the Great Game becomes just another con job

We're up to our knees in Republican sex scandals - Foley and his boys, Sherwood and his mistress, now Haggard and his male prostitute - but that's all SOAP OPERA, folks.

The mud wrestling scandalfest may simply be a clever way to drive the obedient sheep to the polls in a last minute defensive play. Distraction. You're sure not thinking about Bush's coming war on Iran, are you. Or the necessity of reinstituting the draft to save Dubya's ass in Iraq. You're not thinking of that, now, are you.

But here and there, the murmurs and hints are surfacing...

I heard a pithy comment the other day while podlistening to This Is Hell:
... to all of the other cynical realists out there... in these last few days of the Weimar Republic, the only thing left I can tell ya is to "drink good beer."

Over at the Whiskey Bar, Billmon does another great job of explainin' what I want to say:

"I should be jumping for joy over these predictions, if only because I hate the bloody Republicans and the bloody conservatives so bloody much. But instead I'm filled with foreboding. If the Dems are going to win this year it's better, I suppose, that they win big -- big enough to discourage the reptiles from playing any post-election games, big enough to be billed as a mandate for change, big enough to wipe the smirk of Karl Rove's face forever. But it should be understood that even a crushing loss next week will only wound the GOP machine, not kill it, and a wounded, cornered animal can be very dangerous. Which is why I wasn't very happy to read this communique from William Lind:

The third and final act in the national tragedy that is the Bush administration may soon play itself out. The Okhrana [a czarist spy agency, one of Lind's little jokes] reports increasing indications of "something big" happening between the election and Christmas. That could be the long-planned attack on Iran.
You should take that, like you should take everything else you read on the Internets, with a grain of salt. But the logic of an attack is hard to ignore. War with Iran would not only be the quickest, most effective way to throw the Dems back on the defensive, it would also completely preempt, and bury, any post-election pressures to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. (As Lind notes in his dispatch, it could also make it impossible to withdraw without losing an Army, but that's another story.)"

and Billmon goes on...

"To me, the need and temptation for the White House to try to do something "bold" seems only heightened by the way Bush and Rove have painted themselves into a corner. Their whole strategy (and, in some ways more importantly, their political style) is based on operating from a position of strength, and smashing down any opponents -- John McCain, Max Cleland, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, John Kerry again -- as brutally as possible. It's what the base expects and what the broader public has been conditioned to see as Bush's concept of "leadership".

Even leaving aside the tremendous ill will and cravings for revenge this style has created among the Democrats, I have a very hard time seeing the Rovian White House completely reinventing itself and taking a consensual, compromising approach towards a Congress it can no longer treat like domestic servants. Dick Cheney would probably shoot someone first.

We can only hope Lind's "Okhrana" isn't reading the tea leaves correctly. War with Iran would be a special kind of disaster. But there are plenty of other places in the world where Shrub and company could cause trouble, plenty of other crises they could use or create to demonstrate their continued relevance.

Which is why if the Dems do win on Tuesday, and win big, they better get the celebrating out of the way fast, and start thinking about how they're going to handle a very angry, very rejected but still very powerful president with points to prove and scores to settle. Because if he goes critical on them (and us) the next big wave could wash us all out to sea."

This has been my waking nighmare as well. I'm sensing it like a Cassandra, and that's always been my curse.
The chips on this poker table are your sons and the national treasury. Dubya has played himself out, and whatever the outcome of this election, he's going to bet it all. He's always been a spoiled child of wealth whose nanny changed his messy pants. And boy has he made some messes. Do you trust his instinct now? Rescuing him this time will take the blood and treasure of the whole nation.

I once wrote a very boring paper on the medieval concept of Lady Fortune and Boethius- basically, the wheel of fortune always comes around, bubbies.

