John Robb, over at his Global Guerrillas blog, says U.S. confrontation with Iran is “now unavoidable.” [link courtesy Rafe Coburn]

According to Robb, it will be an air attack only, given our overcommitment of ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will aim not simply at taking out the nation’s embryonic nuclear capability, but rather at toppling the current Iranian government.

To accomplish this regime change under the given restraints, the US will utilize a rapidly evolving method of air warfare called the “effects-based operations” (EBO). The EBO is a process that incapacitates a nation-state’s systems (typically critical infrastructure) and organizations to achieve desired strategic outcomes.” In the past this has meant a combination of precision-guided munitions, special operations, and stealth technology to precisely target critical nodes in national infrastructures and systems. The destruction of these nodes, due to the power of network dependencies, will typically cause sustained system collapse (in much the same way a downed power line can cause a regional blackout, but in this case intentionally). A good real world example can be seen in the first Gulf War. During that war, a US EBO shut down Iraq’s critical infrastructures to separate Saddam’s leadership cadre in its Baghdad bunkers from its army in Kuwait. It worked nearly as desired. With Iran, the effect desired would be much more complex: regime change.

Robb says he thinks the operation will succeed, in the short term:

Iran will be torn apart from within. To accomplish this, the US will conduct the EBO under the pretense of forcing Iran to dismantle its entire nuclear program — a condition that the Iranian regime will find impossible to accept. Simultaneous with the air campaign’s suppression of Iran’s minority Persian government, the US will arm and actively support ethnic guerrillas (Kurds, Balochs, Azeris, etc.) to turn sections of the country into autonomous zones. Without the ability to utilize any of the capabilities of conventional warfare (from airpower to armor to massed formations), let alone command forces in the field or marshal a nation for war, the Iranian government would eventually collapse and its successor will accede to the growing set of US demands.

But the whole thing is “rife with downside risks and uncertainties”:

…rocketing oil prices, global terrorist attacks, and severe diplomatic fall-out. Further, Iran’s government may prove to be more resourceful than anticipated and outlast the attack, only to resume production of nuclear materials with the intent of revenge. Worse yet, the US might inadvertently collapse the US-led post cold war environment as countries, distrustful of US intentions, scramble to safety amid rapidly gyrating economic and social instability.

I’d thought that the collapse of our effort in Iraq, the continued failure to capture Bin Laden, and the growing peril to our achievements in Afghanistan might have left the Bush team feeling a little overextended on the military side. If Robb is right, we’re in for an extremely rough ride from a president who has always rebounded from popular-approval lows by fanning war fever.

When I wrote yesterday about the power of public dissent by military leaders, I hadn’t read the Time piece by Lieut. Gen. Greg Newbold (Ret.). Newbold, a Marine who was the Pentagon’s chief operations officer, “voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war,” but had not gone public till now. The article is a doozy. Here’s some key excerpts.

After Vietnam, “Never again, we thought, would our military’s senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It’s 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent statement that “we” made the “right strategic decisions” but made thousands of “tactical errors” is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it. What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions–or bury the results.

It is almost a clockwork kind of thing now: Last week saw one political disaster after another for President Bush and the Republicans. So of course we wake up Monday morning to find the new agenda of the week — another war.

There is no scarier read today than Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece detailing Bush administration planning for a war on Iran. If you’re saying to yourself, “What? How could that be? Aren’t we still busy trying to disengage ourselves from this gang’s last war?” then you are hopelessly mired in a reality-based perspective.

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Hersh’s sources in Congress and the Pentagon say: (1) That the Bush administration is far advanced in planning for war with Iran as an active policy option; (2) such a war would begin with a campaign of air strikes and covert operations; (3) U.S. leaders are seriously considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons; (4) the U.S. goal is “regime change.”

Over at the Washington Post they’re a little less convinced than Hersh that the war plans represent a significant likelihood of an attack, and a little more inclined to think that the plans (and the talk about the plans) is intended as a gambit to scare Iran.

Meanwhile, the White House calls the talk “wild speculation” — a phrase that will ring a bell for those with memories longer than, say, a few months, since the same term was used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Josh Marshall makes the obvious but necessary case that Bush’s credibility is utterly, irremediably shot on this matter.

One of Hersh’s sources says, “The President believes that he must do ‘what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,’ and ‘that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.’ ”

No. Whatever happens with Iran, we already know Bush’s legacy. It is a legacy of reduced options and no-win situations. Given how much more likely an Iranian nuclear weapons program is than Saddam’s turned out to be, the administration’s legacy lies in the self-destruction of American credibility, the hobbling of the U.S. military in an unnecessary quagmire, and the loss of any short-term hope of persuading the world’s billion Muslims that the U.S. is not their enemy.

