This Week in Babylon

Iran Forum Roundup, a Valentine to Israel, and more on “moral waivers”

Iran Forum Roundup

During the course of the past few days' online forum on Iran, a number of readers have asked me for my opinion on the prospects of a military confrontation with Tehran. I believe that confrontation is not as inevitable as one might conclude from recent stories in Vanity Fair and the Guardian (the latter of which I cited on day one of the forum). Both those stories, especially the Vanity Fair article, used cherry-picked evidence and talking heads to stack the deck towards the scenario of a coming confrontation.

Which is not to say that a military strike against Iran won't necessarily happen. The Bush Administration is certainly capable of pulling the trigger, and there are powerful figures in the administration who seem to be itching for a confrontation. Also, there are multiple signs, as many forum contributors noted, that the administration is actively planning military action. And the Iraq intelligence debacle gives us every reason to question the administration's “intelligence” on Iran's nuclear intentions and its role in Iraq. So I agree with Milt Bearden, the former CIA official, who said on day two of the forum, “As insane as the prospect for war might [be]...Americans should be prepared to wake up one morning and find themselves at war with Iran.”

The Bush Administration is definitely drawing up contingency plans for a military strike against Iran, but that doesn't mean the plans will be carried out. As Frank Anderson, another former CIA official, noted on day two, “the barriers to action are formidable.” The barriers include: President Bush's abysmal polling numbers; strong opposition to military action from parts of the Pentagon; lack of international support for a strike, even from America's core allies; and, most importantly of all, the ongoing disaster in Iraq—the barrier that defines the other barriers. I agree with Anderson, who pointed out that, while we're “locked and loaded” for an attack, with “the President politically constrained, that makes me bet against it, but the spread isn't big.”

I don't think the decision has been made to launch a strike against Tehran, and it's not too late for public opinion to influence what comes next. To cite Milt Bearden once more, “Those who think they can get by with ‘shock and awe’ need to be shouted down now.”

Congress Sends Israel a Valentine

The House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia is under new management, but judging from its first hearing on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on February 14, we shouldn't expect any bold new Democratic policy initiatives with regards to the Middle East. The witness list for the hearing, chaired by Representative Gary Ackerman of New York, was plumped up with pro-Israel think-tankers. First up was David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, followed by Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution, and finally Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. It's too bad John Bolton wasn't available that day to provide some balance.

Lou Bites Wolf

Satirist Andy Borowitz “reports”:

A media watchdog group today blasted the major news networks for failing to provide enough coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death in the 72 hours following the blonde bombshell's passing. The Media Watchdog Group took the nation's 24-hour news networks to task for what it called 'scant coverage' of the life, death and legacy of Ms. Smith.

. . . At a press conference in Washington, Carol Foyler, a spokesperson for the group, hit hard at the all-news networks for giving the Anna Nicole Smith story “short shrift.”

“Instead of staying on the Anna Nicole Smith story nonstop, the networks would sometimes cut away to coverage of the war in Iraq for seconds at a time,” Ms. Foyler said. “For a nation struggling with its loss, this was like twisting the knife.”

Sure, if anything deserves mockery it was the maudlin, cynical tributes of overgroomed news anchors working to suck every last second of airtime out of the meaningless death of Anna Nicole Smith. But as the Daily Show points out, with CNN and Wolf Blitzer, there's really no point to satire any more.

Dog Bites Terrorist

Earlier this week Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress announced the latest findings from their new Terrorism Index. They asked “more than 100 of America's top foreign-policy hands if the United States was winning the war on terror” (the answer: no). There are some interesting findings in the survey, but I was struck by one highlighted item from the press release: “More than 80 percent of the experts continue to expect a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade.”

I would like to applaud the panelists for their amazing foresight. I also have cutting-edge predictions about major events likely to take place over the next decade:

China will emerge as a serious economic competitor to the United States.
More people will use the Internet—and Internet pornography will continue to grow in scope and variety.
Repercussions from the Iraq War will continue to plague the United States.

The Times on Moral Waivers

Last week, I ran a story on how the Army has been seeking to meet its recruiting goals by lowering standards for new enlistees. This week the New York Times published a story that addressed many of the same issues. The Army, the story says, “has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions. It has also increased the number of so-called ‘moral waivers’ to recruits with criminal pasts.” It's a problem worth watching, and one that can only grow more severe given the recruiting crunch faced by the Pentagon.

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