Drums In The Deep

By Cernig

Following on from Libby's post about Gates almost breaking into tears as he stressed to junior officers the virtues of loyal dissent, I want to flag up James Joyner's thoughts on whether the drums for war with Iran are beating anew in the depths of Moria the White House. While Mullen is ratchering up the rhetoric, Gates is saying that war with Iran would be "disasterous on a number of levels". Connected? Does Gates know something "we-the-people" should?

James also cites Bernard Finel making an excellent point:

The argument is that diplomacy only works when backed up by force, or that at the very least putting a little fright into the Iranian leadership (maintaining strategic ambiguity) is unambiguously a good idea. Well, it doesn’t and it isn’t.

Diplomacy does not always rely on implicit threats, and even when it does rely on threats, those threats need not be military. And strategic ambiguity is not particularly useful when it unquestionably strengthens extremist demagogues in Iran by seeming to support their rhetoric. Just like Chekov’s gun which if placed on the mantle in act one must be used by act three, placing the threat of force on the bargaining table also increases the likelihood it will be used. As a general rule, people don’t like to make concessions at the point of a gun, and any concessions they make under such circumstances will likely be overturned at the first opportune moment. There would undoubtedly be some emotional satisfaction in lashing out at Iran, but there is no coherent long-term strategy sustaining that course of action. As a wag once argued, “the only thing worse than a nuclear Iran is a nuclear Iran that we recently bombed.”

And the one thing most likely to ensure there's a nuclear-armed Iran is bombing it.

But as Jame's commenters reveal, he's a moderate outlier in conservative thinking. For those to his Right, it seems that the argument is straightforward: there's a slam-dunk case, the only thing these people understand is force, it'll be a cakewalk and we'll be greeted as liberators.

Hmmm...I think there may be a few problems with that.

(Some more thoughts on this from Jim Henley, and James in Jim's comments.)