigorously resist a U.S. invasion. By contrast, Iraq's resistance in 2003 was limited to a few loyal units of the Republican Guards.
3. Population and size: The population of Iran is three times that of Iraq and its landmass is nearly five times larger (and about three times the size of Texas). The scale and duration of operations would need to be adjusted accordingly.
4. Iranian terrain favors defense. The invasion route from Kuwait to Baghdad crossed the flat floodplain of the Tigris-Euphrates — ideal terrain for an armored blitzkrieg. The most likely overland route to Tehran, starting at Abadan (east of Basra), travels some 500 miles through a vast 11,000-foot mountain range whose passes could easily be defended by relatively small forces. (Recall Italy in 1943-44, when a mere 23 German divisions were able to stall the allied advance and inflict horrendous casualties.) An assault from Afghanistan isn't an option, nor is an amphibious landing from the Persian Gulf. A massive airborne assault in sufficient strength wouldn't be feasible, either, since much of the Pentagon's transport capability is heavily committed to resupply in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   
5. Vulnerable supply lines: Iran has enough missiles, aircraft and heavy artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and access to the Persian Gulf, indefinitely. This would not only complicate the task of supplying a U.S. invasion force along lengthening supply lines: it would also have devastating economic effects by interrupting the flow of much of the world's crude oil.
   
6. International opposition: Despite occasional confrontational rhetoric from Paris and London, it's very unlikely that the U.S. could expect any military or diplomatic support from its traditional allies. In fact, a full-scale U.S. invasion of Iran would generate massive worldwide condemnation. The U.S. would be entirely on its own, without the military or political support of even such former "Coalition partners" as the British, Australians or Poles.
7. Decentralization of Iran's nuclear program: Like the North Koreans, the Iranians learned the obvious lesson from the crippling Israeli attack on Iraq's nuclear facilities at Osiraq in 1981. Those facilities have been dispersed across the landscape in "hard" targets to minimize the damage from airstrikes, special-forces incursions and other kinds of attacks. The U.S. would likely have to seize most of the Iran in order to eradicate its nuclear infrastructure.
   

If an invasion is out of the question, militarily and otherwise, why all the blather from the White House and John McCain?

First, it bears repeating that there's always a risk of limited military operations against Iran despite the severe strains on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. A short-term aerial campaign or special-forces incursions, for example, would not be out of the question. Those risks needs to be taken very seriously, as Iran certainly does, but such time-limited attacks are a very different matter than the kind of large-scale "regime change" operation that failed so dismally in Iraq.

The endless threats and bluster are part of a larger dynamic that falls into the realm of psyops — psychological operations. As Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon demonstrated in the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972, U.S. policy is often designed to cultivate the perception that our leadership is dangerous, unpredictable, irrational and likely to grossly overreact to any provocation. From that perspective, the administration's (and McCain's) extreme bellicosity is intended to serve as a plausible substitute for thirty assault divisions poised on the Iranian border.

While it would've been clinically insane and militarily out of the question to launch a third war on Iran or North Korea, Bush/Cheney (and now McCain) seek to create a credible perception that they're capable of anything. The clear purpose is to intimidate both the "axis of evil" and anyone else who might challenge the administration's basic operating principle: "Don't mess with the U.S." This hegemonic strategy can be risky and provocative, but McCain and his neocon advisors have clearly embraced it in their threats against Iran.

Finally, the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq was an extension of the longstanding Israeli policy of responding to terrorism by attacking a known enemy, even if there's no evidence that this enemy was associated with the original incident. There's little reason to believe that McCain would be less likely to resort to retaliatory attacks of this nature.

For the overstretched U.S military, the bottom line is clear enough: no one in authority anticipated the demands of extended counterinsurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There already aren't enough boots to put on the ground in those conflicts. No one in Washington seems to be developing any plans that will elevate force levels to the point where forcible "regime change" becomes a realistic goal in Iran.

A renewed draft, or vastly increased financial incentives for recruits, would be necessary to create a force sufficient to take on the mullahs in Tehran. Even if the political will existed for such a mobilization, it's likely that at least 500,000 troops — equal to the number that invaded Iraq in 1991 — would be required to invade Iran. In fact, the invading force would almost certainly need to be much larger [1].

It would take years to recruit, train and equip a force to undertake "Operation Iranian Freedom." Even if the regime in Tehran could be forcibly overthrown, there's no reason to believe that Iranians would be any more accepting of a U.S. occupation than the Iraqis.

Even if Bush/Cheney/McCain are convinced of the need to undertake regime change in Tehran, these realities are inescapable — as they need to be constantly reminded by citizens, voters, rational voices in the Pentagon, and possibly even the mainstream media.

