Unqualified Offerings

Steve Clemons considers whether Israel chose the style of reaction it did to Hezbollah’s prisoner grab for the purpose of “REMOVING from the table important policy options that the U.S. might have pursued.” Maybe. I find his commenter Dan Kervick’s analysis more plausible:

There is no reason to suspect that this is all an attempt to drag the US into a war it doesn’t want. If that were the case, we would be able to detect that fact from the statements and diplomatic maneuverings of the administration. But we see nothing of the sort. Instead, the administration has gone out of its way to link the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah to Syria and Iran, and to escalate diplomatic tensions rather than defuse them.

I believe Dick Cheney is still in charge of this administration’s foreign policy – not Rice. So to understand what is going on, you need to think like a Cheneyite or neoconservative hawk, and look at events from a broad geostrategic perspective that reflects their values and priorities. From their point of view, the US has a rapidly closing window of opportunity to consummate the war whose opening battles were Afghanistan and Iraq, a war that (they hope) is going to remake the Middle East to the advantage of Israel and the US – and a war which they think is in some sense unavoidable, and so is better fought sooner rather than later. Iran’s power is growing; China’s power is growing; Russia’s power is growing and Europe’s political culture is changing. Before long the balance of power will have shifted so as to drastically curtail US options, and place Israel on the wrong side of unstoppable regional trends. It’s now or never for the hawks.

The administration has decided to go for it, and throw the Hail Mary pass now. Israel in Lebanon is the first back out of the backfield. That this is an election year gives them all the more reason to strike.

George Bush’s unfailing reaction to a bad bet is to double down, so Kervick’s analysis has plausibility. I’d add that it puts a twist on a passage from Time’s “End of Cowboy Diplomacy” article that got all the press this week. Here’s the passage:

“There’s a move, even by Cheney, toward the Kissingerian approach of focusing entirely on vital interests,” says a presidential adviser. “It’s a more focused foreign policy that is driven by realism and less by ideology.”

The thing is, as I’ve felt the need to remind the estimable Justin Logan from time to time, “realism” can be just as bloody as “hard Wilsonianism” or whatever you prefer to call the Bush doctrine. The very association of the name “Kissinger” with the term tells us that. If Dick Cheney is tilting toward “realism,” it’s probably a bloody-minded version indeed. It’s probably this:

The glorious work of bombing Iraq free hasn’t, in fact, produced a model that anyone, Arab or otherwise, would want to emulate. It’s given Middle Eastern autocrats a bogeyman with which to frighten the children. You don’t want to try “democracy” and end up like Iraq do you? So the overall strategy gets modified, but not, perish forbid, in the direction of reducing our military presence in the region.

The reason why, as critics complain, the Bush Administration won’t “tell us what ‘victory’ means in Iraq” is because politics makes it impossible for them to answer honestly: Victory in Iraq now means that Iraq gets quiet enough to move off the front page while letting the US keep a sizable military presence in the country with which to intimidate unfriendly states in the region. Presently those are Iran and Syria. “Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy” can go by the boards. “Iraq the Model” is no longer the plan. Iraq the Airbase is. Iraq will get as much or as little democracy as more or less gets it out of the news. It will see as many American troop withdrawals as help quiet things down while still leaving enough troops in place to secure facilities that can be used as prepositioning for future wars in the region. The new “realist” America can also sacrifice “Cedar Revolution” Lebanon if necessary, because the Cedar Revolution is no longer the point.

You can see why the President and what passes for his brain trust won’t come right out and say this.

The Bush Administration and the Israelis remain obsessed with hostile states as the drivers of terrorism. Both have always assumed that if you just knock off the right leaders, you can make terrorism disappear or at least minimize it. The Bush Administration and Israel too figure that if they can take out Assad and the Mullahs, there’s no one left to “cause” terrorism. Under the old transformative paradigm there was the problem of assuring that better, freer societies emerged from the rubble. In the new, “realist” paradigm, that’s no longer a concern. If you think the problem is that the Syrian government is fostering terrorism out of a personalized evil, all you care about is getting rid of the personalized evil. So long as the next regime is too weak or too cowed to “cause terrorism,” it isn’t your problem whether it can actually run Syria, let alone run it effectively and humanely.

There’s one last wrinkle, I think, which is the lovely, lovely oil. Iran’s got a bunch of it. A postwar Iran that collapsed into chaos would risk taking so much oil off the market that even the Bush Administration might fear the political costs. So I think that, if Kervick is correct, Plan A is to decapitate Syria with an eye toward cowing Iran. (And of course, decapitating Syria is a goal in itself.) The thinking is probably: If we take out Iran’s major client state, the Mullahs will lose face. Their government will either fall in relatively orderly fashion, maybe through a military coup, or it’s cowed into stopping its nuke program and bringing Baby Sadr and the Badr boys to heel in Iraq. Then we can get some quiet, if not peace.

After that it will take months to years to decide that there is terrorism only because of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or Azerbaijan and Yemen, or Venezuela and North Korea. Eventually we’re right up against the border of China, certain that if we can just take out their leadership we can end terrorism in Israel, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the other places we’ve been stomping on that pesky fire. Then . . .

The final possibility is that events are coming faster than Washington’s ability to master them. In that case, we can give those unlucky captured Israeli soldiers in Lebanon the codenames “Archduke” and “Ferdinand.”