We now know that, at the same time the Bush administration was telling the world that talk of an Iraq attack was “wild speculation,” the plans were already in motion, the policy approved, the diplomatic effort a sham. The people who led the administration then are the people who are leading it now. (The only significant figure to have left the scene, Colin Powell, is the only senior administration figure who even put up token resistance to the Iraq scheme.)

So when we hear this new talk of war, the most foolish thing we can do is to close our eyes and say, “No, even George Bush isn’t that crazy.” As Paul Krugman says, the “But he wouldn’t do that” line of argument no longer holds. Bush has got that glint in his eyes again: He’s going to save the world. Look out.

This time around, there are just a few thin reeds of hope: We can at least cross our fingers that the reality of the failed war in Iraq will help the “won’t get fooled again” factor finally kick in with the American electorate. The Republican machine is in disarray, and the drums of war are beginning to sound pretty ragged.

Perhaps even more important, surely at this point the uniformed leaders of the U.S. military are surveying the shambles of their forces that Rumsfeld and company have made in the wake of Iraq, and they’re saying, “Never again.” I wouldn’t foresee, and certainly wouldn’t advocate, a “Seven Days in May” scenario of insubordination or coup. But honorable people in the military have other options. The public resignation is a powerful act.

It is virtually impossible to imagine a happy outcome from any conceivable scenario following from an American attack on Iran. The only silver lining in sight is visible from Bush’s vantage: a new war would wipe the front pages clean of all those headlines about corruption and incompetence, all the deficit figures and low poll numbers.

Bonus link: Jim Fallows in the Atlantic explains why, however dangerous the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran might be, the preemptive assault is the worst option possible for the U.S.

I’m not sure anyone is ready for another John Kerry presidential campaign. Apparently the senator is pondering one, but he had a clean shot two years ago, and we’re still paying the price for his inability to exploit it.

Still, Kerry apparently has a new, terse and catchy ten-point plan, and before you snicker, hear him out (from today’s Times):

“Tell the truth. Fire the incompetents. Find Osama bin Laden and secure our ports and our homeland. Bring our troops home from Iraq. Obey the law and protect our civil rights,” Mr. Kerry said in ticking off his list, which also included supporting health care, education, lobbying reform and alternatives to oil, as well as reducing the deficit.

Sounds like a plan to me. I wish the 10 points were out there on Kerry’s web site, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.

If the Democrats are rooting around for a 2006 equivalent to the Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America,” they could adopt these points, which have the virtues of directness and good sense — and which neatly underscore the Bush administration’s abject failures to be honest, competent, to defeat our enemies, to bring an ill-considered war to an end, and on down the list. It’s good rhetoric, and that’s something Democrats could use.

A brief moment of silence, please, for the political career of Tom DeLay. The Hammer has fallen. He’s leaving Congress and abandoning his re-election bid. Time has the story.

DeLay makes the usual noises about how he’s doing it for the good of his party. Time says: “He decided last Wednesday, after months of prayer and contemplation, to spare his suburban Houston district the mudfest to come.”

Oh, come on. Tom DeLay has never been one to shun a mudfest. He lives for the mudfest. Le mudfest, c’est DeLay.

We’re not supposed to pay any attention to those investigations behind the curtains — the ones connected with Jack Abramoff, in which two of DeLay’s key aides have already pleaded guilty to corruption charges. No, they don’t have anything to do with this move. “It had nothing to do with any criminal investigation,” DeLay’s lawyer told the Times.

Right. Sure. If you believe that, you perhaps also believe that the mid-decade Texas redistricting plan DeLay rammed through was intended to make sure every Texan’s vote counted — rather than to grab a half-dozen seats for the Republican party. If you believe that, maybe you believe that DeLay — the man who singlemindedly transformed the last president’s tawdry lies about adultery into an impeachment war — is an easygoing innocent.

No, I think it will become obvious soon enough that this is the act of a cornered man. As Josh Marshall writes: “DeLay’s lawyers must have sat him down over the last 72 hours and explained to him that he needs to focus on not spending most of the rest of his life in prison.”

The Time piece, which gives DeLay plenty of space to defend himself, deny wrongdoing, and talk of his profound love for God and golf, says the former House majority leader will rededicate himself to his conservative causes: “He said he feels ‘liberated’ and vowed to pursue an aggressive speaking and organizing campaign aimed at promoting foster care, Republican candidates and a closer connection between religion and government.”

Well, we’ll see how many Republican candidates want to share a podium with him. The GOP leadership may feel glad to have one fewer albatross around the party’s neck. But something tells me this isn’t the last DeLay headline we’ll see in the months between now and the fall elections. It may not be so easy to forget the Hammer amid the sound of falling gavels.

