TEXAS TEA AND TEHERAN
Finally, we now have a credible reason why the Bush administration will not start a war in Iran.
Not because the administration believes in diplomacy, let alone can practice it effectively. Not because there is no factually identified casus belli, despite the administration's repeated claims that Iran is attacking US troops in Iraq. Not because Iran has stopped aiding Iraqui Shiites. And not because Iran's faith based and fact denying President without portfolio, Ahmadinejad, a somewhat rhetorical mirror image of our own faith based and fact denying chief executive, has started to make any sense.
No, the reason Bush will not go to war with Iran is that oil experts are now predicting the price of oil will skyrocket if such an attack is launched.
A president so committed to freedom and democracy, as Bush claims he is, would, of course, not be deterred by such proletarian concerns. Afterall, if freedom is not America's gift to the world but rather God's gift to humanity, as Bush claimed in one of his first term State of the Union speeches, the devil's gold of oil (or, as Jed Clampett called it, "Texas tea") could hardly constitute a sound basis for stopping freedom's march at the Persian border.
But, as Mr. Dooley either said or should have said, with this administration, things get "curiouser and curiouser."
Despite his pretended support for the troops, Bush is the first president in American history to actually send American forces into combat without all the tools they needed for success. Check the record. When has any American commander in chief fired (that's what it was) generals who told him they needed more troops to succeed. Even LBJ and Nixon put 500,000 soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. And there were drafts for the Korean War, World Wars II and I, and the Civil War.
Similarly, despite his constant refrain that he intends to follow the advice of his generals, Bush certainly makes certain that the advice will never go where he is loathe to venture. America's premier expert in counter-insurgency warfare is General Petreas. Having studied the Vietnam war thoroughly, and armed with his advance degrees, Petreas wrote the book on counter-insurgency. Bush should read it. If he did, he'd know that a successful counter-insurgency takes at least a decade to succeed (and often longer), and requires a force to citizen ratio far higher than the one we have in place in Iraq, surge or no surge.
Petreas hasn't told us this because the administration has not asked him, and because he knows that the only way he can preserve his own credibility is by radically narrowing the questions on Iraq that he is willing to answer. Notice that General Petraes has never told us that we actually will win in Iraq or that the surge will do it. Either statement would be refuted by his own writing.
Which brings us back to oil.
Facts, as the above makes clear, have never stopped the Bushies from mindlessly plunging ahead. So why should this one?
For three reasons, actually.
First, although Bush is not running again, the rest of the GOP is. For them, Iraq is an electoral ball and chain, and they do not need another. The economy at present is a jump ball, with high tech staving off the recession that the sub-prime induced credit crunch would otherwise invite. It won't take much to cross that line, and with oil at 90 plus bucks a barrel, another round of oil inflation would probably push us into the recession we are for now avoiding. A mismanaged war combined with a tanking economy is not a record that any Rove-like magician could spin the GOP's way out of.
Second, Rudy and the rest of the GOP presidential candidates do not really need a war with Iran; they just need a rhetorical battering ram to ceaselessly hammer and appear tough (now that Saddam is gone and the Chinese have cabined North Korea). This lesson was made crystal clear during the the cold war. Part of the reason both Reagan and Bush I could regularly play the national security card was that war with the Soviet Union during their tenure was so entirely remote, unlike, for example, during the Berlin crisis of the late '40s and or the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, where the real possbility of war was met with far less bellicose rhetoric and far more diplomatic effort -- remember, JFK secretly traded the Soviet missiles in Cuba for ours in Turkey, in stark contrast to his present successor's refusal to even speak to our adversaries. It's easy to talk tough when you do not need to act tough, and right now, the Republicans are far more interested in tough talk because they are betting this is the best way to avert electoral disaster. So, avoiding an oil spiked recession fits very neatly into the rhetorical war on terrorism the GOP thinks it can use to win elections.
Finally, right now, the electorate hates Congress as much as it hates the White House, and the administration is not going to do anything to change that perception. Imagine the demand for a windfall profits tax -- and the price gouging investigations -- if oil climbs to over $100 a barrel as the administration tries to slay the would be Iranian dragon between now and election day, 2008. Nancy Pelosi will look like an avenging angel as her erstwhile San Francisco liberalism dissolves as a voting issue. The Democrats will add thirty seats to their House majority, as well as a veto proof (or close to veto proof) Senate. No more filibusters when President Clinton (or Obama or Edwards) proposes a timetable for an exit from Iraq or (what is worse for the right wing) puts two new Justices on the Supreme Court.
This oil story so constrains the administration and its neocons that they are probably wishing they had long ago followed the advice of the Gore-acle.
Think how many more options they'd have if we were truly energy independent.
So keep on driving America.
It's what stands between you and Thanksgiving in Teheran.
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