Iran Follow-Up: Dealing with the Media's "War, War, War" Drumbeat (Lynch)

UPDATE 0815 GMT: Matt Duss also has posted an effective challenge to the cries of those promoting a military option against Iran.



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On Friday, we took apart the overblown, thinly-sourced "report" by Joe Klein in Time Magazine of preparations for a military strike on Iran. This, of course, won't stop those agitating for bombing: the latest egregious example is the preaching, posing as analysis, of former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marc Lynch exposes the campaign and highlights its. (I would only add that this is not just a case of a weak argument. It is also one of manufactured "information". There is little if any evidence that the Obama Administration has modified its point-blank warning to West Jerusalem against a military adventure.)

UPDATED Iran Analysis: When “War Chatter” Poses as Journalism (Step Up, Time Magazine)

....Why the latest round of commentary about an attack on Iran? It isn't because there are new arguments out there. Gerecht's long Weekly Standard piece is typical of the genre, and could have been written any time in the last decade (and in the case of the Weekly Standard has been, repeatedly): we must bomb Iran because there are no other policy options which guarantee success; the risks of an attack are exaggerated; the benefits of an attack are great; and Iranians and Arabs secretly want us to do it. Nor have the rebuttals changed: other policy options are available, which at least slow down Iran's progress towards a nuclear weapon even if they do not provide the kind of epistemic certainty which hawks crave; the risks of an attack are many and real; the benefits of an attack are likely to be less than advertised; and it is exceedingly doubtful that Arabs or Iranians will in fact rally to support an Israeli or American attack. These arguments are now as familiar as wallpaper, from the arguments over Iraq from the 1990s-2003 through the long years of arguments about Iran.

I suspect that the real reason for the new flood of commentary calling for attacks on Iran is simply that hawks hope to pocket their winnings from the long argument over sanctions, such as they are, and now push to the next stage in the confrontation they've long demanded. Hopefully, this pressure will not gain immediate traction. Congress can proudly demonstrate their sanctions-passingness, so the artificial Washington timeline should recede for a while. The Pentagon is now working closely with Israel, it's said, in order to reassure them and prevent their making a unilateral strike, which should hopefully push back another artificial clock. That should buy some time for the administration's strategy to unfold, for better or for worse. An attack on Iran would still be a disaster, unnecessary and counterproductive, and the White House knows that, and it's exceedingly unlikely that it will happen anytime soon. But the real risk is that the public discourse about an attack on Iran normalizes the idea and makes it seem plausible, if not inevitable, and that the administration talks itself into a political corner. That shouldn't be allowed to happen.

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