A New Asshat Candidate

Well, Steve Hyde was right, it's way too early for me to start closing the list on the "Asshat of the Year" nomination. Not when Elliot Abrams can still shoot for the gold ring, at least... Matt Y notes how Abrams believes that were the US government to start bombing Iran, the Iranian population would greet us as "liberators" and cascade us with flowers.

Given that Elliot Abrams was a high-ranking Bush administration official and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, I think we can conclude that neither substantive policy failure nor a record of illegally lying to congress is going to derail his career. He is all-but-certain to return to office more powerful than ever. Thus, I’m going to hope for the sake of the country that this argument he made during a debate on whether or not we should bomb Iran represents dishonesty rather than stupidity:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – we're talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.

So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why we're doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.

It's not clear to me that the reaction let's go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

Throughout the decades-long history of air power, arguments of this form have been made time and again by people who overestimate its strategic efficacy, and it’s never been true. Nor does it seem at all likely to me that it would be possible for the United States to engage in a thorough demolition of Iranian nuclear facilities without killing some civilians. But even if casualties were limited to Iranian military and intelligence personnel and to scientists and technicians working on the nuclear project, I don’t really see why we’d expect the Iranian population to regard that with equanimity.

Wow. I guess the former Bush administration officials will be supplying us with lots of ridiculous statements such as this. They clearly haven't woken up from their idealistic dream of how everything in Iraq and Afghanistan went so well. But then again, it's not clear that the Democrats are any brighter about options to deal with Iran.