Two brief bits via Sully, but first, a corollary reminiscence.
I remember being barely a teenager when Desert Storm broke out in 1991, and while the whole scud-missile and tracer lights thing is the standard imagistic totem from that conflict, for me the image burned indelibly onto my brain is that of our army crossing the desert towards their army, and then their army just stopping, laying down their weapons, and putting their hands on their heads and surrendering (this “image” is admittedly an amalgamation), not just without a shot fired, but almost as if they had been anxiously and happily waiting for the opportunity to do so. A stream of men waving white flags crossing the desert to be processed, their tanks and weapons and even uniforms strewn about behind them, left in the desert.
A huge part of that was just that we have the best military in the world, and it would have been suicide to fight against it. But I believe the key point was the widespread belief, in the Iraqi soldier’s heart of hearts, that America really was an idealistic place, land of the free and all that. They surely would not have reacted that way against, say, Iran. But there was a persistent belief, despite years of propaganda, programming, and training, that to be free in Saddam’s Iraq was more dangerous and less desirable than to be in the custody of the United States. And they were right.
One of the things I don’t think neoconservative hawks of the Donald Rumsfeld variety understand is the power of that. To them, I imagine, they would look at that same memory I just described and conclude only weakness, weakness on the part of the Iraqi military, and an inability of anybody to stand up to America, the shockingist and aweingest military force on the planet. They would view it almost as an open invitation to use force liberally, because our power was so self-evident that even a hostile nation’s military will flat-out refuse to even try to fight back. I believe that that lesson was part of what shaped their thinking for the first Bush term. And, of course, they then got a perfect set of laboratories to put their interpretation of things to the test, and we all know how that’s gone.
But for me, that lesson underscored a totally different kind of power. Even to those pledged to hate us, the lure of America’s mythology (which isn’t always or even often just a mythology) is ever-present, and put to the real test, all but the most radicalized succumb to it. “Death to America” and all that is easy enough to say in a crowd of protesters burning a flag, but when it’s an American tank rolling up, do you believe that enough are are passionate about it enough to die for it? For Desert Storm, of course, we got our answer (as we did, largely, for the first phase of Gulf War II and Afghanistan). What changed then? Why did those conflicts go so sour, and why did suddenly legions of paens decide to change their answer? It was not because we appeared weaker, I don’t believe, that our military force started to look less mighty, though clearly that’s an element in the mix too. But I believe the controlling factor is we decided to dash our own greatest weapon.
And, of course, this is one of the reasons I find myself so thoroughly outraged at torture and our detention policy, our almost casual use of force, our desire to occupy. It’s not just for purely moral reasons, but almost as importantly for strategic ones. We could not have a 1991-style invasion in the Middle East in this day and age. Because the math, for the enemy combatants, has changed. Not only can they now be reasonably sure, or at least find precedent, in the thought that America has come to invade and occupy rather than free and leave (and even I couldn’t tell you when that invisible line was crossed, though my suspicion is that it happened as much with our rhetoric as with our staying past any arbitrary deadline), but when they make that comparison, whether being free in Saddam’s Iraq (or insert totalitarian arab regime here) was more dangerous and less desirable than to be in the custody of the United States, the answer is not necessarily in our favor anymore. It is a much harder question.
I wrote yesterday, as I did often during the campaign, about the fundamental differences in approach between a United States governed by a guy like Barack Obama (or analogue) and a United States governed by a guy like John McCain (or analogue). This is not a “gotchya” post, nor do I have much interest in rehashing campaign arguments, but I bring it up again because the issues that I was talking about were much larger than the campaign then, and are still around today, and in Iran we have a very interesting if indirect test case for that. Namely, the dominoing force of American soft power and our moral legitimacy, and by extension, the moral legitimacy of Western conceptions of freedom and democracy. Ultimately, the mainstreams of all sides in that domestic political debate, between the neoconservatives and American Greatness Republicans, and the liberal doves and Democratic reactionary pragmatists, and the Ron Paulian non-interventionists, all want the same thing. A world wherein peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom spreads. But the differences between them in how to get from Point A to that Point B could not be starker.
