Paul Pillar

The obsession with putting pressure, pressure and more pressure on Iran, and subjecting it to isolation, isolation and more isolation, has lost almost all sense of purpose and direction. It has become an automatic, ape-on-a-treadmill imperative. It has become divorced from any apparent attention to exactly what such pressure and ostracism can be expected to accomplish or even what we want it to accomplish. In the process, the anti-Iran campaign has sometimes entailed shooting oneself in the foot.

The latest bullet being aimed at the U.S. metatarsal came out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Monday, in the form of an new version of its Iran sanctions bill. The chair of the committee is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who cut her ostracizing teeth on Castro's Cuba—and we've all seen how much a half century of embargo and attempted isolation from the United States have accomplished there. The sanctions bill would make it illegal for U.S. diplomats to have any contact with an Iranian official unless the president certifies to Congress fifteen days prior to contact that not talking to the Iranian officials “would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.” It is impossible to imagine any purpose being served by such a provision other than enabling politicians to express once again how much they hate Iran and how implacable they are willing to be toward Iran.

If enacted, this legislation certainly would have practical effects. It would prevent any exploration of ways to resolve disagreement over that Iranian nuclear program that we are supposedly so intensely concerned about. It would prevent soliciting Iranian cooperation in areas, such as Afghanistan, where some Iranian and U.S. interests run parallel, and the Iranians could be helpful rather than causing trouble. It would preclude discussion of miscellaneous matters of interest to Americans such as the recent return of those captured hikers. And it would prevent any diplomacy to keep U.S.-Iranian incidents or crises—the kind that retired joint chiefs chairman Admiral Mullen expressed concern about—from spinning out of control, unless the crisis conveniently stretched out beyond the fifteen-day notification period. (By way of comparison, the entire Cuban missile crisis lasted thirteen days.)

This legislation is another illustration of the tendency to think of diplomacy as some kind of reward for the other guy, rather than what it really is: a tool for our side. The provision is so stupid that one can reasonably hope that even if it survives the committee markup scheduled for this Wednesday, and even if the House of Representatives passes it, it would not survive in the Senate. But regardless of its fate, it vividly illustrates how mindless the pressuring and isolation of Iran has become.

The legislation reminds me somewhat of one of the better known episodes of foot-shooting in American history: the Embargo Act of 1807, promoted by Thomas Jefferson. That embargo was intended to pressure the warring European powers into stopping certain actions that disturbed the United States, such as Britain's impressment of American seamen. All it brought about instead was significant economic damage to U.S. trading interests. One difference between that episode and the present one is that Jefferson was trying to avoid U.S. involvement in a war—although war with Britain came anyway in 1812. The more fervent of the Iran-bashers today do not appear to have a Jeffersonian outlook.

One of the most misleading and distracting formulations that has been applied to the countering of terrorism is the notion that this effort is a “war.” The notion was in full bloom with the Bush administration's “war on terror.” Terrorism being a tactic, this concept, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once observed, makes as much sense as a “war on blitzkrieg.” The “war” idea also ignores several other realities: that military force is only one of several tools that can be used for counterterrorist purposes (law enforcement resources and the criminal justice system being a couple of the others); that counterterrorism does not entail a struggle against a single identifiable foe, as a real war does; and that counterterrorism does not have identifiable beginnings and endings, as real wars do.

Applying the “war” notion to counterterrorism has several negative consequences. It overly militarizes counterterrorism itself, encouraging excessive reliance on the military instrument. It invites the tendentious association of counterterrorism with unrelated military adventures or misadventures, as happened with the Bush administration's Iraq War. It further invites the open-ended use of extraordinary and even extra-legal methods, as occurred with the Bush administration's practices on detention and interception of communications. It elevates terrorists from the status of criminals to that of warriors.

The Obama administration sensibly discarded the term “war on terror,” but the “war” view of counteterrorism lives on and continues to have negative consequences. The most recent, and in a sense the most extreme, application of this view is found in efforts by Republican members of Congress to bar the use of civilian prisons and courts to handle terrorist suspects. These efforts do not involve the expansion of any counterterrorist tools or resources. Instead, they involve a prohibition on the use of certain tools and resources—ones that have been used effectively for years to handle many terrorist cases. How could such a prohibition be expected to improve counterterrorism?

