Chastened liberal hawk fears clash with Iran

[Douglas Carpenter]

Dealing with a nuclear state is preferable to another Middle East war, says Kenneth Pollack

By Jordan Michael Smith for salon.com

Kenneth Pollack has been among the most influential Middle East experts in Washington over the last generation. He directed Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council and the CIA. His 2002 book “The Threatening Storm” was profoundly influential in convincing some Democratic Party intellectuals and lawmakers that invading Iraq was a national security imperative.

All of which makes his views on Iran both surprising and significant. Pollack’s 2004 book “The Persian Puzzle“ contended that containing a nuclear Iran was possible, if not desirable. Nearly eight years later, he has just written an important piece for the New Republic warning that the Obama administration’s policies are unwittingly leading us to war with Iran.

Pollack was one of the authors of America’s “dual-track” policy with Iran, whereby efforts at serious talks are coupled with sanctions. He is now convinced that policy is failing. “The problem is that Iran sees it very differently from the way we see it,” Pollack said in an interview. “They put our efforts in terms of human rights and reaching out to the opposition, as well as the sanctions, in the same scheme as what the Israelis are doing, which includes assassinations, acts of sabotage, cyberattacks; and what the Saudis are doing, which is aid to basically every group fighting the Iranian proxies all over the Middle East; and what the British are doing, which is gathering information.”

Cumulatively, he says, these efforts are convincing Iran not that it should relinquish its nuclear efforts but that it is under attack: “To the Iranians, this looks like a concerted Western covert war against them.” The current hard-line regime in Iran takes this as the threat of war, and is prepared to fight a war rather than back down, Pollack says. His TNR article points out the ways in which U.S. policies toward Iran, intended as an alternative to war, are leading us directly to that result.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/02/chastened_liberal_hawk_warns_against_war_with_iran/singleton/

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This is a major piece written by a leading Democratic Party policy maker and hawk. This article should be read in full by everyone.

Are We Sliding Toward War With Iran?

Kenneth Pollack for The New Republic

January 18, 2012


It’s important to try to see the world from Tehran’s perspective. What the Iranians see is a concerted, undeclared war being waged against them by a coalition of the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and some European states. The fact that all of these countries are not necessarily always coordinating their actions is doubtless lost on the Iranian leadership. They are under cyber attack like the Stuxnet virus. Someone is killing their nuclear scientists in the streets of Tehran and blowing up their missile facilities. The United States and Europeans have ratcheted up their contacts with the Iranian opposition. The Iranians believe that foreign elements are also making contact with dissident groups like the Kurds, the Baluch, and the Arabs in Khuzestan. The United States has ratcheted up its efforts to broadcast into Iran to undermine the regime’s control over information. Washington is building up the military capabilities of states in the Gulf Cooperation Council. The Saudis are funding proxies to fight against Iran’s proxies from Bahrain to Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. And the Americans and Europeans are waging economic warfare in the form of increasingly crippling sanctions.

From the vantage of Iran’s leadership, it would be easy to see an all-out, undeclared, covert (but multi-pronged) offensive being mounted against them. And the Iranians seem to be fighting back however they can. While I have no independent confirmation that the Iranians really did try to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the United States last fall, U.S. government officials at all levels appear remarkably certain that they did, and claim that it was one of only several operations the Iranians were developing. It would certainly make a lot of sense that given the campaign they see being waged against them, the Iranians would strike back in exactly that fashion—going after a symbol of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and doing it in the American capital in retaliation for the assassinations taking place in their own.

What’s more, it seems unlikely that that will be their last such effort. Their threats to close the Strait of Hormuz are not serious—they know full well that doing so would be horribly counterproductive to their own cause—but they were undoubtedly an effort to panic the oil market, driving up prices which help them and hurt us. It was a bid at economic warfare of their own. We should expect more.

The great problem is that at some point, the Iranians might succeed in one of their retaliatory gambits. Imagine how the American people would have reacted had they succeeded in blowing up a restaurant in the heart of Washington, D.C., killing dozens and injuring scores more? Of course, Americans would have seen it as an unprovoked attack and there likely would have been a public cry for blood. In short, the more we turn up the heat on Iran, the more Iran will fight back, and the way they like to fight back could easily lead to unintended escalation.

Doubtless such a war would leave Iran far, far worse off than it would leave us. But it would be painful for us too, and it might last far longer than anyone wants because that is the nature of wars, especially wars involving this Iranian regime. Thus, if we continue down this path, we had best be ready to walk it to its very end. And if we don’t have the stomach to countenance the possibility of such an escalation, we may want to reconsider our current course.

Kenneth M. Pollack is Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

http://www.tnr.com/article/world/99741/war-iran-america

[Thaddeus Kosciuszko]

1. "convincing some Democratic Party intellectuals and lawmakers that invading Iraq was a national

security imperative."

"Intellectuals" has no meaning in that sentence.

[bemildred]

2. OK.

Although there is much I would argue with, he is right about how Iran sees it, I mean Iraq is right next door.
Hi Doug.

[leveymg]

3. If the Obama Admin wanted to defuse this, they could. Just deescalate, and warn Israel

and KSA that any attack or aggressive act starting a war with Iran would be treated as a threat to US national security. We have a thousand points of leverage over Israel and the Saudis, if we really wanted to prevent war with Iran.

The question is: Do we really want to avoid a war, or are we on a timetable of slow escalation and provocation, hoping to reach a point where Iran retaliates?

I think Pollack is right, for a change.

[Hotler]

5. War means money for the MIC. n/t

[Boombaby]

4. well

there goes his AEI membership.