Force or farce?

Josh Marshall writes,

First time as farce, second time as farce too?

With President Bush again stating that force is still on the table against Iran, albeit only as the last resort, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has kicked off his uphill reelection drive with an attack on President Bush's Middle Eastern belligerence.

All of this, of course, provides an uncanny replay of the build up to the US invasion of Iraq with the German Chancellor leveraging reelection on the axis of President Bush's warmongering.

(ed.note: My literary powers failed me when I tried to come up with a joke suitably humorous and grim to fully capture the ridiculousness of President Bush's continued insistence that he is willing to use force but only as a last resort. Perhaps someone out there can help?)

On the Bush threat of violence as a last resort, the farce is not in the obvious fact that war is pretty close to being Bush's first resort. The real farce is that the administration has blown its credibility of being able to back up its talk of attacks with an actual winnable war. Everyone on the planet knows that invading Iran would be insane, including Iran. Of course, the UN says Iran doesn't have nuclear weapon capability and many estimates say such a capability is a decade or away. For analysis of this see Arms Control Wonk. But let's assume something urgent has to be done about Iran.

There are only three ways I can see that Bush could back up the hypothetical threat of force (and the perception of that threat is what is crucial here): 1) limited air-only strikes; 2) nukes; and 3) invading the country and screwing it up so badly that Iranians would all suffer (let's call the latter the Anarchize Your Country threat or, synonymously, Iraqization). Numbers 2 and 3 are nuts. Of course, number 2 has its proxy version in an Israeli strike on Iran. I think we can be significantly worried about this administration giving the go-ahead for the proxy strike. The already damaged international standing of the US would have the final stake driven through its heart in even the proxy case, and all bets would be off in terms of global non-proliferation.

But, really, air or cruise missile strikes are the only option. So we have to think through the implications of such strikes. There are a number of possibilities one of which is the risk of a broader war in the region. Even if Iran can't fend off cruise missiles, it can at least make things much worse in Iraq in the name of self defense. The US simply can't fight that war. It doesn't have the capability, as the Iraq occupation has shown.

The farce is that there is any credibility to the Bush threat. Of course, the guy may be stupid enough to try any of the three options above. Yet, any real threat may ultimately be based in what logicians call the Argument from Utter Stupidity.