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Tomgram: On Bombing Iran and Other Fantasies of American Power

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: The following essay was much influenced by Mark Danner's comments on the "preponderance" of American power in an interview I did with him for this site. His latest book, a tiny but important paperback, The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (introduction by Frank Rich), has just come out. It includes three pieces that appeared at Tomdispatch thanks to the kindness of the editors of the New York Review of Books. It is, in my opinion, a must-buy. Tom]

"This Is Our Destiny"

"We must perhaps reluctantly accept that we have to help this region become a normal region, the way we helped Europe and Asia in another era. Now it's this area from Pakistan to Morocco that we should focus on… The world has gotten smaller and is getting smaller and smaller all the time... Isolationism, fortress America isn't going to deal with these problems of the kind that we're facing. Willy-nilly, this is our destiny, given our preponderance in the world, our role in the world and because of our successes." Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Iraq in an April 24th interview with Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times

"In short, an attack on Iran would be an act of political folly, setting in motion a progressive upheaval in world affairs. With the U.S. increasingly the object of widespread hostility, the era of American preponderance could even come to a premature end." Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Been There, Done That," op-ed, Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2006.

Hmmm… American preponderance. We know that this preponderance dazzled the men who became known as neoconservatives (though only the "neo" part of it seems even faintly accurate as a label) -- and Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to and putative viceroy in Baghdad, was one of them. They wanted to wield that "preponderance" of power preponderantly. They wanted to lower America's terrible, swift sword decisively.

Now, preponderance ("superiority in weight, force, influence, numbers, etc.") is a strange word when you think about it, seeming to have both "ponder" and "ponderous" hidden somewhere within. As it happened, while the neocons proposed much from inside Washington's Beltway, from various right-wing think-tanks and later from the inner offices of the Bush administration, while oil-consultant Khalilzad was still trying to sort out energy pipeline deals with the Taliban, and while various Iraqi exile Scheherezades were whispering sweet nothings in their ears about flowers, and liberated populaces, and the glory that was Rome -- oh, sorry, those were pundits on the editorial pages of our major newspapers -- they surely pondered too little.

They had been so certain of themselves for so long that they, along with administration mentors Don Rumsfeld and the Veep, had no need to think too deeply. After all, why ponder when you already know? Anyway, when it came to knocking off Iraq, if somebody didn't agree with you -- as was true of almost every expert in the State Department and most elsewhere in the government, as well as numerous generals, not to speak of Father Bush's men like family consigliere James Baker and daddy's former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft -- well, you just kicked them out of your gatherings, or left them out in the cold, to preserve the unanimity of consensus thinking. This lent the old adage, "ignorance is bliss," new meaning in the halls of superpower governance.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 11:12 PM