Iran or Bust
BELL, JEFFREY
Iran or Bust The defining test of Bush's war presidency. by Jeffrey Bell Events are converging to elevate the nuclear crisis with Iran into the central crisis of the Bush presidency. War...
...He had also laid out a coherent U.S...
...Beginning with the March 2003 invasion, the war in Iraq has taken center stage as the toughest, best-defined test of the Bush war strategies: in a nutshell, military preemption and regime change, followed by democratic reform in the wake of terrorist challenges from Sunni revanchists and Islamist terrorists swearing allegiance to al Qaeda...
...If such factions exist, however, they are irrelevant today...
...standing among our friends and allies, in Iraq and across the globe...
...On the pure military level, this is, of course, appropriate...
...If the Bush administration is developing a military option to deal with Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons —a form of preemption—it is doing so very quietly...
...You could disagree with the strategy, and many did...
...The days of treating terrorism as a criminal activity, to be solved primarily by the work of policemen, prosecutors, judges, and Jeffrey Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consultingfirm...
...success or failure in Iraq...
...Without political reform in the Islamic world, Bush argued, eliminating one set of terrorists would achieve no more than a respite before terrorism's next wave...
...In the years since 9/11, the Bush war strategy has yielded some undeniable successes: the turning of Pakistan from a fomenter of terrorism and of nuclear proliferation into a semicollaborator of the United States...
...Much depends on how far Iran is from putting together its first nuclear warhead...
...As vice president, LBJ had fought to prevent the anti-Diem coup, which proved to be a ghastly mistake...
...With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran last June, this began to change...
...Even if the ominous date turns out to be much further away, Ahmadinejad shows little sign of pausing for breath...
...Claims can be made as well for the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon followed by free elections and for the advance of democratic reforms in a number of other Islamic countries...
...When Lyndon Johnson became president in November 1963, he inherited a chaotic situation in south vietnam due to an ill-advised military coup against the civilian-led saigon government countenanced by his predecessor, John F. Kennedy...
...Ahmadinejad, for whatever reasons, appears determined to force Bush to live up to his post-9/11 strategy or tacitly admit that he has abandoned it in the face of difficulties in Iraq...
...There may even be factions in Iran that would hesitate before providing a direct challenge to Bush's preemption doctrine...
...And he announced that rogue states would not be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction...
...Could we live with a nuclear Iran...
...The new military doctrine, a marked departure from the cold War doctrine of deterrence, was that of preemption: We would no longer wait for military mobilizations or attacks before striking against a growing terrorist threat...
...inaction or delay...
...invasion of Iraq, as Jed Babbin recently pointed out, it would be the lack of an element of surprise...
...A war president who can be portrayed as having given up on the core of his own war strategy will be seen as a leader considerably less capable of deterring our terrorist enemies, wherever they are and whatever it is they are plotting...
...Is there a way to take advantage of the fact that the Shiite wing of Islamism has not taken part, so far, in a shooting war with the United States or its allies...
...If you had to pick one flaw in the superbly organized U.S...
...There may or may not be elements in the Iranian government willing to accommodate the emerging Shiite-majority government in Iraq...
...Reports out of Iran suggest Ahmad-inejad may see himself as a central actor in an Islamic apocalypse...
...forces and the Shi-ite-led Iraqi government...
...Franklin Roosevelt as a war president is defined not by the attack on Pearl Harbor, but by the radical war aim he laid out against Japan and Germany in the wake of Pearl Harbor— unconditional surrender—and by his relentless and successful pursuit of that war aim until the day he died...
...The president served notice that foreign governments providing safe haven for terrorist enemies of the United states would be treated as if those governments were mounting terrorist operations themselves— that is, as enemies of the United States in a world war...
...Indeed, the Hamas sweep of the Palestinian parliamentary elections is no doubt being seen in Tehran as a vindication of Ahmadinejad's Damascus terror summit days earlier...
...Preemption comprised a series of military options up to and including invasion, occupation, and regime change...
...Not one led by a man who says the Jewish Holocaust never happened and muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel...
...Given these events, it would no longer be shocking to see Ahmadinejad at a summit with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq and an advocate of the mass murder of Shiites as a tactic in the war against U.S...
...military and political strategy to deal with the protracted world war he believed us to be in...
...But no one could deny that such a strategy had been laid out...
...Iraq has tested every element of the Bush war strategy...
...the ousting of the Taliban government and its al Qaeda mentors in Afghanistan...
...juries, were over...
...By the time of the January 2002 State of the Union speech that singled out an "axis of evil"—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—as the most dangerous of the world's surviving rogue states, Bush had successfully defined his response to 9/11...
...and the renunciation by Libya of its nuclear program, to name three...
...They are judged by how they react to those circumstances...
...one by one, Iran's radical president is removing the pretexts for U.S...
...policy goal around the world but with particular focus on the Arab and Islamic cultures...
...Not with an Iranian president who convenes a terror summit in Damascus with Bashar Assad, the all-but-proven murderer of the former premier of Lebanon, and with Hamas, the avatar of Sunni terrorism in the Palestinian territories...
...But what is starting to become clear is that Ahmadinejad's seemingly reckless challenge will extract, and is meant to extract, a cost in U.S...
...Some reports, particularly those traced to Israeli intelligence, point to the very near future...
...To achieve these war aims, Bush proclaimed two new doctrines...
...In the same way, long after the present wartime president leaves office, his success or failure will be judged not by the enemy attacks of 9/11 but by how he responded to those attacks— and by whether his responses prove right or wrong...
...Yet Johnson as a war president receives a failing grade for one reason only: When he left office in January 1969 the United states was in a far weaker geopolitical position, in vietnam and globally, than it had been when Johnson took office...
...Until fairly recently, it seemed plausible that the success or failure of Bush's global strategies, and thus of the Bush presidency itself, would hinge on U.S...
...In response to 9/11, Bush and his administration put down clear markers and bright lines...
...The new geopolitical doctrine was the promotion of democracy as a central U.S...
...A man with this mindset might see provoking the United States as forwarding the end game of Allah...
...War presidents are graded not by circumstances they inherit, including those that lead to war...
...And he might not fear provoking Israel into an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities that could trigger convulsions throughout the Middle East and beyond...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 20
