The Bomb-Iran Laundry List

As ever, the Washington press corps is playing catch-up with the White House's twisted Iran war logic. Even WaPo's Froomkin is still referring to Bush's commitment to "resolving" the "Iranian nuclear issue" before he leaves office. The truth is, BushCo has moved beyond talking about Iranian nukes in favor of the new Iran Laundry List, which Secretary Rice revealed for the first time in full last Thursday when the White House announced the latest Iran sanctions. Similar to the Iraq Laundry List, the ultimate compilation of Saddam's sins trotted out as a counterweight to the paucity of evidence supporting Iraqi WMD, the Iran Laundry List is the administration's response to the weakness of the Iranian nuclear case.

While Washington is open to a diplomatic solution, Ms. Rice said, “Unfortunately the Iranian government continues to spurn our offer of open negotiations, instead threatening peace and security by pursuing nuclear technologies that can lead to a nuclear weapon, building dangerous ballistic missiles, supporting Shia militants in Iraq and terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and denying the existence of a fellow member of the United Nations, threatening to wipe Israel off the map.”

In light of the stakes involved, Rice gives a whole new meaning to the "shotgun approach." Let's review.

1. Right off the bat, Rice signals the effective abandonment of the nuclear argument. As I wrote before, the administration is now saying that it's not so much worried about an Iranian nuke, but about Iranian pursuit of "nuclear technologies that can lead to a nuclear weapon." No timeline is specified because they know now the only date supported by the intelligence is so far off as to be meaningless.

2. As announced in Bush's speech to the National Defense University, we are now instructed to fear Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles. "Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons," he says, "and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them... Our intelligence community assesses that, with continued foreign assistance, Iran could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and all of Europe before 2015." Bush artfully blurs the distinction between ballistic missiles, which he says twenty-seven countries have, "some of which are hostile regimes with ties to terrorists," and the intercontinental ballistic missile, a technology possessed only by the five most militarily advanced nations. And thus we hit two birds with one stone-- we get an even scarier Iran, plus justification for funneling more billions to that crusty bugbear beloved by Bush/Cheney, National Missile Defense, even as Bush acknowledges that the United States does not actually have a functioning missile defense system:

By the end of 2004, we had a rudimentary capability in place to defend against limited missile attacks by rogue states or an accidental launch. As new technologies come online, we continue to add to this system -- making it increasingly capable, and moving us closer to the day when we can intercept ballistic missiles of all ranges, in every stage of flight: from boost, to mid-course, and terminal... [T]he pursuit of ballistic missiles will ultimately be fruitless -- because America and our allies are building and deploying the means to defend against this threat.

3. The allegation of Iran's support of "Shia militants in Iraq" is factually supported but should be contrasted with America's support of PJAK, the Iranian branch of the Kurdish PKK fighting to expel Iranian forces from Kurdish-occupied territories, and with other U.S.-sponsored measures conducted within Iranian territory meant to destabilize Tehran.

4. Iran's support of "terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories" is broadly publicized, but as a reason to bomb and/or invade a country with its finger on half of the world's oil supplies, leaves a bit wanting.

5. And finally, Iran hates Israel. So does Egypt, Syria, Jordan and a host of other folks, but we don't see plans to invade them (yet).

This is a list the American public will see repeated ad nauseum for the next several months in speeches, op-eds, Foreign Affairs articles, and press conferences until such time as the White House decides we are ready to accept the idea of Tehran buckling under the weight of 30,000 pound bunker-busters.

We've Got Waxman, but Where's Lieberman?

WaPo has an in-depth profile of the investigative team and priorities of Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee and chief White House gadfly. Missing from the story, however, is any comparison to Waxman's Senate counterpart, and how he might be exercising his oversight responsibility. As it happens, it's Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, a man who becomes “angry when I hear about fraud or corruption in the spending of American dollars,” but somehow can't find the time to make it a priority.

TPM Muckraker caught on to this discrepancy by quoting Roll Call on the subject of why Lieberman has not used his committee chairmanship to conduct any oversight of the Iraq war:

“You’ve got to set your own priorities, and it was clear to me that other committees were going to pick this up,” said Lieberman ...

Still, critics say they don’t understand why Lieberman has not followed Waxman’s example, and they say his support for the war should make him more likely, not less, to hold oversight hearings.

“He supports the war. So why does he not investigate the things that undermine the mission?” asked Charlie Cray, director of the nonpartisan watchdog Center for Corporate Policy.

Worse, Lieberman defended his bizarre 2006 re-election bid by saying he was anxious to get back to wielding the chairman's gavel.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Primaries!

More than a year before the 2008 election and before a single primary vote has been cast, the Washington Consensus, for what it's worth, seems to be coalescing around a Clinton/Giuliani matchup. One key indicator is how the big papers direct their investigative resources, leading to articles like WaPo's extended profile on Giuliani's indoctrination into the world of conservative activism, and the Times' study of Hillary's managerial style.

