Ben Buckman.net

I'm mostly disconnected from the daily news these days, the political blogosphere in particular, but I've been listening to a lot of On Point Radio and other NPR programs and caught the episode with Jeffrey Goldberg about his recent Atlantic piece on Israel's plans to bomb Iran.

One element of the story that I find so interesting, which they didn't really talk about at all, is how it hasn't changed in years. The administration and pundits were having the same conversation when President Bush was in office. There were neocons who wanted to bomb Iran in 2006 just as there are today. I wrote a column about Iran in March 2006 that reflects a debate (and apparent facts) little changed today. The choices and tradeoffs are almost exactly the same (the one exception I can think of being the vulnerability of US combat troops in Iraq).

The National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 claimed that Iran had stopped or stalled its nuclear weapons program. Neocons (and the Israeli right) criticized the report for being conveniently "political". It seems pretty clear now, unless everything is still all wrong, that the NIE was in fact correct.

So apparently they're back on track now. And now, according to Goldberg, there's a one year horizon to figure it out. July 2011 is the magic moment of decision. (Don't make any international travel plans for August 2011...) Let's assume for the moment - still, a worst-case scenario - that this time it's for real. War against Iran certainly wasn't an urgent national security priority in 2006 or 2007. Thinking about Iran's nuclear program and trying to stop it were important, but none of that required the kind of large-scale military strikes talked about then. And by extension, talking about those kinds of strikes as if they were urgent in 2007 was absurd in retrospect.

The lesson I take from this is to always question the urgency of alleged crises. Iraq, we have known for years, wasn't an urgent national security threat in 2003 when we invaded. Iran may or may not be an urgent crisis a year from now, but before then it's a diplomatic issue to be thought about and resolved rationally. Urgency just breeds fear (which is why, rightly or not, Goldberg is getting so much heat for the story). Fear short-circuits intelligent policy debate. Always good to keep in mind.