Of course, it won't improve it. Instead, it would be a new impediment to counterterrorist investigations. If enacted, it would lead to awkward and ineffective procedures such as the FBI having to interrupt an investigation that had just gotten under way in order to turn a suspect over to military custody.

Earlier incarnations of the “war” notion were an indirect, lexicographical way of arguing for greater use of military force. Propelling the latest moves is some combination of two other drivers. One is sheer ideological momentum, driven in turn by the habit of referring for years to a “war on terror.” The other, far more calculated, motivation is to come up with something that can be used to portray Barack Obama as being soft on national security. The Republicans will have a hard time doing that, amid counterterrorist successes such as the killings of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki and Obama's striving to sound tough on Iran. The “war” concept of counterterrorism gives them something to grasp at and to put into play in the election campaign.

And so yet another important function of government, like many others, has been turned into either an ideological gesture or a campaign talking point.

Image: German Federal Archives

Some of the recent bloody unpleasantness in Libya reminds us that the world does not divide as neatly into white hats and black hats, good guys and bad guys, as we would like it to. We would like it to divide that way because it would be easier to deal with, conceptually and psychologically, if it did. Policy makers would like the world to divide that way—or at least often talk publicly as if it did—because that makes policies easier to sell. So both the menace from adversaries and the goodness of clients or allies tend to get oversold. And what is not good about clients or allies tends to go unmentioned.

The real world's messier and more complicated lines between good and evil, and between who should be supported and who should be loathed, inevitably and inconveniently appear. They are doing so today in Libya in a way that adds extra irony to how the NATO intervention there was sold. The undeniable negative qualities of Muammar Qaddafi, a dictator easy to loathe, were not enough. Added to the pitch for intervention was the prediction of atrocities by the regime if it were left in place. We don't know if the predictions would have come true—there was little or no basis for the more sweeping prognostications of city-wide bloodbaths—but since the beginning of the Libyan civil war opponents of Qaddafi have accumulated a record of violent violations of human rights that should be every bit as disturbing as actions of the former regime. Significant attention has been focused on how Qaddafi died amid the fury and confusion of the dictator's final minutes. Worthy of at least as much attention is what appears to be systematic slaughter of others associated with the old regime, followed by a lack of any apparent effort to investigate what happened.

Specific incidents of such violence, fully worthy of the label atrocity, could not have been predicted, but something along similar lines could have been expected. As Donald Rumsfeld once observed, stuff happens. As Rumsfeld and his colleagues failed to do in an earlier intervention, one should anticipate the stuff. But discussion of atrocities before the intervention in Libya was all focused on what the Qaddafi regime might do, not on what would happen when it was falling or after it fell.

The intervention is now water over the dam. There is little the United States or NATO can do, or should try to do, to directly and physically affect what will continue to be a messy and often violent course of events in Libya. The biggest lesson to draw from the experience is to do a better job of anticipating the nasty stuff, and drawing the appropriate policy conclusions, the next time an intervention in someone else's civil war is being considered.

Meanwhile, we should not try to frame what is going on now in Libya in terms of oversimplified divisions between good people and bad people, and between who deserves support and who deserves condemnation. Actions, not people, should be individually judged. The transitional government will need support, mostly in the form of advice in constructing a civil and political order, if Libya is to avoid unending, bloody disorder. But it also needs to be called to account when it does not do as much as it can to stop atrocities occurring under its nose.

Image by ليبي صح

Imagine if, as public and Congressional discussion about the prospect of going to war against Iraq reached a peak in the autumn of 2002, it somehow could have been foreseen that nine years later there would still be debate about U.S. troops in Iraq, and about whether to keep them there even longer than nine years. The prospect of U.S. involvement in a war in the Middle East dragging out that long would have killed the possibility of neocons being able to conduct their great experiment in trying to inject democracy through the barrel of a gun—notwithstanding even the post-9/11 militant mood of the American public that, in the real world of 2001-2003, made it politically possible for the neocons to launch their experiment. The war would never have happened. Recreating our own thoughts from a decade ago, free of the political and emotional baggage accumulated during the course of this long expedition, provides necessary perspective in assessing what is being said today about keeping U.S. troops in Iraq or finally bringing them home.

