The Guns of April, Revisited

By Scott Horton

A week from my original post, the fifteen British sailors and marines are back home with their families, and so is an Iranian diplomat held captive in Iraq. As Andrew Sullivan writes in yesterday's Times, it's likely to be years before we have the full story of what went on – though it does seem that a swap of some sort was worked out.

In the meantime, we are learning more about how the Bush Administration behaved behind the scenes. Bush decided to continue escalation of the U.S. naval presence in the gulf by committing another carrier group for purposes of military exercises while the crisis was brewing. But that was just the opener. The Guardian tells us that from the outset the Bush Administration aggressively pushed military engagement. The United States offered to take military action on behalf of the 15 British sailors and marines held by Iran, including buzzing Iranian Revolutionary Guard positions with warplanes.

Whitehall, not surprisingly, responded with “no thanks,” also requesting that the United States exercise restraint in its actions and comments about the event. This request seems to have been honored, but it also seems to have unleashed a torrent of criticism from well-connected Neocons who obviously had a good sense of the landscape and saw in the incident the perfect causus belli.

In a column at the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer has withering criticism for Britain and the European Union:

Iran has pulled off a tidy little success with its seizure and release of those 15 British sailors and marines: a pointed humiliation of Britain, with a bonus demonstration of Iran's intention to push back against coalition challenges to its assets in Iraq. All with total impunity. Further, it exposed the impotence of all those transnational institutions—most prominently the European Union and the United Nations—that pretend to maintain international order.

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, appearing on Fox News on Sunday, used almost identical words in criticizing Britain and the Europeans and went the next step: saying that military force should have been used against Iran. Here's the key interplay:

KRISTOL: It's a real humiliation for the British and, of course, the Europeans didn't stand by them either. And it sent the signal to the worst forces in Iran. To me there are splits in the Iranian government. It has strengthened the worst forces in Iran by making them think they can push the West around. We came closer to war with Iran this week. The only way to avoid war is to have the Iranians believe the west is tough enough to threaten them with war and tighten the economic pressure. After the Germans refused to help the British, after the British refused to do anything, after we've been very passive, we're closer to war with Iran — if either war or an Iran with nuclear weapons.

WILLIAMS: Well, what was the alternative? To go in and strike them while the hostages were there?

KRISTOL: Yes.

All of this suggests that the Neocons were prodding Britain to sign off on a military strike on Iran that quite likely would have precipitated a war, or at least would have moved the parties much closer to one.

If a future incident occurs involving American personnel rather than those of an ally, it seems likely that the war party will get its way. Kristol was intent on the president's ability to “build public support” for a strike on Iran in early 2008. Following Krauthammer and Kristol we can see the path by which that support presumably would be built.

In her 1974 Harper's essay, Barbara Tuchman reminds us of the need for careful empiricism and the avoidance of making the facts fit to a preconceived model of what the observer thinks they should be.

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of the evidence rather than the other way around, like Hegel and all the later Hegels; it saves one from being waylaid by that masked highwayman, the categorical imperative. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.

Of course, arranging the facts to fit the agenda of the day has been the very hallmark of Bush foreign policy. And do we not see in the pushy, tendentious analysis of the Krauthammers and Kristols this exact failing? The facts are distorted horribly to fit the mold they want, one which will produce a war. This is not the mindset that produced the tragedy of August 1914. It is far worse.