A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  Copying the tactics that brought us to war with Iraq, Herman sounded the alarm that Iran may possess a nuclear weapon “within the next two to three years,” and that the United States is amply justified in waging war now on Iran:

  Which brings us back to the military option. That there is plentiful warrant for the exercise of this option—in Iran’s serial defiance of UN resolutions, in its declared genocidal intentions toward Israel, another member of the United Nations, and in the fact of its harboring, supporting, and training of international terrorists—could not be clearer.

  Like a teenager in the obsessive midst of an online video war game, Herman lays out a detailed fantasy plan for our massive military assault on Iran: “The attack could move to include Iran’s nuclear facilities—not only the ‘hard’ sites but also infrastructure like bridges and tunnels in order to prevent the shifting of critical materials from one site to another. Above all, the air attack would concentrate on Iran’s gasoline refineries.”

  With the air attack on Iran’s industrial infrastructure, Herman is just warming up. After that, the real war begins:

  The scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf.

  North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Kargh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Ahwaz, Marun, and Gachsaran, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch.

  Once the United States controls Iran’s oil, Herman envisions that we can then start dictating to Iran what form their government will take and what policies they should and should not undertake, basically putting them into complete submission to our national will. Herman argues that our war plan “must therefore be predicated not only on seizing the state’s oil assets but on refusing to relinquish them unless and until there is credible evidence of regime change in Tehran or—what is all but inconceivable—a major change of direction by the reigning theocracy.”

  And what of the rather self-evident, towering risks of unilaterally attacking a country such as Iran and seizing its oil assets? Herman dismisses those as casually and cursorily as he drew up his grand war plans: “The tactical risks associated with a comprehensive war strategy of this sort are numerous. But they are outweighed by its key advantages.”

  The very idea that the United States is going to launch a unilateral bombing campaign against Iran, shatter its infrastructure, and then seize its oil assets is pure insanity of the highest order. There is no other way to describe that.

  But it is worth underscoring here that Herman’s grandiose war fantasy is published in a magazine edited by neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz—father of New York Post and National Review contributor John Podhoretz, and father-in-law of Elliot Abrams, the White House official in charge of Middle East policy for the National Security Council. Calls for war on Iran, on the grounds that it is an incorrigible Evil, issue not from the fringe back alleys of our political institutions but from its most influential core.

  When it comes to operating within the minimum confines imposed by basic rationality and plain reality, those advocating a new war with Iran really are indistinguishable from, say, Lyndon LaRouche or Fred Phelps or any number of other deranged extremists who are radical in their ideology as well as so far removed from reality that they command no attention beyond the occasional derisive reference.

  Almost by definition, they do not recognize the constraints of reality because the moral rightness of the battle ensures victory. Righteousness trumps resource limits and the world as it is. That formula spawned continuous claims of imminent victory in Iraq even when the facts compelled the opposite conclusion, and it is the formula used once again to lure the president into a military confrontation with Iran that can produce nothing but disaster.

  There is little doubt that these chest-beating war advocates, detached from reality though they are, still exert the greatest influence on the thinking of the president, and the more decorated among them continue to command great respect from our nation’s media stars. Their war-advocating rhetoric, dressed up in Manichean appeals to moral duty and accompanied by threats of losing one’s manly courage if one shirks that duty, has not lost any of its persuasiveness for George Bush.

  That the president faces intense and growing pressure to confront Iran militarily is simply beyond doubt. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has resolutely devoted itself to this goal, and the significance of that crusade is difficult to overstate.

  The AEI sits in the innermost belly of the neoconservative beast, boasting a list of resident “Scholars and Fellows” that includes Richard Perle, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, John Yoo, and Laurie Mylorie (who, according to The Washington Monthly, “theorized that al Qaeda is an agency of Iraqi intelligence, that Saddam Hussein was behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center, and that Iraqi intelligence was linked to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols”). Former Rumsfeld deputy and current World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz and Irving Kristol, among many other similar Middle East war–loving types, are former AEI resident scholars, and Lynne Cheney is still an active fellow.

  Every top administration official, including the president, has appeared before the AEI several times. In 2006, the longtime editor of its magazine, Karl Zinsmeister, became the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. The AEI played as significant a role as any other single entity in creating the justification for the invasion of Iraq. And one of its senior fellows, Frederick Kagan, is the architect of the president’s surge strategy. The AEI is agitating—hard—for a military attack on Iran.

  The Washington Monthly noted that of all the lobbying and special-interest groups, the AEI “is in a different league, because of the influence its scholars wield in Washington and their consequent power to turn research into government policy.” The AEI is incredibly well funded, and its board of trustees is composed of numerous chairmen of the world’s largest corporations along with some of America’s wealthiest individuals. It is a very serious and influential organization and its positions typically reflect imminent government actions or cause those actions.

