I also want to take note of Wesley Clark’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, sort of an open letter to the administration, urging them to give diplomacy a chance. Here’s the meat of the piece:
The most rational endgame is to give the mullahs a choice: Give up uranium enrichment and the nuclear ambitions it enables. Give up the proxy terror war against Israel and its supporters. In return, escape more-severe military attacks and the crippling sanctions that have decimated the Iranian economy. The U.S. should allow the mullahs to survive but should leave government to the Iranian people. Enable Iranians to engage in open and internationally supervised elections, with the hope of Persia’s return to peace and prosperity.
The U.S. has a rare opportunity to combine the leverage of a military campaign with strategic diplomacy to force Iran’s remaining leadership to confront their real choice: likely being overthrown and killed by their own people, or giving up their aggressive ambitions and renouncing their hold on government. If they choose wrongly, they will reap the consequences.
The power is in our hands. Do we have the wisdom, gained by painful experience, to achieve a more peaceful Middle East?
I think we’ve demonstrated repeatedly that we do not have that wisdom and I’m afraid that we will just repeat our mistakes of the past. Far from preventing countries from becoming failed states we’ve left a trail of failed states in our wake.
For the last thirty years we’ve been a lot better at knocking countries down than standing them back up again.
It’s a bit of a digression but I suspect that Gen. Clark is also underestimating the popularity of the present regime among the urban poor and, consequently, its staying power.
I think there is some presumption of a land invasion if you think you are going to control elections and for sure we have not been good at nation building since WW2.
Steve
It’s a moot point now. I don’t think troops were even remotely in the cards.
It’s too bad it came to B2s, but Iran was given every opportunity.
Hypocrisy is in the air. Suddenly Dems have forgotten Obama and bin Laden/Libya. And Clinton and Bosnia/Mogadishu.
It’s not hypocrisy on my part. I opposed Obama’s actions in Libya and Clinton’s in Bosnia and all for the same reasons. They were illegal—violations of our obligations under the UN Charter.
I’m trying to draft a post titled “We Don’t Know” about President Trump’s actions in Iran. There is so much we don’t know it’s hard to make sense of it all. Just about anything I’d write would be obsolete by the time I’d written it.
I am skeptical of Trump’s recent action on Iran.
Too much of it reminds me of Biden’s decision to go full speed with the ARPA, a decision to go forward with something despite clear signs of hesitation from his own party on the potential costs from it (and if I say so, Trump has voiced hesitations on American involvement in Middle East conflicts in the past).
And now, if anything ill happens, it will all be Trump’s responsibility. Trump probably thinks he can walk it back or deal with the fallout, as he has in many other jams…. but some decisions define a Presidency and set it onto failure from that point on.
It’s certainly likely that the downsides dont occur fora few years, at which time Trump would be out of office.
I thought that the UN authorized military action in Libya and Bosnia. It was the bombings in Serbia/Yugoslavia that were not authorized and IIRC when the UN voted to not authorize the bombings were stopped. In the case of Serbia (maybe Yugoslavia also but cant remember) there were also other NATO countries involved.
My preference would be that Congress have to approve of military action including bombing. I think it’s also good that we have UN approval and/or NATO approval. I continue to think it’s bad that the country is being run upon the whims of one person, what we have now. (Yes, in theory Trump is being advised but he has put in place a bunch of total sycophants.)
Steve
You’re correct about Yugoslavia. The UNSEC did not authorize our bombing Serbia. It also did not authorize our degrading the Qaddafi regime’s capabilities to the point that we did. What it authorized was protecting civilians not anything we felt like doing.