A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (26 page)

The notion that the president “tried all diplomatic means in Iraq” before invading is as transparently insincere as is his claim that he is seeking to do the same in order to avoid war with Iran. And just as the president’s threatening rhetoric toward Iran is identical to that which he adopted vis-à-vis Iraq, so, too, is the language he is using to deny the inevitability of military conflict with Iran.

Long after it was apparent that the president was intent on invading Iraq, he continued publicly to deny that fact, insisting instead that he was still committed to a diplomatic resolution. As
New York Times
reporter Michael Gordon and retired general Bernard Trainor documented in their book,
Cobra II
—
The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
, the president repeatedly insisted that he was not working on war plans to invade Iraq even when war was the option with the greatest claim on his attention.

In May 2002, for instance, the president went to Germany and sought to assure European allies that he was seeking to avoid war with Saddam: “I told the Chancellor that I have no war plans on my desk, which is the truth, and that we’ve got to use all means at our disposal to deal with Saddam Hussein.” Three days later, in Paris at a news conference with French president Jacques Chirac, the president made a virtually identical statement: “The stated policy of my government is that we have a regime change. And as I told President Chirac, I have no war plans on my desk.”

And later in May, when General Tommy Franks was asked how many troops would be needed to invade Iraq, he responded, “That’s a great question and one for which I don’t have an answer because my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that. They have not asked me for these kinds of numbers.”

But as Gordon and Trainor document, all of those claims were highly misleading, if not outright dishonest, because the president was clearly intent on invading as the sole means to resolve the “grave threat” posed by Saddam:

The president’s statement was true in only the most literal but trivial sense. Bush had ordered the development of a new CENTCOM war plan, repeatedly met with Franks to hear its details, offered his own views on the schedule for deploying troops and on the military’s effort to couch the invasion as a liberation, and sent his vice president halfway around the world to secure allies for the war. And as for Franks, even the cleverest hair-splitting could not reconcile his remarks with the activity of CENTCOM during the previous six months.

In like manner, throughout 2006 the president and then-Secretary Rumsfeld were employing almost identical language, and identical means of denial, with regard to their war planning against Iran. In April, for instance, they chided the media for what they both called “wild speculation” with regard to the president’s preparation for military action against the Iranians.

And as the year progressed, the president, when asked about Iran, would respond almost exactly as he did when queried in mid-2002 about Iraq: by quickly expressing hope for a “diplomatic solution,” cursorily noting that war is a “last resort,” but then animatedly stressing that military action is an option and that, regardless of what else is true, it is “unacceptable” to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Indeed, throughout the year, the president repeatedly used the term
unacceptable
when speaking of Iran, a term which, as noted in October by the
Washington Post,
is one of the most bellicose and deliberate words a president can choose in the foreign policy context:

Having a president call something “unacceptable” is not the same as having him order U.S. troops into action. But foreign policy experts say the word is one of the strongest any leader can deploy, since it both broadcasts a national position and conveys an implicit threat to take action if his warnings are disregarded.

When the president calls Iran a “state sponsor of international terrorism” and repeatedly proclaims its conduct “unacceptable,” that is as unambiguous a threat of war as can be issued short of an ultimatum or promise to commence a bombing campaign on a specific date.

Worse, the president’s own claims about Iran make diplomacy all but impossible from the start. When one embraces the view that a certain country is the equivalent of Nazi Germany and its leader tantamount to Adolf Hitler, diplomacy, by definition, is not occurring and is certain to fail, since one has preordained that the country, by definition, cannot be trusted and cannot be reasoned with. What rendered Hitler such a singular threat—his
defining
attribute—was that he
craved
war as a means for asserting dominion over other countries, and affirmatively did not want a “diplomatic solution.” To equate Saddam, and now Iranian leaders, to Hitler, and to equate the threat posed by their countries to the one posed by Nazi Germany, is by definition to declare in advance that diplomacy is destined to fail and that—as was true with Hitler’s Germany—war is the only viable option.

War-threatening allegations regarding Iran have not been confined to the president’s speeches and interviews. On September 5, 2006, the White House unveiled its new National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. It is composed largely of empty rhetorical platitudes that are by now depressingly familiar. Its fundamental premise is that “the War on Terror will be a long war,” but there is no need to worry, because we have a very specific and coherent strategy for winning:

There will continue to be challenges ahead, but along with our partners, we will attack terrorism and its ideology, and bring hope and freedom to the people of the world. This is how we will win the War on Terror.

That
is the president’s plan for “how we will win the War on Terror”—we are going to “bring hope and freedom to the people of the world.”

But the strategy is not completely filled with moralistic platitudes of this sort. Just like the 2002 strategy that presaged the invasion of Iraq, the document contains some unquestionably meaningful pronouncements, the most significant being the emphasis on Iran and Syria as “state sponsors of terrorism.” The strategy repeatedly makes the claim that those two countries are supporting terrorists: “Some states, such as Syria and Iran, continue to harbor terrorists at home and sponsor terrorist activity abroad.” The strategy also notes that “the United States currently designates five state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea, and Cuba,” but pointedly asserts that “Iran remains the most active state sponsor of international terrorism.”

This is the same claim the president made in a speech he delivered several days prior to the issuance of the strategy, in which he declared, “We know the death and suffering that Iran’s sponsorship of terrorists has brought,” and then ominously warned, “if you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists; you’re an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account.”