Read this post from Billmon. The man makes awful, reasonable, frightening sense:

April 16, 2006
The Flight Forward
For those who don't want to believe the United States is seriously preparing to attack Iran, one favored explanation for the current war chatter is that it's nothing more than a textbook case of saber rattling - or, once the alleged threat to use tactical nuclear weapons is added to the mix, an example of the so-called "madman theory" in action.
I've been planning to post something on the madman theory for several days now, but Fred Kaplan at Slate has long since beaten me to the punch. So I'll let him review the origin of the term:
In his first few years as president, Richard Nixon tried to force North Vietnam's leaders to the peace table by persuading them that he was a madman who would do anything to win the war. His first step, in October 1969, was to ratchet up the alert levels of U.S. strategic nuclear forces as a way of jarring the Soviet Union into pressuring the North Vietnamese to back down. A few years later, he stepped up the bombing of the North and put out the word that he might use nukes.
As Kaplan notes, these threats had no effect whatsoever on Hanoi's behavior - just as talk of nuclear bunker busters now doesn't appear to have intimidated Tehran. Like the North Vietnamese before them, the Iranians apparently have concluded that while the president of the United States may be crazy, he's not that crazy.
Or, alternatively, the ultracons are right and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the crazy one, and would be perfectly happy to accelerate the return of the Hidden Imam (the Shi'a version of end-time theology) by a couple of years. However, it may be that Ahmadinejad is playing his own version of the madman game, in which case it's entirely possible that two sane (well, semi-sane) men will end up bluffing each other into a nuclear war - albeit a wholly one-sided one.
To paraphrase Sy Hersh: It's a hell of a way to run a world.
We can only pray that the Iranians are right about Bush and/or the ultracons are wrong about Ahmadinejad - because if madman theory ever turns into madman fact, the world truly will be in Satan's hands.

In my first post on this subject, I made the obvious point that a nuclear first strike on Iran would be the worst war crime imaginable, save for mass genocide. But Arthur Silber at The Power of Narrative points out that the two aren't mutually exclusive. Arthur links to this article in The Progressive, which cites worst case estimates from both the Union of Concerned Scientists and the National Academy of Sciences that a tactical nuke strike could kill more than a million people – not counting the longer-term mortality risk from cancer or other diseases. (The UCS offers this flash animation of what the fallout plume from a strike on the Iranian nuclear complex at Esfahan might look like.)

Physicians for Social Responsibility claims the direct death toll from a strike on the Esfahan could be even higher - three million. And even the low-ball estimate, from the Oxford Research Group, forecasts 10,000 immediate deaths and the outbreak of all out war in the Middle East.
By just about anybody's definition - except maybe Hermann Goering's - this would qualify as mass genocide. Even I don't believe George W. Bush would deliberately and knowingly order the murder of three million people. But I'm absolutely terrified by the thought that a popular novelist (or Dick Cheney) might waltz into the Oval Office and convince the president of the United States that all the scientific experts are wrong and that a tactical nuclear strike on Iran would only make the flowers there grow a little faster.

There are times when ignorance can be an even greater enemy of mankind than evil.

There is another possibility - a new twist on the classic madman theory. As Kaplan notes, the current nuclear blustering may actually be aimed at U.S. and global public opinion, in hopes of making a conventional bombing strike against Iran seem, well, almost sane:
It's a variation on the game that national-security advisers sometimes use in laying out options to their bosses. Option 1: Declare all-out war. Option 2: Surrender. Option 3 is the course of action that the adviser wants to pursue.
Hersh's story might be serving the same purpose. Option 1: Nuke 'em. Option 2: Shut your eyes and do nothing, like the Europeans would prefer. Option 3: Attack Iran's facilities, but with 2,000-pound smart bombs, not 5-kiloton nuclear bombs.
Perhaps. Although if this is true the administration appears to have an even lower opinion of the American public, and the democratic process, than I do. The manuever that Kaplan describes - i.e. options 1,2 and 3 - is usually played out behind closed doors, not as part of a national PR campaign. There's always the risk that the public (and Congress) will basically geek out at the thought of nuclear war, and will try to do something to stop it, making the administration's job of planning and preparing for conventional war that much harder.
But these attempts to explain the seemingly irrational may all be going off on the wrong tangent. The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to suspect that the madman theory - and its weaker sister the "saber rattling" scenario - are the wrong concepts for understanding the tragedy that may be playing out in front of us.

What we are witnessing (through rips in the curtain of official secrecy) may be an example of what the Germans call the flucht nach vorne - the "flight forward." This refers to a situation in which an individual or institution seeks a way out of a crisis by becoming ever more daring and aggressive (or, as the White House propaganda department might put it: "bold") A familar analogy is the gambler in Vegas, who tries to get out of a hole by doubling down on each successive bet.

