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Be Careful What You Wish For
At a moment when Washington is confronted by the enormous challenge of how to respond to Iran’s catastrophic nuclear programme, the Defence Department has become an institutional eunuch and the CIA is paralysed by introspection. If this continues, the diplomats will do about Tehran what it is their custom to do about most acute dilemmas: (1) deny the problem is imminent; (2) insist that words alone will make an opponent “see reason”; (3) capitulate if that “ reason” is not forthcoming.A new Defence Secretary is the minimum precondition for a policy debate that is more meaningful. If not, the United States could find itself in a surreal situation where it has removed one dangerous tyrant with ambitions to hold weapons of mass destruction yet stood by while another in a neighbouring state triumphs where Saddam Hussein failed.
That Mr Rumsfeld must leave to allow someone else — in ideal circumstances, the Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman — to make the case for threatening to exercise American power is both painful and paradoxical. Yet there it is. ~Tim Hames, The Times
One of the ideas that is beginning to make the rounds out there these days is that the "generals' revolt" stems, in reality, from the horror-filled reactions of senior commanders as the prospect of launching (possibly "tactical" nuclear) attacks on Iran becomes more and more likely.
In practice, such attacks will mean that their forces in Iraq will probably become the primary targets for Iranian retaliation. In this view, Rumsfeld's incompetence on Iraq is being invoked to stand in for general administration incompetence on Iran. But this could possibly have the unintended effect of hastening the day when the attack on Iran comes.
As Mr. Hames' article hints, the chorus of anti-Rumsfeld voices may grow, not because of anything to do with Iraq, but because the anti-Iranian jingoists will not want Rumsfeld's political weakness and loss of authority within the military to be a liability when the time comes to start threatening and then bombing the Iranians. It may be that keeping Rumsfeld in place could be the very thing that could help stall or prevent all together any strike on Iran.
Daniel Larison | April 17, 2006
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