Military failures have made cowardice a virtue and turned Bush into a wimp

Before President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in February 2003, the universally-accepted principle of national defense that 9/11 brought into stark relief was that if the U.S. had the fingerprint of any organization or country on a terrorist attack against Americans anywhere, then swift and decisive retaliation was imperative. But it’s important to understand that this principle was developed as a deterrent – after discovered al-Qaeda military manuals showed that a record of terrorist attacks with impunity against Americans had emboldened Osama bin Laden to order the 9/11 strikes in New York City and Washington DC. (Recall that those attacks included the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, US Embassies in Africa in 1998 and, most inspiring of all, the World Trade Center in NYC in 1993.)

Unfortunately, Bush’s reliance on “sexed-up” and faulty intelligence, which has American soldiers now stuck (and dying) in the vice grip of a civil war in Iraq, has led to a cognitive dissonance against this principle that will condemn America to a pre-9/11 state of vulnerability.

In fact, this cognitive dissonance is already very much in evidence in the way the U.S. is responding to known terrorist attacks against Americans by Iranian operatives. After all, despite having Iranian fingerprints all over explosives (as dipicted this photo released by the U.S. military) that have killed scores of American soldiers in Iraq, political leaders in the U.S. seem to consider it a red-white-and-blue badge of courage to declare any thought of mounting a swift and decisive retaliation against Iran not only prohibitive but, in fact, unconscionable.

(For the record, the Iranians deny any involvement and claim that the format of the date on these signature weapons exculpates them. This, from the same PR flaks who deny that Iran is developing nuclear weapons….)

Now, contrast this prevailing sentiment expressed by Dodd with the following declaration, which aroused a bipartisan standing ovation when Bush delivered it at a joint session of Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11:

Clearly, by any criterion, Iran today is as hostile to America as al-Qaeda was pre-9/11. Indeed, reports out of Iraq on Tuesday confirmed that Iran is even harboring (America’s-most-wanted) radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr whose Mehdi Army (funded by Iran) has killed almost as many Americans in Iraq as Sunni insurgents have. (Sadr is pictured here with Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on the occasion last year when he pledged to defend Iran against any attack by the U.S.)

Yet even Bush has become so cowered by military failures in Iraq that he’s bending over backwards to assure the world that he will allow Iran perpetrate terrorist attacks against American soldiers there with impunity.

But as one who is on record not only opposing Bush’s decision to invade Iraq but also decrying his refusal to deploy the Powell Doctrine to ensure a swift and decisive victory, I feel obliged to warn that abandoning the post 9/11 principle of retaliation is just as misguided as Bush’s misuse of it to justify the invasion of Iraq. After all, redressing the national and international problems this war has spawned does not require abrogating the categorical imperative to retaliate against Iran.

Indeed, arguing against military action – no matter how justified – is tantamount to rationalizing cowardice in the face of terror. And, just as such arguments emboldened bin Laden to perpetrate 9/11, they will embolden Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to perpetrate even more daring and catastrophic attacks.

It is ironic, however, that where Bush relied on political hacks to spin circumstantial evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, he’s now relying military generals (namely Gen Peter Pace pictured here on the occasion of his nomination by Bush to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) to spin direct evidence (Iranian fingerprints) to justify his fear of retaliating against Iran.

Never mind that Pace came across more like Bill Clinton expounding on “what the meaning of is is” when he attempted to explain Bush’s retreat from his 9/11 declaration as follows:

For his part, Bush confirmed that he has turned into a wimp when he echoed Pace’s vacuous and paralyzing assessment of the situation during his news conference yesterday, only with even more tortured language and incomprehensible logic. But his equivocation raises an extremely important question that he and all presidential candidates must be made to answer definitively:

Is it not a dereliction of duty for an American president- as Commander in Chief – to admit (as Bush did) that he knows a “vital part of the Iranian government” (i.e. the Quds Force) is responsible for killing over 170 Americans, without provocation, but that he’s unable to avenge their deaths because he does not know “whether Ahmadinejad…picked up the phone and said the Quds Force ‘go do this”?

Because, by this logic, the world was wrong to blame Bush for Abu Ghraib. After all, he probably did not pick up the phone and say to American GIs “abuse and hum
iliate them Iraqi prisoners”.

Nevertheless, if anyone needs further confirmation of the dire consequences this failure of nerve portends, consider the following EU, not U.S., intelligence report that was published on Monday by the Financial Times of London:

Alas, sometimes a shoot-out with the Sheriff is the only way to deal with an outlaw….

This report renders specious the suggestion that – instead of retaliating with military force – the U.S. should negotiate with Iran the way it has done with North Korea (or did with the Soviet Union). What is more troubling, however, is that this suggestion ignores the nature of Iranian hostilities against the U.S. and only promises comfort to fools. After all, the blood of American soldiers is not on the fingers of North Koreans.

Moreover, where North Korea’s Kim Jung-il is merely leveraging his nuclear weapons to bargain for oil and luxury goods, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is vowing to use his to drive America out of the Middle East and wipe Israel off the map. And, just as he has no compunction about giving conventional weapons to terrorists to kill American soldiers in Iraq, he would probably have none about giving nuclear weapons to jihadists to detonate in the heartland of the United States.

That said, I think Bush’s refusal to talk with the Iranians under any circumstances is juvenile and furthers no strategic interest. In fact I think he should meet with Ahmadinejad just as he meets with that neo-Stalinist Russian president, Vladimir Putin. But this should not preclude him from ordering proportionate retaliation against the Iranians for killing Americans. (And proportionate in this context means that for every American they kill, Bush should order U.S. Special Forces to take out 3 Iranians….)

After all, the EU report cited above makes it patently clear that dialogue alone will deter the Iranians neither from developing nuclear bombs, despite worldwide disapproval, nor from mounting terrorist attacks against American shoulders in Iraq. And I am acutely mindful that it’s foolhardy to insist that because Bush relied on false and misleading intelligence to invade Iraq that he must be doing the same to invade Iran; especially since the Iranians have provided completely independent and verifiable evidence of their genocidal intent.

Related Articles:
Israel’s categorical imperative (and plan) to attack Iran
Iran tells the US and UN to go to hell as it continues developing nukes

Iranian terrorism Iraq