The Lies Paving the Way for War with Iran

Unprovoked aggression is reimagined as “preemption” and therefore as self-defense.

Walter Russell Mead turns reality on its head:

Worse, Iran’s inexorable march toward nuclear weapons [bold mine-DL], combined with its deepening partnership with Russia, is driving the Middle East steadily closer to a war that is likely to engage the U.S.—one that the Biden administration desperately wants to avoid.

The region is getting closer to war, but it is not because of Iran’s “march toward nuclear weapons.” There is no such march. The chief reasons why Iran’s nuclear program has expanded as much as it has are U.S. sanctions and Israeli attacks. Iran isn’t marching toward nuclear weapons, inexorably or otherwise, but if people like Mead get their way that could change.

If there is going to be a war, it will happen because Israel or the U.S. or both together decide to start one against Iran. To the extent that any one set of actors is “driving” the region towards war, it would have to be the ones threatening to launch illegal attacks on another country and conducting military exercises to practice for those attacks. As he often does, Mead gets everything backwards to push his agenda of more and more hawkishness and more catering to regional clients.

Later in the column, Mead makes an even more ridiculous claim:

But the Russian dictator doesn’t need to go that far. Simply by increasing Iranian military capabilities that limit Israel’s ability to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Mr. Putin could force Israel into a pre-emptive strike [bold mine-DL] that would set off a regional war.

This is quite something. If Russia provides Iran with the means to defend itself against possible Israeli attack, that would “force” Israel to attack? Apparently aggressors aren’t responsible for their own actions when the aggressor happens to be on the “right” side. It is important to emphasize that any Israeli or U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran would not be pre-emptive, because there would be no imminent threat that is being averted.

The Bush administration caused a lot of damage to the world, and one of the things it did was to damage the way that Americans talk about aggressive warfare. Launching an attack against another country’s nuclear facilities isn’t pre-empting anything. Even if you believe that their government might one day build nuclear weapons, attacking them before they even have a nuclear weapons program is not pre-emption. This is preventive war, and that is nothing but illegal aggression. Attacking another country because you have an irrational fear of the threat they might pose in the distant future is no different than what the U.S. and its allies did to Iraq. The Iraq war was a massive crime, and this would be, too.

I come back to this over and over because aggressive war against Iran has been so normalized in our debate. Unprovoked aggression is reimagined as “preemption” and therefore as self-defense. This self-defense claim is a lie, but it is one that we can expect to hear a lot more often in the coming months.

If Mead’s analysis is predictably distorted and wrong, his recommendations are blinkered. He wants an even closer embrace of our terrible client governments, including the Saudis, and he wants the U.S. to commit acts of war on their behalf:

The American approach to Saudi Arabia will have to move from a fist bump to wholehearted embrace. Drone attacks and other provocations by Iran and its allies against the Saudis, Emiratis and their neighbors will have to be met with the kind of American military response that leaves no doubt of our determination to prevail.

None of this “has to” happen, and it will be a disaster for U.S. interests if it does. The U.S. is under no obligation to fight on behalf of its despotic clients. U.S. involvement in their still-ongoing war on Yemen remains one of the most shameful episodes in modern U.S. history, and our government would have to be insane to strike Iran over “provocations” against bad clients that have done so much to invite attacks on their territory because of their atrocious intervention. Needless to say, even closer cooperation with regional clients will lead to greater cooperation between Russia and Iran. Even if you bought Mead’s nonsense in the first part of the column, his recommended course of action would guarantee “actions that trigger a new Middle East war.”

Mead’s final answer is predictably more militarism:

We must make it unmistakably clear that we will ensure our allies win should hostilities break out. Nothing else will do.

Since the U.S. doesn’t have any real allies in this part of the world and it isn’t obliged to support or defend any of the states in question, this will be hard to do. The U.S. should rein in its clients as much as it can. If it can’t or won’t do that, it should reduce its military footprint in the region as quickly as possible to limit our exposure to the consequences of the stupidity and recklessness of those clients. Above all, our government should never listen to anything Mead says.