The Problem with Foreign Policy

So it turns out that we have no motivation to go to war with Iran (except that they're, you know, Muslim and anti-American), since they stopped their weapons program since 2003. What the report more or less shows is that Iran has been deescalating a war situation instead of baiting one.

Brian wonders why it took so long for the report to be released and why the intelligence community would defect from the administration. To me, the second point of wondering doesn't seem surprising. After all, the administration has more or less blamed the entire Iraq war on faulty intelligence, something I'm sure gets under the skin of many intelligence professional at the DoD and the CIA. The decision to go to war didn't rest with them, it rested with the president.

Furthermore, I think this really shows how hawkish our entire foreign policy community is on Iran. Even so-called liberal publications like the New Republic in the last year have published essays suggesting a hawkish policy on Iran.* What's more, a lot of people aren't considered serious thinkers in the foreign policy community unless they show evidence of at least minor hawkishness. This seems like a problem to me.

Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org/blog.

*Edited from original text.

Hossein Derakhshan wrote in Comment is Free today that he would gladly defend Iran in a military conflict with the United States. Even though Iran blocks his own blog, he feels strongly about the right of the Islamic Republic's right to exist. This goes to show how complex feelings about the United States have become internationally. Even though Derakshan desires a free and secular Iran, a distaste for the neo-conservative foreign foreign policies of this administration stands to cause already fleeing loyalty away from the side of the United States.

When Tony Blair announced that he was withdrawing troops as we filtered more in (or rather, retained them via extended tours), some tried to spin it as good news for Iraq. Blair was Bush's lapdog, but it seems public pressure got too much even for him. European governments are distancing themselves from American foreign policy more and more. This seems like something to avoid.

Burden of Proof

It's no surprise that skeptics, both domestic and international, are emerging on the alleged evidence of "illicit weapons" in Iran. Since it's obvious that the administration lied--or at the minimum, sloppily accused--Iraq of harboring WMDs, the burden of proof is going to be much higher this time around. While there are obvious reasons that an administration needs a certain level of secrecy, it seems more likely that the evidence presented to a select group of journalists recently is a distraction for how badly the war is going in Iraq.

What's more, our troops are already badly stretched. If Bush really wanted to send troops to Iran, he'd be in a slightly more than sticky situation.