The Crazy Rush to Attack Iran

By Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

21 February 12

From the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the head of Mossad, the experts are speaking out against attacking Iran over its nuclear program, but hawks like the GOP presidential candidates are drowning out the warnings.

he debate over whether Israel should attack Iran rests on three basic questions. First, if Iran's leaders got the bomb, would they use it or give it to people who might? Second, would a strike substantially retard Iran's nuclear program? Third, if Israel attacks, what will Iran do in response?

The vast majority of people opining on these questions - myself very much included - lack the expertise to answer. We've never directed a bombing campaign; we have no secret sources in Tehran; we don't spend our days studying the Iranian regime. So essentially, we decide which experts to trust.

As it happens, both the American and Israeli governments boast military and intelligence agencies charged with answering exactly these sorts of questions. And with striking consistency, the people who run, or ran, those agencies are warning - loudly - against an attack.

Start with the first question: whether Iran would be suicidal enough to use or transfer a nuke. In 2007, the U.S. intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran argued that the Iranian regime - loathsome as it is - is "guided by a cost-benefit approach." In 2011, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress that "we continue to judge Iran's nuclear decision-making is guided by a cost-benefit approach." Last week, Gen. Ron Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that "the agency assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or provoke a conflict." Last weekend, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN's Fareed Zakaria: "We are of the opinion that Iran is a rational actor."

Most of the Israeli security officials who have commented publicly have said similar things. In December, Haaretz reported that Mossad chief Tamir Pardo had called Iran a threat, but not an existential one. Earlier this month, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy echoed that view, declaring that "it is not in the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel." That same week, former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said virtually the same thing: that "Iran poses a serious threat but not an existential one." In other words, Iran might use a nuclear weapon to put additional pressure on Israel, but not to wipe it off the map.

Then there's an attack's likelihood of success. In congressional testimony this week, Clapper warned that an Israeli strike would set back Iran's nuclear program by only one to two years. In January, Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009, said a successful strike was "beyond their [Israel's] capacity." This week in The New York Times, David Deptula, the Air Force general who planned the bombing campaigns against Iraq in 1991 and Afghanistan in 2001, mocked "the pundits who talk about, ‘Oh, yeah, bomb Iran'" and said that only the United States could launch a strike massive enough to seriously retard Iran's dispersed and hardened nuclear program.

Finally, there's the likely fallout. This week, Dempsey predicted that an attack would have a "destabilizing" influence on the region. Last month, Hayden warned that while the U.S. intelligence community does not currently know whether Iran has decided to build a bomb - as opposed to developing the capacity to build one - an attack would "guarantee that which we are trying to prevent: an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon." Meir Dagan, who ran Mossad from 2002 to 2011, warned last year that attacking Iran "would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program."

Can you find former military and intelligence officials who are more sympathetic to a strike? Sure. But in my lifetime, I've never seen a more lopsided debate among the experts paid to make these judgments. Yet it barely matters. So far, the Iran debate has been a rout, with the Republican presidential candidates loudly declaring their openness to war and President Obama unwilling to even echo the skepticism of his own security chiefs.

And who are the hawks who have so far marginalized the defense and intelligence establishments in both Israel and the U.S.? They're a collection of think-tankers and politicians, most absolutely sincere, in my experience. But from Rick Santorum to John McCain to Elliott Abrams to John Bolton, their defining characteristic is that they were equally apocalyptic about the threat from Iraq, and equally nonchalant about the difficulties of successfully attacking it. The story of the Iraq debate was, in large measure, the story of their triumph over the career military and intelligence officials - folks like Eric Shinseki and Joseph Wilson - whose successors are now warning against attacking Iran.

How can it be, less than a decade after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that the Iran debate is breaking down along largely the same lines, and the people who were manifestly, painfully wrong about that war are driving the debate this time as well? Culturally, it's a fascinating question - and too depressing for words.

Can Jeb Bush Save the GOP?

By Joe Conason, The National Memo

21 February 12

umors and whispers of a late presidential bid by Jeb Bush are difficult to consider seriously - if only because the deadlines to enter primary contests have past, the necessary money and campaign staff are not in place, and the mechanisms for a "brokered convention" do not exist. And yet some worried Republicans are evidently imagining a rescue by the former Florida Governor.

Such fantasies arise from the unappetizing choices that now confront Republican voters. But if Jeb Bush were to enter the field, as he has wisely declined to do so far, the public scrutiny that has damaged the current candidates so badly would turn toward him - and swiftly reveal an enormous deadweight of political baggage. What Florida voters once accepted (or ignored) might well horrify the national electorate today.

The first obstacle that Jeb would have to surmount is that to most Americans outside the Sunshine State, he is known only as the brother of George W. Bush, most recently named one of the two worst presidents in the past half-century by respondents to a Gallup poll - rated just above the late Richard M. Nixon, in fact. It's a negative accomplishment that should not be "mis-underestimated," as the former president himself might say.

Only a professional politician or a right-wing pundit - the sort of deep thinkers mulling a Jeb boomlet - could believe that most Americans would receive the idea of another Bush presidency with any emotion except loathing. Not much would have to be said or done to remind voters of this century's catastrophic first decade, and why they might not wish to risk putting a third Bush in the Oval Office.

Leaving aside the historic burden of his family name, Jeb Bush carries a resume of dubious episodes that stretch back three decades, to his early days as a Florida real estate developer and consultant, when he told reporters that he intended to become "very wealthy." Among the partners he encountered in that quest was one Miguel Recarey, whose International Medical Centers was accused of one of the largest Medicare swindles of all time. Before Recarey fled the country ahead of several federal indictments, Jeb had made a call on his behalf to Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler - a Cabinet secretary serving at the pleasure of his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, who was then president. Recarey paid him $75,000 for that lobbying errand, which forestalled government action to stop Recarey's skimming of millions in Medicare dollars. Although Jeb has denied that Recarey - a mob associate - paid him to call Heckler, both the fugitive and the former HHS secretary have since confirmed those circumstances.

Jeb soon did amass a fortune in real estate, mostly with the assistance of the Cuban-American community in South Florida. He returned the favor by seeking a presidential pardon from George H.W. Bush for the late Orlando Bosch, a murderous anti-Castro militant denounced by his father's own Attorney General Richard Thornburgh as "an unreformed terrorist" responsible for killing dozens of innocent people.

Although he never hesitates to denounce government regulation and praise the unfettered free market, Jeb didn't exactly reject the federal teat when one of his own investments went south during the savings-and-loan crisis. With an infusion of more than $4.5 million from the Treasury, Jeb and his partners managed to hold onto a downtown Miami office building in 1989 that they soon sold for $8.7 million. In other words, Bush benefited from a government "bailout."

There is much more to the Jeb saga, including his vow to sign legislation that would have awarded Florida's disputed electoral votes to his brother in November 2000, and his ill-advised attempts to intervene in the case of Terry Schiavo, the brain-dead woman whose husband and parents sued each other over whether to turn off her respirator and end her life. The public regarded interference in that sad matter by Congressional leaders and other right-wing politicians as an opportunistic exploitation of tragedy - and the Schiavo affair became a turning point leading up to the 2006 Republican midterm debacle.

What Newt, Mitt and the rest of the Republican cohort have learned is how unflattering stories that faded years ago become suddenly vivid under the campaign's glare. Unless he is truly the smarter Bush - and ignores all this presidential daydreaming - the same lesson awaits brother Jeb.