Classic historical examples of the flucht nach vornes include Napoleon's attempt to break the long stalemate with Britain by invading Russia, the decision of the Deep South slaveholding states to secede from the Union after Lincoln's election, and Milosevic's bid to create a "greater Serbia" after Yugoslavia fell apart.
As these examples suggest, flights forward usually don't end well - just as relatively few gamblers emerge from a doubling-down spree with their shirts still on their backs.
But of course, most gamblers don't have the ability to call in an air strike on the casino.

For Bush, or the neocons, or both, regime change in Iran not only may appear doable, it may also look like the only way out of the spectacular mess they have created in Iraq.

The logic is understandable, if malevolent. Instead of creating a secular, pro-American client state in the heart of the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq has destroyed the front-line Arab regime opposing Tehran, installed a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad and vastly increased Iranian influence, not only in Iraq, but throughout the Shi'a world. It's also moved the Revolutionary Guard one step closer to the Kuwaiti and Saudi oil fields - the prize upon which the energy security of the West depends.
By the traditional standards of U.S. foreign policy, this is a fiasco of almost unbelievable proportions. More to the point, the neocons may believe that unless they can do something dramatic to recoup those losses, they won't be able to safely withdraw large numbers of troops from Iraq, since they are A.) the only remaining source of U.S. influence in the country and B.) the only shield against Iranian infiltration of both Iraq and the Shi'a majority regions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Yet the military need for such a draw down becomes more critical with each passing day, as the all-volunteer Army is stretched towards its breaking point.
In other words, the administration, and the Pentagon, have gotten themselves into one hell of a jam - militarily, strategically and politically. As desperate and reckless as attempted regime change in Iran might seem to us, to the Cheneyites it may look like the only move left on the board.

Hersh suggests the neocons have convinced themselves that an air campaign against Iran would quickly lead to a popular rebellion and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Perhaps this is so, at least for the gullible and the ignorant among them (such as Bush.) Drowning men, after all, will clutch at straws.
But my suspicion is that at least some of the civilian war planners see events playing out very differently. They understand that air strikes would lead very quickly to a wider war, which in turn would make it politically feasible to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran.
Conventional wisdom holds that an invasion of Iran isn't militarily feasible, given how bogged down the Army is in Iraq. That being the case, the general assumption seems to be that the administration's war plan begins and ends with a major air campaign - thus the deus ex machina theory of a popular revolt against the regime.
But defense analyst and Washington Post blogger William Arkin begs to differ with the conventional wisdom: Contrary to all the speculation this week that all U.S. contingency planning for Iran is about quick, surgical action short of war, both the Army and Marine Corps are newly looking at full scale war scenarios.
More on those plans here.

As I speculated in an earlier post, a move against Iran might be preceded by a major troop drawdown in Iraq (which, if my analysis is correct, would itself make war with Iran a strategic necessity in the eyes of the neocons.) Or it may be that Rummy and the gang intend to push through another of their 'minimalist' invasion plans (which may be one reason the chorus of military complaints about Rummy has risen to a howl.) Either way, it should not be assumed that the neocons are going to act in a military rational way. That's not what the flucht nach vorne is all about.
If anything, the same goes double for our boy king. If the institutional temptation for the neocons to seek redemption in a flight forward is powerful, the psychological motivations for Bush may be overwhelming. In his story, Hersh refers to Bush's alleged desire to make "saving Iran" from the Shi'a Hitler his legacy. But saving Iraq from the Baathist Hitler was orginally supposed to be his legacy. This is doubling down on a historically grand scale.

We can at least hope the nuclear component in the current war planning is indeed a sham - some sort of variation on the madman theory. But when it comes to assessing the administration's overall intentions, I have a sinking feeling that most analysts remain trapped in an obsolete frame of reference - that of preemption, or "preventative" war, driven by an overwhelming fear of weapons of mass destruction.
As Arkin puts it: I don't believe that the United States is planning to imminently attack Iran, and I specifically don't think so because Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons and it hasn't lashed out militarily against anyone.
Fear of WMD may indeed be at the root of a war with Iran, if that's really where we're heading. Or it may simply be a reprise of Wolfowitz's "bureaucratic reason." The past few years have taught us a lot about mixed motives. But it seems at least possible that what the neocons - and Bush - are really hoping to "preempt" is the collapse of their grand scheme in the Middle East. In other words, it may be the United States, not Iran, that is preparing to "lash out" - in a deliberate, calculated war of aggression.
That may not fit into the traditional concept of the madman theory, although it would still be the handiwork of the criminally insane.