Richard Clarke: Against all solutions
By TigerHawk at 4/16/2006 08:33:00 AM
Kerry advisor and anti-terrorism expert Richard Clarke has an op-ed piece nytimes.com in The New York Times this morning that exemplifies what is wrong with the approach of most Democrats to national security. Clarke argues that any attempt to bomb Iran would backfire, in that Iran has many means by which it could retaliate, and that it is not at all clear that the United States could achieve "escalation dominance, the condition in which the other side fears responding because they know that the next round of American attacks would be too lethal for the regime to survive."1
Clarke's enumerated concerns -- they are all too familiar to anybody who has been reading the work of people who have been thinking seriously about the Iran crisis -- are valid, and they trouble me as well. The problem is that his essay does not say what the United States should do about the intersection between Iran's hideous government and its all-but-admitted nuclear weapons program. Not only does Clarke not say what we should do (as opposed to what we should not do, which he is quite explicit about), he does not have the stones to say that he thinks we should resign ourselves to a nuclear Iran and work on a plan to contain it.
Richard Clarke is one of the leading Democratic "experts" on terrorism, and one of the most visible credentialed critics of the Bush administration's strategy and tactics. If John Kerry had won in 2004, he would probably be on the National Security Council instead of writing op-ed pieces. We are entitled to know whether or not he thinks the United States can tolerate a nuclear Iran and, if it cannot, what we should do to prevent it.
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1. Although off the main topic of the post, I note that Clarke proposes here a "straw man" objective against which all proposed policies would fail. The goal of escalation would not be to eliminate the regime -- at least I hope it would not be -- but elimination of the nuclear program and an agreement by the regime to an intrusive inspections system that would prevent its revival. By claiming that the target of American escalation is regime change, Clarke sets up an impossible objective for American air strikes. It is a disingenuous argument, and he knows it. He gets away with making it, though, because the Bush administration has at least flirted with the "regime change" rhetoric with regard to Iran, notwithstanding the urgings of the British and others that we back away from it. We have, in that we are now talking of "regime transformation," the term we use in North Korea. That language is code for advocating that the regime change its attitude, rather than its essential character or even the particular people in charge. Much as I would like to see the regime in Iran change, only Iranians are going to be able to do that, and I hope that the United States does not declare it as American policy.
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