I believe, as I said yesterday, that the present events in Iran would have looked markedly different had the constellation of factors present in the world today been different, chief among those factors being a President who has done a great deal already to curry soft power in the arab and muslim worlds, the very fact of his story, his campaign, and his election, his pragmatism and reactive non-involvement, and simply the fact that he decided to step out of the “us vs. them” paradigm that had been so dominant in the Bush years and would have likely remained so in the McCain years. Our domestic politics certainly did not create the events in Iran—the Iranians (on both sides) have done a very good job of that themselves—but it did, to some extent, lay the groundwork of conditions for things to play out in Iran as they have (as, again, I mentioned in my comment yesterday). What’s more, the fact that we have, once again, some soft power credibility opens up our toolbox moving forward in a way that would have looked very different had we chosen to pursue the path of democratization at the barrel of a pistol.
I say all that to pass along two interesting bits, via Sully, that, in very small ways, play into this theory.
The first is simply a quote from Julian Sanchez:
[P]erhaps the administration is finding subtle ways to support democratic openness without a lot of counterproductive bluster that would conjure bad memories of U.S. interference in other countries’ choice of leaders. They’d probably have more instruments for gentle pressure if we weren’t already totally disengaged from Iran—the trouble with making a big show of utterly shunning bad regimes is that you’ve got nowhere to go when there’s a propitious occasion to give them a nudge in a healthier direction—but for all we know they’re doing other similarly subtle, unobtrusive stuff behind the scenes. It’s almost as if they’re more concerned with what actually contributes to human rights in Iran than with what provides the best fap-fodder for hawks at home. Crazy.
The second is just an item of pure speculation, but an interesting one. Foreign Policy’s blog quotes an article from CQ:
What should the CIA do?
Keep its distance, say covert action veterans.
“If an American hand is exposed — and the regime is working diligently to find one — all the elements now protesting the elections will be tarred and discredited as CIA stooges,” says one well placed source, who declined to be identified because of the situation’s volatility.
Unlike in Poland, where the Catholic church gave the CIA, working with the Vatican, a vehicle to undermine the communist regime, the spy agency has no equivalent infrastructure in Iran, one former spook pointed out Small, fragile human rights activists are no match for the ubiquitous Iranian secret police.
Does that mean the CIA is impotent to affect events there?
No, the covert action veterans say: Iran’s political crisis provides the CIA with an opportunity to provoke the defection of Iranian military, intelligence and diplomatic representatives abroad.
(After the Soviet Union crushed the “Prague Spring” in 1968, Czech officials defected in droves to the CIA.)
How it handles a similar scenario now, and the possible windfall of inside information on the Iranian leadership and its nuclear program, will be far more beneficial than clumsy attempts to manipulate the protests sweeping Tehran.
So, in some ways, maybe the situation in Iran will turn out something like Gulf War One, as dissidents and reformists, even if they’re put down, are empowered in some small way by key United States actions or inactions into believing that there is more to fight than just the United States. That this is a pretty nebulous possibility doesn’t make it any less real. And, in a way, an interesting way to jiu-jitsu the ill-will and not entirely unfounded animosity and radicalization that occurred as a reaction to the Bush years. Totalitarian states have beefed themselves up under the rubric of fighting the Great Satan, and when the Great Satan suddenly doesn’t look so Great or Satanic, and quietly fades into the background, those countries are left with perhaps more repression, militarism, and theocracy than their citizenries are otherwise comfortable with as the perceived imminent threat suddenly looks less imminent and less threatening and the masses realize they have a lot more problems at home that need attention than the American bugbear half a world away.
Which, now that I think about it, is an interesting mirror to how our own citizenry reacted to the Bush years. But maybe I ought to just leave that thought hanging and end the post here.
