March 16, 2005

"We Seek no Wider War"

On February 17, 1965, several months after the partly fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incident and passage of the wholly real Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Lyndon Johnson famously said of Vietnam, “We have no ambition there for ourselves, we seek no wider war,” the last half of that phrase immortalized by songwriter Phil Ochs.

Those words signaled the almost immediate escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from support for a murderous counterinsurgency carried out by the South Vietnamese government to all-out war and a massive U.S. troop presence.

By the end of the 1960’s, as most people believed the United States could not win outright, Nixon’s response was to expand the unwinnable war, resuming bombing of North Vietnam and also spreading the war to Laos and Cambodia. The primary reason given was that Laos and Cambodia, as uncontrolled neutral territories, were a base of operations for the Vietnamese resistance.

All the signs indicate that the Bush administration is planning expansion of the hitherto unsuccessful but still far from lost war in Iraq.

We have known for some time that the abstract, theoretical plans of the neoconservatives involve “regime change,” removal of governments, especially in the Middle East, designated as enemies, and the spreading of some form of U.S. domination, usually designated by the code word “democracy.” What we didn’t know, especially with the occupation of Iraq bogging down, was whether those at the top felt they could act on those plans.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen all the signs we need; widening the war is the background for all the administration’s foreign policy thinking.

The neoconservatives, Rumsfeld, and Cheney have developed the absolute conviction that Syria and Iran are helping the Iraqi resistance. This makes little sense; the Syrian Ba’ath and Iraqi Ba’ath have opposed each other for almost 40 years; Syria is run by the minority Alawites – Shi’a -- and can’t be interested in fuelling an insurgency that is increasingly Wahhabized and attacks Shi’a more often than occupying troops; and Syria just turned over Saddam’s half-brother Sabawi to the Americans. Iran is in contact with major Shi’a groups in Iraq, but the main groups close to Iran just won the elections and have no intention of armed resistance.

But we already know that our war planners are not part of what one Bush aide termed the “reality-based community.”

They also know, this time correctly, that they haven’t gotten very far in fighting global jihadism. Put these ingredients together and you get a wider war.

So far, we’ve seen Seymour Hersh saying that the United States currently has numerous teams inside Iran looking for hidden nuclear facilities and that some planners are thinking about “regime change” through the unlikely mechanism of bombing Iran and hoping the pro-democracy movement there overthrows the government.

We’ve seen an opportunistic attempt to use the Hariri assassination to push Syria out of Lebanon preparatory to regime change in Syria -- the ground having been prepared months ago by passage of U.N. Security Council resolution 1559.

Finally, we’ve seen the new “democracy offensive” coming out of Washington. On the one hand, they’re using democratization or some facsimile thereof as a tool to destabilize governments the Bush administration doesn’t like; on the other, infinitesimal reforms in countries like Egypt, supposedly imposed by U.S. action, are used as rhetorical points in a whole new “war of position” in the Middle East that complements their expanding “war of maneuver.”

This strategy is explicit – indeed, Friday’s Wall Street Journal details a massive new review led by Rumsfeld designed to create “a military that is far more proactive, focused on changing the world instead of just responding to conflicts” and that will make counterinsurgency the primary strategy.

It’s too early to see what will come of this. Cooler heads even in this administration know how absurd the plans for Iranian regime change in a quick strike are. Hezbollah’s massive demonstration has counteracted the rhetoric about the Lebanese “opposition” – the administration is in the odd position of celebrating popular participation by Iraqi Shi’a while opposing that done by Lebanese Shi’a. And, although not in active opposition, the American public is growing tired of the war and sees no benefits coming to it – certainly not lower oil prices.

Even with these caveats, we can no longer ignore the possibility of a wider war.

http://www.empirenotes.org/