Marketing a War with Iran

I'm back from a weekend in still drought-ridden Wisconsin. Now that we're past Labor Day I can look forward to a Cubs meltdown and the Bears fumbling and stumbling their way through another season. I'm also looking forward to the marketing campaigns for the next generation of iPods and the next generation of interventionist disaster: a war with Iran.

According to the blog Informed Comment Global Affairs, a spin off of Juan Cole's important blog Informed Comment, this week the Bush administration will begin its marketing campaign for an attack on Iran. Barnett Rubin reports that a friend "who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient" that a source in "one of the leading neo-conservative institutions" has been told

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

The third hand account, complete with a comma splice, warrants skepticism. Rubin has some other circumstantial evidence of new preparations for a war with Iran, but he's skeptical about the reports as well. After all, there have been alarmist reports about an impending attack on Iran before. (I heard about one that was supposed to occur just before the November 2006 elections, and another that was to take place last spring.) Besides, the war talk could be a bluff designed to increase pressure on the Iranian government to discontinue its nuclear weapons program. Rubin writes,

I hesitated before posting this. I don't want to spread alarmist rumors. I don't want to lessen the pressure on the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran. But there are too many signs of another irresponsible military adventure from the Cheney-Bush administration for me just to dismiss these reports.

It seems hard to believe that the Bush administration honestly believes it has the political capital to launch an attack on Iran. It's even more difficult to believe that the administration believes it has the troops to invade Iran if the Air Force bombing campaign doesn't work. (From what I've read, the Air Force has assured Cheney that they can destroy Iran's nuclear capability with precise bombing--the generals refused Cheney's request for a nuclear bombing option--but the Army and the Marines are dubious about the plan, since they're the ones who will have to clean up the Air Force's mess.) The American military will start running out of ground troops this spring, and public patience with combat in the Middle East has already run out. Finally, the whole marketing campaign metaphor should have been discredited after the Iraq war. Maybe Fox and the rest of the conservative press will finally do a public service and refuse to sign up for this particular campaign.

Comments

[Reklamist_One]

Hello. Address your site "onewaystreet.typepad.com" was found in a public list of resources that would like to receive advertisements. If you do not want us to place on your site ads, please go to - advertising-poll.leadhoster.com - where you can easily remove your site from the list.
(Link is not "active". If this is not the appropriate branch for this post, you can remove it.)
Thanks.