In a nutshell, Dick Cheney is pursing the grand strategy that he has set out for himself. He and George and their neo-con friends have proclaimed that they want to re-make the Middle East in their own image. This is their stated goal and despite a lot of missteps, head fakes, and outright lying about a lot of other things, they are sticking to this claim. They started in Afghanistan, to the east of Iran, next they went into Iraq, to the west of Iran, and now comes Cheney’s hat trick, Iran itself. In the book The March of Folly which describes four historical episodes where ruling powers pursued failed strategies despite all kinds of facts that should have lead them to do otherwise, Barbara Tuchman finds that those in power are much more willing to fail than they are to admit that they are wrong. So it matters not a wit to Cheney how bad things get in Iraq (or Afghanistan) he’s going forward with Plan A.
So if Cheney won’t stop Cheney, who can? Well, the Democrats, of course!
But let’s listen to what the Dems are saying and take stock of exactly what they are not doing.
In November 2006, in results that surprised even themselves, the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. They did so on a wave of anti-Bush and anti-war sentiment, which frankly, as a party, they did relatively little to push or swell. So what have they done to lift up these anti-war voices, to press the demands of the people who put them into power? First off they have resuscitated the policeman that was suffocating under the ass of the former Speaker of the House, Danny Hastert. With the investigatory powers accorded to the legislative branch once again in play, there is now an opposition party asking questions. Second, they have come out publicly (being quoted in mainstream newspapers even!) and asserted that the Bush (sic) administration does not have the legal authority to invade Iran without expressed written permission from the Congress. Third, they have tried (and so-far failed) to pass a non-binding resolution stating their opposition to the president’s “surge strategy” in Iraq. Bold moves from a Party emboldened by victory. Onward soldiers of justice!
Now let’s look at the real effect of these three gambits. First, the ever-vigilante Henry Waxman (D, California), as new chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, will do his best to embarrass the hell out of the Republicans. He will publicize their lies, corruption, nepotism, veniality, and incompetence. He will subtly reveal (to the those already in the know) that the Republican Party is willing to risk the lives of Americans so that they and their rich friends might continue to pay the kids private school tuition bills without changing their sacred current-consumption patterns. Don’t get me wrong, I like Henry Waxman and I believe that he’s a first class and honest muckraker. But he is a Party man and though we can’t know for sure his own appetite for truth, we do know his party’s. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Republicans like to serve truth as the appetizer, while Democrat’s prefer it for dessert, but neither would ever dare serve it as the main meal.
And as for the policy implication of the other two maneuvers? Well, the Democratic Party has finally come straight out and said it, “The President’s powers are limited.” That’s right! There it is! They’ve said it and they’ve even said it in public! You didn’t think they had it in them but they said it. Many of us had come to think that the Party had no balls. But they proved us wrong. And if George tries to break the Constitution again well this time they’re really going to do something about it like…like…pass a non-binding resolution saying that what he did was wrong (as opposed to the current one wherein they say what he’s going to do is wrong.)
In other words, all of the Democratic Party’s current strategies are designed to not change a thing. It is pure political jockeying, intentionally designed for political advantage without risking any policy changes. The Democrats know that both ideas—the surge in Iraq and the bombing of Iran—are awful and immoral, but they also know that they cannot intervene without putting at risk the entire house of cards, a.k.a. the current American political establishment. So they do the only thing they can do: they tuck a political card into their sleeve so that next year after the surge plan has failed and the bombing campaign in Iran has happened (and thanks to their own sins of omission tens- maybe hundreds-of-thousands of more lives have been lost), they can say they told us so.
So in my continuing effort to turn the social sciences into a predictive science, here’s what I see in the crystal ball:
(1) The US attacks Iran on flimsy evidence;
(2) The Democrats hem-and-haw, spin around three-and-half-times, and hem-and-haw some more;
(3) The MSM, while continuing to quote the Cheney administration that the evidence implicating Iran is air-tight, reports that some administration opponents say that the administration’s evidence against Iran is, in fact, not perfect;
(4) The truly innocent civilians of Iran die in the tens- and maybe hundreds-of-thousands; and,
(5) Paraphrasing Sourush Shehabi, the current (very unpopular) Iranian regime remains in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians become radicalized.
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