  As with all topics, caricature should be avoided. The AEI does not run the world or act as some sort of shadow government. But it most assuredly does exert significant influence on the policies and actions of the Bush administration—the similarity between its advocacy and the administration’s decisions is demonstrable fact—and its crusades ought to be taken seriously, for that reason.

  One of the AEI’s featured publications in September 2006 was by Richard Perle, one of the most influential neoconservative architects of the invasion of Iraq, lambasting the president for “dithering,” “blinking,” and “beat[ing] an ignominious retreat” in the face of the mortal Iranian threat. Still another, by Reuel Marc Gerecht, urges the Bush administration to stop being so “overwhelmed and deflated” by the war in Iraq and to get on with bombing Iranian facilities in “Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, Tehran, and Bushehr.”

  In September 2006, the New York Sun reported that Bill Kristol—fearful that Republicans would lose control of the Congress in November—began urging the administration to seek a Congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iran, and even to make use of force against Iran the central issue in the election. The same month, Charles Krauthammer in his Washington Post column said of the president’s statements regarding Iran, “The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy.” Krauthammer predicted: “The decision is no
more than a year away.”

  In a New York Post column during the same time period, John Podhoretz said in reaction to one of the president’s speeches regarding Iran, “barring a miraculous change of heart on the part of the Iranian regime, a military strike is all but inevitable. Bush himself will view his own presidency as a failure if he doesn’t act. So act he will.”

  With a military depleted to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan, the narrow, suffocating confines of the president’s two-dimensional Manichean world renders the president’s only option—chest-beating militarism—both impotent and entirely lacking in credibility. Yet the president knows no other way short of all-out militarism. And even if he were receptive to another course, the continuous manipulative appeals of his warmongering advisers about the Iranians, 1938, his warrior duties, his place in history, and his moral obligations would not allow him to pursue it.

  The most striking evidence of the inability of both the president and his supporters to consider any course with Iran other than the war path was their extraordinary reaction to the report issued by the Iraq Study Group. Two of the report’s most significant recommendations squarely contradicted the core premises of the president’s disastrous Manichean Middle Eastern militarism—namely that (a) the Bush administration open direct negotiations with Iran (and Syria) as a means of averting further disaster in Iraq, and (b) the United States devote far more efforts to brokering a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in order to diffuse much of the anti-American resentment in the Middle East fueled by that conflict and America’s role in it.

  The report—issued by a bipartisan commission of ten of America’s most entrenched establishment figures—was widely seen to represent the views of Jim Baker, secretary of state under Bush 41 and a loyal Republican ally to the Bush family. Baker’s foreign policy approach has long been defined by placing American interests as the supreme value, and relatedly, by an aversion to moralistic wars against regimes considered “Evil” or crusades for “Good.”

  In Baker’s view, the question for the U.S. government in formulating its relations with other nations is not whether those nations meet some moral test, but how to promote U.S. interests and enable the U.S. to maintain peaceful and constructive relations even with repressive regimes. Within this framework, Baker sees Iran not as a symbol of Evil on which the U.S. must wage war, but as a country with which the U.S. can re-establish constructive dialogue as a means of finding a way out of the catastrophe we have spawned in the Middle East and, beyond that, securing our interests further.

  There is nothing exotic or novel about Baker’s approach. Throughout history, nations have not typically sacrificed their resources and the lives of their citizens in order to wage moralistic wars against nations perceived to be “Evil,” but rather nations have been guided by a calculation of what is in the interests of their citizens and what maximizes their security. Religions and charities are devoted to the aim of maximizing Good and combating Evil, but foreign policy is not missionary work. It has been viewed—almost universally—as a means of ensuring the national security of the country.

  Throughout its history, the United States has negotiated and reached peace agreements with scores of nations that were previously anti-American at their core, including governments that were far more internally repressive than the Iranians. The U.S. has never perceived its role to be to wage war against any regimes that, in some abstract, moralistic sense, could be deemed “Evil.”

  The list of governments around the world that could qualify as Evil has always been extremely long. No nation that commits its resources and the lives of its citizens to waging war against Evil in the world will endure very long. Even the attempt is plainly unsustainable. The role of the U.S. government is and can only be to protect American citizens and preserve U.S. security, not to end Evil in the world through a series of hostile foreign policy declarations and wars.