With President Obama's announcement Friday about Iraq, we can look forward to an extra reason to celebrate during the year-end holidays. This long national nightmare will finally be ending. The return of the last combat troops from Iraq will be a good time to reflect on the nature and broader consequences of what future historians will regard as one of the biggest blunders in U.S. history. That reflection can consider how a small number of determined advocates of war were able to use the post-9/11 political milieu and scary themes about dictators giving weapons to terrorists to get enough people to go along with their idea. The reflection also can consider the full range of costs and damage to U.S. interests, from the more than four thousand Americans dead and tens of thousands wounded, to the trillions of dollars of direct and indirect fiscal and economic losses, to the tarring of America's standing abroad and the boost the war gave to America's extremist enemies.

For now, however, there is the immediate subject of bringing home those remaining troops. In response to any doubt that this is the right thing to do, the main question to ask is: if not after almost nine years, then when? Given that the troops' return merely fulfills an agreement that the previous U.S. administration reached with Iraq, one could also ask: if not George W. Bush, then who? Yet another question is: if the purpose of being in Iraq is supposedly to help another nation in need, why would we want to stay if the other country doesn't want us? Iraqi preferences have varied, of course, but being unwelcome is a very large part of what the misery of this war has been about, including the stimulation of armed resistance to what was seen as a foreign occupation. Discussions in recent months about possibly extending the U.S. military presence beyond this year took the odd form of the United States doing most of the asking and Iraq doing most of the resisting.

This is hardly the first war that exhibits the common tendency to think that just a little more persistence will make the difference between a win and a loss. But this tendency is no more logical than a gambler on a losing streak doubling down on his bets. There is no reason to believe that the next year or two of war will be more productive than the previous year or two or three. As with other lights that have been seen at the end of other tunnels, this kind of incremental thinking is a prescription for winding up with far greater costs than would justify even something that could be described as a win. We are dealing in the realm not of logic but of psychology, especially with the common but mistaken human inclination to treat sunk costs as investments.

The president's announcement will set off a new round of recriminations and debating points. Opponents of the president and proponents of the war will stake out positions to enable them to say, in response to anything nasty that happens henceforth in Iraq, that the problem was we withdrew too soon. Republican presidential candidates are of course among the first out of the blocks in doing this. Mitt Romney fired off a strongly worded statement that referred to the president's “astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq.” (What transition are you referring to, governor? From Maliki to someone else? How long will that take? And what could U.S. troops do about it?) Michele Bachmann said, “In every case where the United States has liberated a people from dictatorial rule, we have kept troops in that country to ensure a peaceful transition and to protect fragile growing democracies.” (Kept them there how long? And which countries are you referring to, Ms. Bachmann? Will we be stationing troops in Libya?)

Then there are the intellectuals who have had the biggest professional and psychological investments in the Iraq War. Only some of them have acknowledged the war was a mistake. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance to relieve. We already saw the relief process begin several years ago, when the war first went unambiguously sour and the scapegoating began. Some of those outside government who had been the most fervent proponents of the war also became the harshest critics of how the war was conducted, with the Bush administration as a whole and Donald Rumsfeld in particular being scapegoats. The message was that the war wasn't a bad idea; it was just executed poorly. Now there will be the added message that the war was still supposedly a good idea, but it just wasn't waged long enough. Frederick Kagan has fired an early shot along this line under the heading of “Obama abandons Iraq.” The most noteworthy thing about Kagan's shot is that it is centered around the notion that withdrawing U.S. troops will undermine containment of Iran—noteworthy because the Iraq War itself has provided the single biggest boost to Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf region.

President Obama inherited multiple messes, at home and abroad, from his predecessor. Some of those messes, especially the lingering effects of the Great Recession, are proving hard to clean up. But congratulations, Mr. President, for bringing to a conclusion the biggest overseas mess you were given.