Will President Bush Invade Iran?

The hawks are pounding the drums on Iran as they once did on Iraq, acting as if the hourglass is running out and we have to act immediately or, as the president apocalyptically suggested last week, we could be facing World War III.
(Madness as Method, by OpEd Columnist Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, October 24, 2007)


Will President Bush invade Iran? This is still an open question. It has been nagging me for the last couple of years. Had things gone favorably in Iraq, he would have invaded Iran by now. His hands are tied because of the outbreak of the unforeseen insurgency in Iraq.

Soon after the debacle in the mid-term elections in 2006 for the Republican Party, I was paying a social visit at a friend’s house and the conversation inevitably turned to Iran. He predicted that President Bush would attack Iran before leaving the office. Although I understood his reasoning, I thought otherwise. I thought the newly won majority in the House by the Democrats would prevent him from any such preemptive action. Maybe I was wrong; or maybe not.

The drums of war have started beating again. The scenario which had been played out before invading Iraq is again in the works now. But this time, there is one big difference. In the case of Iraq, the American public was more than ready to believe anything against Saddam Hussein. Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction (wmd’s)? They believed yes if President Bush said so. The Americans didn’t ask for any other proof or hard evidence. The president’s word was good enough. So they believed that Iraq had the wmd’s and could use against the mainland of the U.S. or at least against Israel which was more or less the same thing. The Congress gave President Bush a blank check against Saddam Hussein and he readily cashed it. Although Joe Wilson, who had gone to Niger Republic on a fact-finding mission, provided strong evidence to the CIA that there was no deal between Iraq and Niger for the acquisition of the “yellowcake” and the UN weapons inspectors repeatedly insisted that they couldn’t find any wmd’s in Iraq, none of it stopped President Bush from invading Iraq.

Now the people are aware that the current administration is not wholly trustworthy; they are not ready to go along with the administration to invade Iran. The Iraq war, which seems to be endless, has become an unbearable financial burden. The president has vetoed a bill requiring a provision of measly 35 billion dollars over a period of five years for the children’s health care plan while he continues spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on the Iraq war. This is not acceptable to the American public. Consequently, the president’s popularity rating is very low and constantly sinking. If the Iran war is started, the economy would be practically ruined.

The Americans do not want any of this. They had cast their votes in the mid-term 2006 elections to stop the Iraq war and bring the soldiers home. They don’t want another war.

On the other hand, the determination of President Bush doesn’t seem to be flagging in the face of such a great resistance at home. He has raised the stakes by mentioning the possibility of World War III in one of his recent press conferences. He has declared the Iranian National Guards as terrorists. The situation indeed is very tense and if anything goes wrong, the world might plunge into a very serious war.

The Iraq mess was created because the administration had stubbornly refused to truly grasp the aftermath of the Iraq war, which the political analysts had forecast. That aftermath did happen and consequently the U.S. lost political ground in the Middle East to Iran. Will the administration again foolishly ignore the predictable aftermath of the Iran war? Who knows? The analysts are saying that Iran is not Iraq; the administration will not have easy sailing in Iran as it had in the initial stages of the Iraq war. Iran is a very complicated situation. Any attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations by half-hearted bombings will not produce any meaningful results. It might delay nuclearlization of Iran but will not stop it. Open war will be a complete disaster.

While the drumbeat of war is continuing there are strong voices which vehemently oppose the war. In the case of Iraq, there was at least Britain which went along with the U.S., apart from a few other small and inconsequential countries which constituted the so-called “coalition.” There are no strong indications in Britain or elsewhere to show that they would militarily support the U.S. in its war against Iran. They are in favor of imposing economic sanctions on Iran if it refused to forsake its nuclear bomb-manufacturing efforts. It is doubtful and very unlikely that the Congress would allow President Bush to invade Iran. Clock is also running out on President Bush; in another 14-15 months he would be out of the White House.