Tunnel Vision in the Strait of Hormuz

Trying to persuade an audience in Nashville, Tennessee, that Saddam Hussein had already fooled the world once about his intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush issued one of his most memorable malapropisms:

"Fool me once, shame... shame on... you (long, uncomfortable silence). Fool me... can't get fooled again!"

Maybe so, but the American public has shown a surprisingly high tolerance for being fooled repeatedly, as if it were impossible for the Bush Administration to cry wolf too many times. Even though the United States had just invaded Iraq on the false premise that its weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the region and the world, resulting in one of the worst foreign policy mistakes of this generation, the US government has spent the last three years building a case against neighboring Iran based on (you guessed correctly) its threatening nuclear weapons program. The American public and, most importantly, the chattering classes and the foreign policy "experts," believed them once again. The only real disagreement, given the damaged state of national hubris in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, was whether anything at all could be done about it.

Last December, the National Intelligence Estimate stated "with high confidence" that Iran had halted its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons' program back in 2003. Bush had been notified of this for some months, but nevertheless dialed up his anti-Iran rhetoric. Perhaps he put the report in the same to-read-later pile as the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US" memo.

One month later, some Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz allegedly brought us to the brink of World War Three. Five Iranian patrol boats had approached three US Navy warships. In one of the radio transmissions, a threatening message was picked up: "We are coming at you. You will explode in a few minutes." The US ships said they were about to fire when the patrol boats retreated. Both the United States and Iran decided to broadcast their own version of the event, with the Iranian government saying that it had been a routine mission of reconnaissance and that there had not been any hostility. Asked yesterday which propaganda he believed most, Fareed Zakaria, one of the better-reputed foreign policy pundits, repeated his own past mistakes by acknowledging he believed the American version, but that the Iranians had a reason to be jumpy and aggressive. In an attempt to justify the decision to get ready to fire on the small speedboats, which typically are only crewed by 2-3 people and should pose no threat to US warships, mentions of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole abounded. Many sources within the Pentagon have now begun to retract, venturing that the hostile message was probably issued by a locally famous radio heckler known as the Filipino Monkey. The sound and tone of the voice sounds different than that of the Iranian officer, and lacks a Persian accent. According to the Navy Times, these kinds of things happen frequently, and especially in the Strait of Hormuz.

For Americans, this incident evoked memories of the USS Cole and the death of 17 American sailors. This attack was allegedly carried out by Al Qaeda -although a recent judicial ruling in the US makes the Sudanese government responsible- and took place in a Yemeni port. Iranians and others in the Muslim world, however, are likely to draw different comparisons and historical analogies. They will probably say -and they are right- that the Strait of Hormuz is within territorial waters of Iran and Oman, and that the US warships have been patrolling it for decades. They might remember that a year ago, a US nuclear submarine accidentally struck a huge Japanese oil tanker, risking disaster. They will surely point out, and this incident is almost never brought up in the US media, that in 1988 a US warship mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers over Iranian territorial waters. The US government said that an inexperienced crew mistook the Airbus 300 for an F-14 Tomcat fighter, but I doubt anyone in Iran believes that. After all, only three months before that, the United States had sank two Iranian warships and six speedboats in what was called Operation Praying Mantis.

And it all happened in the Strait of Hormuz, involving US warships. Remember the USS Cole? How about remembering Gulf of Tonkin?

The Pastor's Dangerous Missive

First of all I want to apologize for the long gap since my last post. The holidays, of course, pose a difficult hurdle for bloggers of my ilk. But now I'm back.

I, unlike some of my friends, have been diligently reading the foreign policy statements which had been put forth by the presidential candidates in Foreign Affairs magazine. While I have been stultified by the banal writings of the Democratic candidates, I have been incensed by the small-mindedness and, in some cases, radicalism of the Republican candidates. Obviously, my agita has not been so acute as a prompt me to write something about. However, after getting back from Florida, I was welcomed by the most recent copy of Foreign Affairs. In it was an essay by Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and fellow son of Hope (along with former President Bill Clinton). Now I have to admit that Huckabee makes me laugh on occasion. Growing up in the South, his soft-spoken ways and his pastoral (literal and figuartive) approach to politics speak to me, despite all my cerebrally-informed attempts for them not to. However after reading just a few paragraphs of his essay, the veil has been ripped from eyes. Now, I never thought he knew anything about international politics, but I was surprised to see that Chuck Norris’ candidate knows nothing about politics. Let me say it again: Huckabee knows nothing about politics.

The reason for this unqualified judgment is as follows: he says, "The first rule of war is know your enemy, and most Americans do not know theirs." He of course is talking about Islamic terrorists, and I agree with him there. Here comes the rub. Just a few sentences before he states that "they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it." This nonsense -- this Fox News, Ann Coulter, Kristol family nonsense -- cannot stand.

Osama bin Laden understands politics perfectly well. His decision in the late 1990s to abandon local wars in corrupt Arab states (the near enemy) and begin a focus on the global war against the United States (the far enemy) and its proxy in the region, Israel, shows calculation and an understanding of the way the world works, especially the postmodern, mass-mediated world in which live. Osama bin Laden has no desire to kill every last American. Only the greenest recruit in the Al Qaeda organization has the notion that they can actually rewrite the rules of civilization. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's mentor, has studied some of the greatest revolutionaries, including a Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao. Al Qaeda's actions are carefully orchestrated to achieve tangible, concrete outcomes. If just killing Americans was their goal, there would be a lot more dead Americans.

Huckabee, while talking about Sayyid Qutb and other important aspects of violent global Islamism in his essay, fails to grasp even the most basic notions of political science. His embrace of this ideal of "Islamo-fascism" shows that his views of the outside world are just as paranoid and muddled as those of Rudolph Giuliani, who is currently under the tutelage of some of the most aggressive neo-conservatives. In Andrew Sullivan's recent article about Barack Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, discusses how having an American president whose father was born in Kenya, grandmother is a Muslim, and studied in a Muslim-majority school as a youth might actually deter some angry young Muslim youth somewhere in Pakistan at sometime in the future from sacrificing his entire life to kill Westerners. While I'm not sure I buy Sullivan's argument completely, a Baptist preacher from a Red state who sincerely believes that all Muslims want us dead will -- if elected to the presidency -- ensure that there will be at least a few more of those young men who choose the route of violence over pursuit of their own self-interest.