
Burns, obviously, works for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice, as you'll recall, is supposed to be the leader of the non-crazy, non-demented faction of the Bush administration. The counter-Cheney. The voice of reason. But she's also the one who provided Washington Post columnist David Ignatius last month with with "an unusually detailed public explanation of the new American effort to create a de facto alliance between Israel and moderate Arab states against Iranian extremism." As Rice told him,
After the war in Lebanon, the Middle East really did begin to clarify into an extremist element allied with Iran, including Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. On the other side were the targets of this extremism -- the Lebanese, the Iraqis, the Palestinians -- and those who want to resist, such as the Saudis, Egypt, and Jordan.Apparently, at some point American foreign policy descended from "seemingly deluded" to "explicitly deluded" and nobody took note. Ignatius, obviously prizing access over good sense, managed only to meekly note that "the realignment strategy poses as many question as it answers -- not least the anomaly of supporting Sunni resistance to Iran at the same time the U.S. augments its military support for a Shiite-led government in Iraq."
Sorry, no. The only question the realignment strategy poses is, once again, the one about the Bush team's sanity.
There's no "question" to be asked about the coherence of escalating American military support for Iraq's pro-Iranian government while blaming Iran for the Sunni-orchestrated insurgency -- there plainly is none. One might as well ask Rice whether she really thinks it makes sense to talk unproblematically of "the Lebanese" as a unitary bloc opposed to Hezbollah when virtually half of Lebanese people are Hezbollah supporters. Or we could raise questions about the coherence of classifying Hamas (a Sunni organization) as part of "an extremist element allied with Iran" while classifying groups like "the Palestinians" as "targets of this extremism," when Hamas came to power with an electoral mandate from those Palestinians -- following elections that Rice had insisted be held! But to look closely at this is merely to skirt the broader absurdity of Rice's vision of Israel standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the world's Sunni Muslims to combat the dastardly Iranians. Does she really believe this is going to happen?
Even worse, a truly baffling early February Time article cast this new adventure in wishful thinking as a return to realistic foreign policy approaches by an administration that spent 2004 and 2005 dreaming of democracy. But abandoning a far-fetched utopian scheme for a far-fetched machtpolitik scheme isn't the same as bringing a weirdly dissociative policy back down to earth. Say this for the abandoned idealism: It at least had the virtue of being an appealing fantasy. Why, exactly, are we daydreaming about provoking a region-wide sectarian clash?
And make no mistake, the Bush administration is provoking it. Bothering to debate the precise veracity of the Bush administration's claims "that Iran is supplying Shiite extremist groups in Iran with deadly weaponry, including a roadside bomb that pierces American armor," is besides the point. For one thing, that the administration is lying can simply be taken for granted -- there aren't any major policy areas this crew doesn't lie about. Whatever evidence exists, they're exaggerating it; whatever the extent of Iranian involvement, Bush is overstating it. Moreover, it's all beside the point once you understand the context.
As Bush administration veteran Flynt Leverett pointed out in December, and Michael Hirsch and Maziar Bahari explain in the current Newsweek, after 9/11, Iran sought to cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan in hopes of improving Tehran's relationship with Washington. For their trouble, they were treated to membership in the "axis of evil." Following the invasion of Iraq, the Iranians once again sought negotiations as a way to secure their interests in Iraq. The Bush administration rebuffed that offer, preferring that Iran continue with its nuclear program and its support of Hezbollah so long as the United States was able to continue pressing for the overthrow of the Iranian government.
And now the press is really on. The administration seems to know it can't sell the Congress or the public on a new war, so it's trying to escalate tensions enough so that the Iranians will do something to American troops that will create a viable pretext for an American war-as-retaliation.
So many things are wrong with this that it's hard to know where to begin. The basic point, though, is that the Iran problem is entirely self-created -- or, rather, Bush-created. U.S.-Iranian relations were chilly when Bush took office, but there were no active hostilities. After 9/11, relations stood a good chance of improving as both of our nations shared a common foe in al-Qaeda. The administration then proceeded to cope with al-Qaeda through such a series of bizarre and ineffective moves -- failing to secure Afghanistan, toppling Saddam Hussein, proclaiming the United States to be on a grand mission to democratize the entire Middle East, isolating America from most of its potential friends around the world -- that it created a much worse problem in the form of growing Iranian power and hostility. Instead of looking at this mess and trying to find a way out of it, Bush and Rice now seem determined to plunge the country further into the abyss for reasons they can't be bothered to explain.
Worst of all, while Congress can refuse to grant Bush statutory authority to launch a new war, there's little they can do to prevent him from trying to goad the Iranians into attacking Americans. One hopes the congressional Democrats can do something to prevent a war, but one fears that the world is simply due to pay the price of Bush having been re-elected two years ago.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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