NOTES

[1] It hardly needs to be mentioned that another devastating attack within the U.S. could transform these political calculations, possibly generating support for conscription, a general mobilization to a long-term war footing and a major escalation in the "clash of civilizations" with Islam.

MAP: Wikimedia Commons

Pushing the envelope

Veterans for Peace established this memorial on the beach at Arlington West in Santa Monica in 2004, and it has expanded relentlessly each year with the casualty count in Iraq.

As of today, the war in Iraq has inflicted 3,454 deaths and 26,188 wounded on U.S. forces. 980 of those deaths have occurred since last Memorial Day weekend, compared to 807 during the previous year. Over two hundred troops have been killed over the last two months alone. It's not unusual for the same number of Iraqis to be killed and wounded over a single weekend.

And it will only get worse, as Bush warned on Thursday:

"We're going to expect heavy fighting in the weeks and months," he said. "We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties." He added, "It could be a bloody -- it could be a very difficult August."

Meanwhile, yet another poll shows that:

"Six in 10 Americans say the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq and more than three in four say things are going badly there -- including nearly half who say things are going very badly, the poll found."

Last week the Democrats in Congress blinked in their confrontation with Bush over timetables for withdrawal. They had little choice, of course, since they lack the Republican support needed to override the inevitable second veto. The war is funded through September, and it seems unlikely that even these poll numbers will persuade Republicans to desert Bush in sufficient numbers to have an impact on policy. Unless the situation deteriorates dramatically, they're unlikely to go into total panic mode until the primary season begins in 2008.

As a lame duck, Bush is unlikely to be able to pursue any kind of domestic agenda in Congress, for which we can all be grateful. But on Iraq, as with the Gonzales affair, he can safely adopt an in-your-face posture, defying the growing opposition to do something to force a change.

During the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole got exercised because Al Gore visited a Buddhist temple and was rewarded with some $122,000 in (legal) campaign contributions. He asked: "Where's the outrage? When--when will the voters start to focus? ...How far can you push the envelope? How much can you get away with? What can you do? "

The context has changed completely, but eleven years later Dole's questions—which seemed trivial even back then—are far more momentous. Voters are clearly focused on the war, and there seems to be no lack of outrage, but Bush has plenty of reason to believe that he can get away with just about anything—and nothing can be done about it. Sadly, he apparently faces no political consequences even if another 2,000 Americans die in Iraq before January 20, 2009.

PHOTOS: Arlington West [Thanks to Digby at Hullabaloo for the tip.]

Diplomatic non-recognition

As plans develop for a regional conference in the Middle East, initiated by the Iraqi government, the U.S. faces the prospect of sitting down at the table with Iran and Syria, two governments that it regularly denounces in terms usually reserved for the naughtiest children. Since the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran in 1979, the U.S. has had no diplomatic relations with Iran at all. American "interests" there have been represented by the Pakistani government.

Despite its radical approach to foreign policy in the Middle East, the Bush administration's understanding of diplomatic relations is strangely consistent with most of its predecessors, from Kennedy through Clinton. In brief, that policy has been based on the notion that diplomatic relations can be withheld and thereby used as a kind of "sword" to punish or coerce an unrecognized government. Some prominent examples include:

• Cuba, most notably, since its 1959 revolution. The "sword" in this case includes another potent and crippling economic weapon, the embargo.
  
• Iran
• North Korea
• The Palestinian Authority
  

Nonrecognition is usually combined with economic sanctions in an effort to destabilize, or at least delegitimize, governments that have lost Washington's favor (or never had it).

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. finally conferred the "gift" of diplomatic relations on various other states that were formerly isolated and demonized, including Libya (recognized in 2006), Vietnam (1995), Iraq (2003) and China (1979, seven years after Nixon's "opening" in 1972).

Wikipedia's handy definition of "diplomatic relations" describes the concept as a "political act by which one state acknowledges an act or status of another state, or government, thereby according it legitimacy and expressing its intent to bring into force the domestic and international legal consequences of recognition."

"Domestic" consequences of recognition? This definition is flawed because it's far too ambitious, suggesting as it does that recognition is a tool for modifying the behavior of an errant government. I'd offer a more minimal version: diplomatic recognition is a means of establishing a channel for communications between two governments in order to reduce the risk of conflict and facilitate long-term peaceful interaction. The premise here is that talking, or at least the option of communicating, is always better than an atmosphere of threats, perpetual antagonism and bullying.

In 1961, the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations declared that the goals of diplomatic relations are to acknowledge "the sovereign equality of States" and "contribute to the development of friendly relations among nations, irrespective of their differing constitutional and social systems..."

