I increasingly wonder if I have not by some freak of probability been flung into a strange hallucinatory construct taking its characteristics from the fiction I enjoy reading. Perhaps it mimics an alternate universe wherein the local Western civilization never came up with many of the common aphorisms of my own, like "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Perhaps it is trying to be sci-fi time travel, with a mad scholar whispering to the daring investigator, "It is all happening again!"
Daring investigator, listen to my tale: in my world, my President did a strange thing. We were involved in a war; we were occupying a country and working to shape events there as best we could. Ours was Afghanistan, yours seems to be Iraq. Oddly, the President began talking about the threat posed by a second country, and its supposed weapons, or ability to acquire weapons, or ability to use weapons, or somethign of this nature (it was never all that precise). Ours was Iraq; yours seems to be Iran. (It does look like your intelligence on Iran is much better than ours was on Iraq, though. Ours turned out to be wrong later. If we came across the same situation in Iran, I imagine we'd have trouble with our credibility trying to do something about it. You wouldn't have that problem, right?) We shrugged and kept fighting where we were.
He accused this second country of supporting terrorism in other countries: our President accused Iraq of wanting to give weapons to al-Qaeda; yours is apparently accusing Iran of aiding Islamic rebels in Iraq. Somewhat troubling, if true, but something to be dealt with through investigative channels at the moment; we had much bigger fish to fry. (Frankly, our Iraq was pretty well contained and not much of a threat to anyone outside its borders.)
He started putting pressure on this second country, talking about facing up to evil and throwing around a lot of tough-guy rhetoric. His people quoted a previous President's policy of "regime change" in Iraq and started acting like it was suddenly important. I notice that one of your local Republicans, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has proposed that the same "regime change" notion be made policy for Iran -- Senate bill S. 2681, currently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Go ahead, check out thomas, it's a great resource in both our worlds. I also imagine it's the same in both our worlds that telling someone you want to remove them from power is, shall we say, not exactly conducive to obtaining their cooperation through nonmilitary means. (Technically you could read "regime change" as something else - that's the point of couching it in those terms - but any serious reader knows what it means.)
Now, the guys leading the charge for this push into Iraq, which didn't really have anything to do with our current war, were an odd lot: some guys named Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, etc. Cheney in particular considered himself the chief "examiner of worst-case scenarios." That's the kind of job that can turn you a little paranoid. Never good for decision-making. Say, did you hear that John Bolton's being called "the self-appointed tip of the spear" on Iran discussions these days?
Where the public didn't know, there were some other things going on. We were getting some human intelligence on the ground, and they were telling their sources that we were ready to move. We were shifting troops into the region, theoretically so that we could be ready to go quickly if the word was given. Problem was, our President didn't seem to know enough about the nature of leadership (he wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the bunch; not very curious, or introspective, or given to nuance) and advisors who examine worst-case scenarios and planning cycles, because once all this backend stuff had been building up, not pulling the trigger and invading this country was suddenly next to impossible.
Of course, we only found this out later. Hard to know about that kind of thing when you're a civilian. So through all this, and especially since we didn't know much about the secretive stuff (our President was a pretty close-mouthed guy when it came to divulging anything to the public), we were thinking, "Surely our President's not so insane as to just drop the mission in Afghanistan and go invade Iraq. We're stretched already, and we've got work to do in Afghanistan." Still...
If the personalities involved here are anything like they were in my world, the backend process is probably pretty similar. Maybe if you had a different President you could expect something different. But even without that....
Surely your President's not so insane as to just drop the mission in Iraq and go invade Iran. You're stretched already, and you've got work to do in Iraq.
Right?
Posted by William at September 23, 2004 07:09 PM