The president was in Cleveland yesterday, once again showing just how divorced from reality he is on the question of Iraq and just how willing he is to fudge the facts to make his points:
In his speech, Bush once again conflated two organizations, al-Qaeda in Iraq and the nternational network led by Osama bin Laden, saying that the same group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, is responsible for much of the violence in Iraq. While the Iraq militants are inspired by bin Laden, intelligence analysts say the Iraqi group is composed overwhelmingly of Iraqis and does not take direction from bin Laden.
But this line is the one that really struck me — one not included in the major news stories:
Failure in Iraq would have serious consequences for the security of your children and your grandchildren.
Failure — as if the mission in Iraq was not already a failure, a four-year war built on shifting rationales that has cost the United States thousands of lives, wounded tens of thousands more Americans and killed and maimed countless Iraqis, a war that has cut us off in many ways from nations that should be our allies.
He talks about the impact that the war will have on how we are viewed by Iran and “the extremists,” implying that a show of weakness on our part would only empower them. That — it seems to me, sitting here in my suburban New Jersey perch, distant from the halls of power — is an incredible distortion of the facts. As if the extremists weren’t already using Iraq as a recruiting tool.
As for Iran, it already is distrustful of the United States, believes the Bush administration to be an aggressor and is incredibly protective of its own sovereignty. A bellicose United States waging war next door is something the Iranians view as a threat and, given the power imbalance, a nuclear weapon becomes an attractive equalizer.
I’m not endorsing an Iranian bomb — I am a nuclear abolitionist and believe all countries, this one included, need to find a way to end the nuclear madness. But my reading of the last couple of decades — since the end of the Reagan administration, actually — is that our continued willingness to stockpile nuclear arms, our more recently stated willingness to use them and the misguided notion that we have a right to violate national sovereignty and remove leaders (whether covertly or overtly) with whom we disagree or whom we view (rightly in most cases) as venal and evil acts as the impetus behind the current spread of weapons to more and more nations.
Jonathan Schell, writing recently in The Nation (sorry, it is a subscriber item), offered this account of the history, beginning with Reagan’s call for a Strategic Defense Initiative (the Star Wars system) — essentially a missile shield — in 1983. However, dubious a proposition, it allowed Reagan to think differently about nuclear weapons. Star Wars mean that the
two superpowers, finding their nuclear weapons now “impotent and obsolete,” could do away with them. The motivation for co-opting the freeze is well documented, yet so is the sincerity of Reagan’s fervent desire not just to freeze but actually to abolish nuclear weapons. That sincerity was put on spectacular display at the summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, between Reagan and Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, also a nuclear abolitionist. As memorandums of the summit show, the two leaders came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Thus, in a sense the spirit of June 12 reached a high point and expired at Reykjavik.
The aftermath has been dispiriting. Arms control resumed and had some successes, but no fresh or bold initiative to deal with the nuclear danger has been launched. No heir to either the freeze movement or Reagan has arisen. The end of the cold war, seemingly the greatest opportunity to lift nuclear danger since 1946, was wasted. Instead, the whole issue fell into a shocking state of neglect, as if people believed that a mortal illness could be dealt with by forgetting about it.
In the years of silence, the unattended predicament quietly went haywire, assuming a malevolent post-cold war shape. Observing that the cold war powers, whatever they might say or not say, were determined to hold on to their nuclear arsenals, other nations — India, Pakistan, North Korea, perhaps Iran — determined to join the undissolved nuclear club. Whereupon the nuclear powers suddenly awoke to the danger and declared that these nuclear arsenals were intolerable. Having, in the early post-cold war years, mutely forgone the idea of negotiated nuclear disarmament for all, the United States soon turned to war as the ultimate solution to proliferation, and the Bush Doctrine of preventive war was born. There followed the Iraq War and, now, the threat of war with Iran, including the multiplying threats to use nuclear weapons.
But the Bush administration does not see things this way. Iran’s weapons are viewed in a vacuum, separate and apart from allies like Pakistan and Israel or even India (forget North Korea).
The hypocrisy is its own trigger. If the Americans have them, the rationale goes around the world, then why can’t we? Especially, if those nations see the United States as a potential aggressor.
In the end, Bush is right to link Iraq and Iran. We will need Iran’s help to keep Iraq from spiralling further out of control when we pull up stakes; and we need to begin leaving Iraq and to renounce our “pre-emptive war” doctrine if we are to bring Iran to the table, both to discuss Iraq and the Iranian nuclear program.
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Hank Kalet 