The Nixon-Kissinger opening to China was far more modest in scope than Wikipedia's definition would suggest. After three decades of refusing to officially acknowledge mainland China's existence, the U.S. finally yielded to the reality principle and, in 1979, belatedly established formal relations. At the same time, it abandoned the fiction that the Nationalist Chinese government, confined on the small island of Taiwan, represented the vast population on the mainland. The U.S. refusal to recognize China was an utter failure if its goal was to undermine the legitimacy of the communist government and produce eventual regime change. The "silent treatment" has not proven to be a very effective tool of statecraft.

By the same standard that it applied to China nearly three decades ago, the U.S. could justify extending diplomatic relations to the de facto regimes in Cuba or Iran. Both countries have established relatively stable governments that have been in power for decades—48 years in the case of Cuba. Despite years of open hostility, threats and economic sanctions, regime change is still elusive in both places. In fact, the antagonism and contempt of the U.S. government may have had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing popular support for both regimes.

Diplomatic recognition should not, and need not, indicate approval. The U.S. extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933, fifteen years after it came to power and long before the two became allies in the war against Hitler's Germany. Britain recognized the Soviet government even earlier, in 1924, despite its obvious and very deep disapproval of the communist regime.

It's widely recognized that the isolation of Cuba is a result of domestic political considerations having a lot to do with the politics, and 27 electoral votes, of Florida. During the long embargo of Cuba, the U.S. has vigorously supported many regimes with far worse human-rights records than Castro's: the regime of the House of Saud in Arabia, the Shah's Iran, Somoza's Nicaragua, South Vietnam under numerous dictators, Pinochet's Chile, and other countries too numerous to mention.

South Africa during apartheid is worth special consideration. As with China, the U.S. justified its close relationship with the atrocious regime of the National Party under the theory of "constructive engagement." The U.S. and Britain saw South Africa as a profitable trading partner and an ally against communist penetration of southern Africa.

If trade and other forms of "constructive engagement" were useful tools in relations with South Africa and China, why doesn't the same logic apply to Cuba, which poses no military threat whatsoever to the U.S.? The real reason is that U.S. policy there, as in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, is designed to create enough hardship among the general population to undermine the government and produce regime change.

As for the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf war, a 1999 report prepared at the direction of the U.N. Security Council found that:

"In marked contrast to the prevailing situation prior to the events of 1990-91, the infant mortality rates in Iraq today (1999) are among the highest in the world, low infant birth weight affects at least 23% of all births, chronic malnutrition affects every fourth child under five years of age, only 41% of the population have regular access to clean water, 83% of all schools need substantial repairs."

Despite the mayhem visited on the Iraqi people by the sanctions, it was still necessary to launch an invasion to accomplish regime change. The use of sanctions against an entire population to effect regime change, whether the target is Iraq or Cuba or any other country, is both immoral and ineffectual. Economic sanctions, including bans on trade in armaments and spare parts, can be effective and appropriate, but they shouldn't include prohibitions on food or medicine required by the general population.

Diplomatic relations with Iran may seem problematic in light of mutual hostility, its despicable leadership and the seizure of the U.S. embassy by student radicals in 1979. However, the steady deterioration in the U.S.-Iranian relationship is a good reason to increase communications rather than cut them off altogether.

Last year, President Ahmadinejad wrote a long letter to George Bush that, among other things, challenged whether the Holocaust ever occurred. Bush ignored it, though there was much outrage against Ahmadinejad from Israel to western Europe to the U.S. and elsewhere. What would have been the harm in responding to that letter, in English and perfect Farsi? No doubt George would need a lot of help with both languages, but it would give him a chance to challenge Ahmadinejad's preposterous statements and communicate directly with the Iranian people, who are reported to be much less hostile to the U.S. than their government.

Iran would be a good candidate for informal "Track II" diplomacy that, as greater confidence develops (perhaps requiring regime changes in both the U.S. and Iran), could eventually produce normal diplomatic relations.

This is not to suggest that the U.S. must automatically extend diplomatic recognition to every de facto government on the planet, no matter how outrageous its conduct. Some regimes have leaderships that can only be described as insane: for example, those engaged in genocide or mass murder, or those (like Iran in 1979) that can't be trusted to protect American embassy personnel. There's no bright line, beyond which recognition can't be extended, but at least the U.S. should develop, for the first time in its history, consistent standards for extending diplomatic relations.

NOTES

(1) While the outrage in the U.S. back in 1979 was understandable and justified, few Americans, then or now, have appreciated the role of that embassy in the CIA's overthrow of the nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. A brief but thorough account of the U.S. role in the coup can be found in Overthrow (2006) by Steven Kinzer.

PHOTO: U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece (subjected to a rocket attack in January, 2007).