  Although Ronald Reagan is often held up by the president’s war-loving supporters as the great Churchillian warrior—and his labeling of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” is frequently compared to Bush’s “axis of evil” speech—Reagan’s emphasis in dealing with the Soviet Union was negotiation, not war. His objective was to achieve a sustainable peace with the Soviets as the result of negotiated agreements, at most to bring down that regime through economic pressures, not to wage war as a means of extinguishing Soviet Evil or even forcing regime change.

  In fact, precisely because President Reagan emphasized the need to negotiate with rather than wage war on the Soviet Union, he himself was the target of the same “Chamberlain appeasement” denunciations now unleashed on those who want to avoid endless wars in the Middle East. For instance, a January 20, 1988, UPI article reported that Conservative Caucus chair Howard Phillips “scorned President Reagan as ‘a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda,’” and published ads that likened

  Reagan’s signing of the INF Treaty to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s signing of an accord with Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler in 1938. The ad, with the headline, “Appeasement Is As Unwise In 1988 As In 1938,” shows pictures of Chamberlain, Hitler, Reagan and Gorbachev overhung by an umbrella. Chamberlain carried an umbrella and it became a World War II symbol for appeasement.

  According to the January 19, 1988, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, back when Pat Robertson was campaigning for president in Missouri, he “suggested that President Ronald Reagan could be compared to Neville Chamberlain…by agreeing to a medium-range nuclear arms agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.”

  The Orange County Register editorialized in September 1988 that “Ronald Reagan has become the Neville Chamberlain of the 1980s. The apparent peace of 1988 may be followed by the new wars of 1989 or 1990.” And Newt Gingrich, in 1985, denounced President Reagan’s rapprochement with Gorbachev as potentially “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.”

  Donald Rumsfeld—who provoked controversy when he delivered a speech in mid-2006 equating the administration’s foreign policy opponents to Neville Chamberlain appeasers—has been tossing around that same verbiage in order to promote his prowar views for almost thirty years. According to a November 26, 1979, Associated Press article regarding efforts to oppose ratification of the SALT treaty: “‘Our nation’s situation is more dangerous today than it has been any time since Neville Chamberlain left Munich, setting the stage for World War II,’ Rumsfeld said at a news conference.”

  Screaming “appeasement” and endlessly comparing political opponents to Neville Chamberlain is not a serious, thoughtful argument; nor is it the basis for any sort of foreign policy. At best, it is an empty, cheap platitude so overused by war seekers as to be impoverished of meaning. More often than not, though, it is worse than that; it is the disguised battle cry of those who want war for its own sake, and who want therefore to depict attempts to resolve conflicts without war as irresponsible and weak. Recall that the Cold War did not end via hot war on the Soviets but rather through engagement of them and treaties with them, signed by the “Neville Chamberlain of the 1980s,” Ronald Reagan.

  But once a president accepts and publicly declares that Nation X is not just hostile but Evil, and once he refuses even to negotiate with that country, all of the options typically available to a country in order to coexist peacefully are eliminated. But that is precisely the barren, suffocating corner in which the president’s most fervent supporters want him to be with regard to Iran, and it is where the president has chosen to be.

  The strength of a superpower resides in its ability to distinguish between serious and unserious threats. Leaders of militarily weak countries have long squeezed political advantage from symbolic gestures of independence from, even hostility toward, the United States. But such rhetoric coming from nations that lack the capability to threaten us is the equivalent of meaningless trash talking. Great powers do not feel compelled to descend to the level of playground taunts o
r to treat every provocative comment as a cause for war-threatening behavior. Yet like the empire that America’s founders desperately warned us to avoid, the Bush administration has come to apply the term Evil to virtually any country that refuses to submit to the will of the current president and to America’s dictates.

  And worse, that mentality is accompanied by an insistence that Evil, by definition, can be dealt with only through maximum force, never with diplomacy or negotiations. The mind-set repeatedly expressed by Vice President Cheney, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and even the president himself—namely, that the United States must constantly prove to the likes of Osama bin Laden and other petty Middle Eastern tyrants that we are tough and strong and will never back down—defines an insecure adolescent bully, not a responsible and secure superpower. Yet those are the premises that have placed the president on a collision course with Iran. To maintain that course, the first order of business for those seeking such a war is to attack viciously the possibility that other options short of war with Iran are feasible.

  As always with the president’s most steadfast supporters, that goal is achieved not by engaging the merits of others’ substantive recommendations and options, but instead by demonizing those who advocate additional options. Most notable in that regard is the frothing intensity of the personal attacks on Jim Baker coming from the neoconservatives and assorted other warmongers as a result of the ISG’s recommendations that Iran be engaged in negotiations and that more efforts be devoted to an Israel-Palestinian peace agreement.