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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Iran
Back when I was in college, a long, long time ago, I studied political science and took an upper division course that was called something like Political Military Theory or The Politics of War. It was taught by Dr. Elizabeth Kier, who seems to have moved over to U-dub since I've left Cal. In structuring her course she took as a starting point Kenneth J. Waltz's Man, the State and War -- one of the classic, definitive volumes in International Relations and Political Science theory. In it Waltz explores why states go to war and discusses the various actors that can influence that decision to expend blood and treasure.

Is it because, at the individual level, humans are naturally selfish, aggressive and warlike, and war is an expression of their collective actions as savage actors? Or does the way that states are structured internally (democracies? totalitarian?) explain the reasons for war? That if there is internal conflict at home because a state is too authoritarian, leaders could opt for foreign action abroad in order to quell that internal dissent? Finally, at the international level, states go to war because the international system is anarchic -- that there is no one governing world body that can prevent it. In other words, states go to war because they can.

Wrapped up in the internal state-structure explanation is the diversionary war, or "rally around the flag" theory of causa belli. A leader of a state, for whom things are not going particularly well, will go to war in order to boost popularity ratings or gain support for policies that would otherwise cause opposition. (I'm not going to go into what merits this theory has -- usually in IR the empirical evidence usually does not support positions like this; what academics usually find is that this could be a reason, not necessarily the definitive reason.)

So all the grumblings about Iran now, are raising some heads in blog-and-pundit land...and if you think about it, the rally-around-the-flag theory goes a long way towards explaining why -- just before the November elections -- Dubya might just want to launch war #3 against Iran. As Kevin Drum notes:

In Iran we have a country that (a) has clear connections with al-Qaeda and apparently even with 9/11, (b) has a genuine and well advanced WMD program, (c) supports terrorist groups like Hezbollah far more than Iraq ever did, (d) has fought wars against its neighbors, (e) is a medieval theocracy, and (f) is determinedly hostile toward the United States.

Question: that's a much more convincing case than we had against Iraq, so should we invade Iran and attempt to install a democratic government in Tehran?

Here's the take from the Dreyfuss Report. It seems that there's this article in the Sunday Herald:

President George Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target.

Bush named Iran as part of the Axis of Evil along with North Korea and Iraq almost three years ago. A U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership.

The official said: "If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran."

Dreyfuss adds:

That's a calculated leak from an embedded neocon, and it's guaranteed to make the Iranian government sit up and take notice. Now imagine yourself to be an Iranian mullah, sitting in your obscurantist domain. Wouldn't you be thinking: what can I do to stop George Bush from being reelected? You would. And what you would do, most likely, is try to meddle in Iraq, in a way calculated to weaken the American position there. Only, the real result of such meddling would be to create precisely the kind of showdown between the United States and Iran that the neocons want. They've been trying to provoke exactly that sort of crisis for months.

[insert sarcasm] Sounds about right to me. And since war with Iran would open our susceptibility to even more terrorist attacks against the United States, we should definitely consider suspending the November elections in the process. That should make it easier to give Bushie and his cronies 4-8 more years...[end sarcasm].

posted by claudine |Added at 2:58 PM| | international politics, iran

 
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