Someone's Been Reading a Little Too Much Tom Clancy

Instahack is not so quietly out of his mind:

We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc.

First of all, assassination is very rarely a subtle option. In this case, it's likely the proof that the United States had carried out the assassinations would be substantially more compelling than the proof that the Iranian leadership has been sending shaped charges to Iraq.

My source on this is none other than a real soldier, who really served in Iraq, and - of all things - was in a real intelligence unit looking at real evidence about IEDs:

About two years ago, in Iraq, we saw what we called then "platter charges"---a tube of explosive, with a bronze plate, concave or convex (I can never remember which is which) welded at the business end. The technique was Syrian, and at least thirty years old. They were devastatingly effective. With detonation the brass plate melted into a projectile which destroyed any and all armor, either vehicular or the personal type, worm on the bodies of soldiers. It reduced kevlar helmets to shreds. Within two months we saw more and more of them. There was no talk of blaming Iran then. The president wasn't trying to forget one unsuccessful war by starting another.

Now I watched CBS news and saw them highlighting these bombs. They're blaming Iran, and acting as if they are new weapons.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Not of our enemies: of our government, for the fights they desire cannot be fought with weapons.

Call me crazy, but after the WMD debacle, I think I'll take the word of a vet like ginmar over some lazy, rightwing law professor sitting on his fat ass in Tennessee.

Then, the immorality of it. Reynolds says:

But if civilization will not allow itself to respond to the barbarians who are making war on it -- complete with a nuclear weapons program that violates the "international law" usually invoked with such vigor where U.S. actions are concerned, and the fomentation of widespread murder throughout the region -- then civilization will not persist, and barbarism will flourish.

Okay, first of all, as we said, that Iran is doing this is definitely not proved yet. Secondly, you can call the Iranian government a lot of very bad things, but "barbarians" is not on the list. They're our adversaries, certainly, maybe even our enemies. They want power, and we don't want them to have it (as much as the Bush administration has done to hand it to them on a plate). But to pretend that Iran is not civilized is not just wrong, it's grotesque. And third, Reynolds' crude attempt to forge a link between Iran's supposed nuclear weapons program and a supposed clash between civilization and barbarism is D+ propaganda. There are other countries in the region who have developed nuclear weapons, some with our approval (Israel and Pakistan) and some without (India), and we haven't started killing their scientists and religious leaders. In fact, Iran wouldn't be where it is today with its program (wherever that is) without the kindly aid of a Pakistani scientist named A.Q. Khan, who at the U.S.'s behest received a stern talking-to for being so naughty.

The last major point is the question, where do Reynolds and his ilk think this idea would lead us? I really do blame action movies and writers like Tom Clancy for making stupid people think that war is a nice, neat process.  In Clancy's book Clear and Present Danger (which was also made into a movie I didn't see), the President of the United States of America secretly declares war on a non-state actor, in this case, South American drug cartels. In this rip-roaring tale, the following happens (1) The U.S. secretly sends a regiment of Spanish-speaking U.S. soldiers (without U.S. uniforms) into the Columbian hills to kill drug traffickers, destroy their processing facilities, and disrupt their communications, (2) the U.S. assassinates a number of drug lords - and kills nearby civilians - by faking a truck bomb outside the drug lords' meeting place, which is intended to spark a inter-cartel war, (3) the U.S. military shoots down light, unarmed aircraft attempting to enter U.S. airspace that don't obey orders to land, and (4) the U.S. military carries out mock executions of suspected drug traffickers in order to coerce their confessions and gather intelligence. Much exciting trouble ensues, but in the end the U.S. succeeds in knocking back drug smuggling into the U.S.

Really.  That's the plot.

(A significant character in the book is a renegade Cuban intelligence officer who leaves Cuba to work for the cartels because Castro resists his advice to use drugs to undermine the hated Americans. Which, if you know anything about big-time drug smuggling, is fucking hilarious.)

It's fiction like this that shapes how conservatives like Reynolds think about how force can be used to advance U.S. goals.  Reality is far messier and unpredictable. In fact, if we took his advice, we'd probably find that Iran could kill more American soldiers in Iraq - who are just walking around out in the open, by the way - a lot faster than we could kill more Iranian mullahs and scientists who identifiably were involved in feeding arms to Shiite militias. From there, the only way to escalate is to a general bombing campaign, which would backfire, and from there, to an invasion, which we are incapable of doing. It would be Iraq all over again - the U.S. begins a fight it can't finish, and couldn't have finished under any circumstances given its unachievable goals, and which leaves the U.S. in a worse strategic position than when it started.

(Via Scott Lemieux.)

Comments

[Aquagirl]

I've been thinking a lot lately about morality and reason in the current political arena. It is really easy to engage in an argument based on reason (they don't even have a weapon yet, and Korea has actual weapons! not to mention that they gotta know that if they ever used a nuclear weapon against the U.S., their entire country would be a giant crater inside of 45 minutes). But we do that at a huge price. We accidentally engage in this argument as if they could have a point, they've just reasoned it out wrong. We let them frame the argument. We forget to challenge the assumption that every country or person that dislikes us is somehow an existential threat to the US. We forget to say, what you're suggesting is immoral and abhorrent and wrong. You can't pre-emptively kill your neighbor because he doesn't like you and he owns a gun, and who knows, he could snap some day and hurt you. Assassination is against international law, even during times of war, for a reason. That reason is a consensus among rational humans that such actions are wrong.

[ajay]

To be honest, I think you're being unfair to Clancy - IIRC the whole point of "Clear and Present Danger" was that all the exciting paramilitary stuff was a) carried out against the advice of the experts on the orders of a near-hysterical president, and b) didn't actually do any good; it's made repeatedly clear that the only part of the Big War On Drugs that works is an asset-seizure program, which is a combination of good luck and solid police work. Certainly there's no implication that it makes much of a difference in terms of interrupting the drug trade. Meanwhile it got a lot of US troops killed for no good reason. In the end, the hero actually shuts the program down, because it's illegal and being carried out without proper oversight.

[huxley]

A significant character in the book is a renegade Cuban intelligence officer who leaves Cuba to work for the cartels because Castro resists his advice to use drugs to undermine the hated Americans. Which, if you know anything about big-time drug smuggling, is fucking hilarious.

I do know a little bit about big-time drug smuggling (not as a participant, of course), but I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Would you mind elaborating?

[Mithras]

Would you mind elaborating?

Hmm, I assumed this was common knowledge. Without being too specific, the Cuban government has no qualms with being involved in the illegal drugs trade.