Giuliani comes across as surprisingly pliable when it comes to ideas new to him ("I've got to tell you, I don't think he understands what the Steve Forbes flat tax proposal is," says one AEI resident scholar) under the onslaught of people like Grover Norquist, Norman Podhoretz, Steve Forbes, John Bolton, Jack Keane and Fred Kagan. Trying desperately to prove he's a "real" Republican and finding no welcome among evangelicals, Rudy has shacked up with the the bomb-Iran, supply-sider wingnuts, who for their part appear to have found a horse worth latching onto.

For her part, Clinton sounds like the kind of focused, data-driven manager that a certain 2000 presidential candidate from Texas promised he would be. From the Times we learn that:

[Clinton] presides over an office of intense and focused workaholics, protective of their patron and wary of outsiders, a trait that has drawn comparisons to the leadership team of George W. Bush. The president surrounded himself with advisers who went back to his Texas days and were similarly lauded for loyalty and criticized for insularity.

Unsourced, passive-voice characterizations like one this bug me. Who, exactly, is drawing these comparisons between Hillary and Dubya's leadership team? Water cooler gossip? A recent book? Op-eds? The beltway commentariat? Or maybe a journalist on deadline looking for a quick and easy simile?

Is President Bush Moving the Goalpost on Iran?

In what is likely to be one of the few remaining presidential briefings of this administration, on Wednesday, October 15, George W. Bush unveiled a new talking point in the War on Tehran. And, like the other rhetorical shifts that proved crucial to clearing the way for the Iraq war, seems to be largely unremarked upon (other than The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias).

Wednesday's press conference by the president has already gained a reputation as being particularly quotable. Hay has been made of Dubya's glib reference to starting "World War III;" his statement that he is vetoing a bill for children's health coverage because "that's one way to ensure that I am relevant" in the face of his lame duck status; and Bush's dodge of David Gregory's question as to whether he approved of Israel's bombing of Iraqi nuclear facilities over twenty five years ago by claiming that he couldn't remember what he was doing in 1980: "I was living in Midland, Texas, trying to provide for my family."

But tucked among the president's charming patter was a curious and carefully repeated phrase, used whenever the subject of Iran's nuclear program came up. The president's moral outrage trembles not only at the prospect of a real, honest-to-God, functioning Iranian nuclear weapon, but at the idea that Iran may have knowledge of how to build one. In explaining why, for example, he wasn't worried about Russia's recent signals of solidarity with Iran, Bush explains that Vladimir Putin recognizes that "it's not in the world's interest for Iran to have the capacity to make a nuclear weapon." He later said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." Later he conflates the desire to be a nuclear power with possession of the same power: "I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace."

(And in a bizarre echo of Bush's attempts to justify the Iraq war by pointing to Saddam Hussein's tyranny, he includes a short disquisition on the failures of Iranian governance: "We're disappointed in the Iranian government's actions, as should they be. Inflation is way too high; isolation is causing economic pain. This is a country that has got a much better future, people have got a much better -- should have better hope inside Iran than this current government is providing them." Apparently the president's commitment to good public administration knows no bounds. Should we now expect the insertion of SEAL teams in to wayward central banks and ineffectively-run foreign ministries around the world?)

Remember Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, the point when he stopped talking about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and started talking about "weapons of mass destruction-related programs"? That shift in presidential language shares important characteristics with the shift the White House is introducing with respect to Iran, and both share useful properties. They were designed to be introduced into the nation's discourse quietly, invisibly if possible, and to appear to the average listener to be synonyms denoting the same thing: the bad guys are gonna hurt us. And both shifts have the effect of freeing the president's hands, something that Cheney and his functionaries have been demanding for years.

The idea that possession of a nuclear weapon is coequal with the knowledge of how to build one is ridiculous, of course. The first assertion, that the bad guys have a gun pointed at us, demands a high degree of factual accuracy. Either the bad guy has a weapon, or he doesn't. The tweaked statement, that the bad guy has a yearning for a weapon, or has ordered the parts on the internet but hasn't gotten them, or is engaging in "weapons of mass destruction-related programs," is very different. It demands no factual accountability from the government other than "we know we're right, but can't tell you why." And as a legal standard used to ask Congress for war powers against a country that has not harmed us nor possesses the ability to do so, it's not worth the time it takes to vote on it.

UPDATE: The Post picks up on the shift, noting today that the president's comments "may have also signaled a shift in his personal redline in Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon. With most attention focused on the doomsday scenario he invoked, another part of his answer may be telling. Although in the past he has said it is 'unacceptable' for Iran to possess a nuclear bomb, Bush said Wednesday that it is unacceptable for it to even know how to build a bomb." The Post's story ends with the observation that "[s]ome saw his declaration as meaning that even 'knowledge' of nuclear bomb-making would be unacceptable. 'They have just redefined the nature of the problem,' said Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council official under Bush."