In September 2006, Paul Gigot, editor of the
Wall Street Journal
editorial page, asked the president about Iran. Gigot wrote on September 9:

On the other hand, Mr. Bush remains as blunt as ever about the nature of the Iranian regime when I ask if one lesson of North Korea is that Iran must be stopped
before
it acquires a bomb. “North Korea doesn’t teach us that lesson. The current government [in Iran] teaches that lesson,” Mr. Bush says. “Their declared policies of destruction and their support for terror makes it clear they should not have a nuclear weapon.”

One way or another, Iran will be the major dilemma of the rest of his presidency, and Mr. Bush knows it.

While the emphasis on Iran is relatively new, the Bush mentality driving the administration’s war-seeking posture was announced long ago and has not changed. As early as February 2002, for instance, Vice President Cheney gave a speech at the Nixon Library in California and accused Iran of being “a leading exporter of terror,” and then pointedly added, “Under the Bush Doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed or fund a terrorist, you are a terrorist, and you will be held accountable.”

In early 2002, then-Secretary Rumsfeld was eager to underscore the newly threatening posture of the United States toward Iran, telling reporters,

If I were in Iran or North Korea or Iraq and I heard the president of the United States say what he said last night about weapons of mass destruction and about terrorism and about terrorist networks and about nations that harbor terrorists, I don’t think there would be a lot of ambiguity as to the view he holds of those problems and their behavior.

As Bush supporter and former CIA director James Woolsey said during a television appearance in January 2002 about the president’s accusations that Iran is a “state sponsor of terror”:

It’s very definitely a clear statement of the president’s attitude and it leans—it seems to me—toward a policy of telling these governments that if they do not get out of the business of terror and developing weapons of mass destruction, they stand at risk of their regimes being deposed forcefully by the United States.

One of President Bush’s closest and most influential aides during the first five years of his presidency, Michael Gerson, views military confrontation with Iran as highly likely and
imminent
, if not inevitable (not to mention noble and necessary). In an August 2006
Newsweek
essay, Gerson revealed the type of counsel the president has been receiving for the last five years. “Cowboy diplomacy” is a virtue because it is the only approach that keeps Evil tyrants in line; operating from that premise, Gerson hopes for and all but predicts war with Iran:

First, the nation may be tired, but history doesn’t care. It is not fair that the challenge of Iran is rising with Iraq, bloody and unresolved. But, as President Kennedy used to say, “Life is not fair.”

Behind all the chaos and death in Lebanon and northern Israel, Iran is the main cause of worry in the West Wing—the crisis with the highest stakes…. And despite other disagreements, all the factions in Iran—conservative, ultraconservative and “let’s usher in the apocalypse” fanatics—seem united in a nuclear nationalism.

Some commentators say that America is too exhausted to confront this threat. But presidential decisions on national security are not primarily made by the divination of public sentiments; they are made by the determination of national interests. And the low blood-sugar level of pundits counts not at all. Here the choice is not easy, but it is simple: can America (and other nations) accept a nuclear Iran?…

There are still many steps of diplomacy, engagement and sanctions between today and a decision about military conflict with Iran—and there may yet be a peaceful solution.

But in this diplomatic dance, America should not mirror the infinite patience of Europe. There must be someone in the world capable of drawing a line—someone who says, “This much and no further.” At some point, those who decide on aggression must pay a price, or aggression will be universal. If American “cowboy diplomacy” did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

By the end of 2006, even some Democrats—almost entirely confined to those who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq (and were therefore wrong about the need for
that
war)—were openly suggesting that war with Iran may be both inevitable and necessary, for exactly the same reasons they told Americans that war with Iraq was. Indiana senator Evan Bayh, for instance, told
The New Yorker
’s Jeffrey Goldberg:

“You just hope that we haven’t soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle,” he said. “That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They’re everything we thought Iraq was but wasn’t. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they’ve threatened us, too.”

Some key Bush supporters in government who are particularly impatient for war with Iran take Gerson’s aspirations a step or two further by proclaiming that the United States is
already
at war with Iran, and the only question is when the U.S. would begin fighting back. One of the most vocal supporters of the administration’s militaristic Middle East policies, Senator Joseph Lieberman, ended 2006 with a
Washington Post
editorial in which he, in essence, declared that we are
already
at war with Iran, and that our task is to recognize them as our real Enemy (emphasis added):

While we are naturally focused on Iraq,
a larger war is emerging
. On one side are extremists and terrorists
led and sponsored by Iran,
on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States. Iraq is the most deadly battlefield on which that conflict is being fought. How we end the struggle there will affect not only the region but the worldwide war against the extremists who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.

According to Lieberman, all the chaos and violence in Iraq is the fault of Iran and Al Qaeda:

This bloodshed, moreover, is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds. It is the predictable consequence of a failure to ensure basic security and, equally important, of a conscious strategy by al-Qaeda and Iran, which have systematically aimed to undermine Iraq’s fragile political center….

On this point, let there be no doubt: If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism.

Perhaps most telling was the president’s own January 2007 prime-time speech to the nation, the ostensible purpose of which was to unveil his “surge” strategy for Iraq. In the course of the speech, the president mentioned Iran no fewer than six times and included what the
New York Times
described as “some of his sharpest words of warning to Iran” yet. But those words could be described more accurately as a virtual declaration of war. Bush accused the Iranian government of “providing material support for attacks on American troops” and vowed to “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies.” But those networks are located
in Iran
, which means that search-and-destroy missions on such networks might include some incursion into Iranian territory, whether by air or ground.