DeLay specialized in party discipline, the harvesting of lobbyist money, and creative innovation in the realm of political-machine funding. As I wrote a month ago, DeLay is no garden-variety bribe-taker (like that clown Duke Cunningham); he is clearly a new wave, Enron-style crook — the Andy Fastow of the Republican Party. The K Street Project he spearheaded set out to make sure that lobbyists, formerly understood to have a need for bipartisanship, directed their largesse strictly in the GOP direction. And his dream, seemingly delivered on by the grotesque Texas gerrymander, was to use the money and power he accumulated to cement a permanent Republican majority.

The only fitting epitaph for his political career will be for the American electorate to deliver a landslide rejection of that vision in November. But even if that doesn’t happen, even if we’re still stuck with a Republican House and Senate, at least Tom DeLay won’t be hanging around the Capitol to sanctimoniously gloat.

Award for most depressing read in the Sunday paper today goes to Jeffrey Gettleman’s piece from Baghdad, in which the New York Times correspondent, returning to Iraq after a year away, describes the new state of affairs there.

It’s true that American soldiers are still dying, but the focus of the bloodshed has changed… By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad’s streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes… This new wave of executions was different. It was more sadistic and less selective. These people weren’t rounded up because they were important. They were tortured and killed simply because of their religion. And because most of them were Sunni Muslim Arabs, there was no response from the Shiite-led government.

This is the situation that our government is unwilling, for profoundly self-interested reasons, to label “civil war.” It is the worst-case outcome for the American misadventure in Iraq, and we are rapidly sinking toward it.

Gettleman writes: “I recently met a Sunni man who used to be virulently anti-American. He showed me postmortem pictures of his younger brother, who had been kidnapped by death squads and had holes drilled in his face. ‘Even the Americans wouldn’t do this,’ he said.”

Holes drilled in his face.

In the early months of the Iraq occupation, the insurgency was using car-bombs to blow up U.S. soldiers; every now and then, there’d be a beheading. American true believers in the war, stranded by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, would point with anger to this barbaric behavior. “These are the kind of beasts we’re fighting,” they’d cry, and, stoking their anger with outrage at such cruelties, they would find new resolve to pay the war’s escalating costs in dollars and blood.

So what are we to make of people who drill holes in victims’ faces? What new awful depths are trap-dooring open below us? How about this: These new sadists aren’t even on the same team as the others we’ve been fighting. The car-bombing insurgency, the “Al Qaeda in Iraq” beheaders led by Zarqawi, are Sunnis; the new Baghdad slaughterers are radical Shiites. They’re fighting each other, the American-backed Iraqi “unity” government can’t or won’t stop the miserable carnage, and U.S. forces are either unwilling or unable to step in. (Here’s Gettleman’s dispatch for the Monday paper: “American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents who for nearly the past three years have been branded the gravest security threat.”)

The Samarra attack last month now appears to be the match that lit this civil conflagration. Gettleman, again:

Not enough can be said about the attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra last month. That explosion opened a cycle of revenge that seems to have split modern Iraqi history. There is before Samarra and after. Before Samarra, many Iraqis tried to play down Sunni-Shiite tensions. Since Samarra, they live in mortal fear of them.

Perhaps it’s time for the American leadership to stop the game of delusional behavior, admit that Iraq is now in the early stages of a civil war, and begin figuring out how to get our forces home before the Sunni-Shiite crossfire decimates them. Or are we going to keep spending $100 billion a year to garrison Iraq with an army that can’t even stop people from drilling holes in faces?

In this week marking the third anniversary of the start of George Bush’s deceptively justified and incompetently waged war in Iraq, many pundits, commentators and bloggers are looking back. The Web lets us see who said what, when pretty easily. (See, for instance, Daniel Radosh’s devastating review of the remarkable waffling of David Brooks.)

I checked my own archives and found these two posts, which remain, I think, accurate, defensible and consistent with everything that’s happened since. I don’t claim any great clairvoyance; the insight I provided mostly came from a Thomas Powers radio interview. I’d certainly be happier for the U.S., Iraq and the world if my gloom had proven unwarranted.

But it was the president’s job to look ahead and plan for different outcomes. His failures will haunt us and our children in the form of generations-spanning unpaid bills; the physical and psychic scars to hosts of returning American warfighters; festering anger towards the U.S. among throngs of the people we bunglingly liberated; the bright new anti-American banner we have handed our enemies in the war on the 9/11 perpetrators; and of course the graves of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis. Even the best-case outcomes from here on in Iraq, unlikely as they are, cannot undo this volume of damage.

I also found this post, a week later:

Before the war started, if one suggested that the US might be underestimating the problems of an invasion of Iraq, it was considered “helping Saddam”; now that the war is on, discussing those problems as they unfold is considered “helping Saddam.” Apparently there is no appropriate time to challenge what may well prove a misguided policy.

I note that this attitude — with a slight shift in wording from “helping Saddam” to “helping the insurgents” or “helping the terrorists” — has continued in the three years since, during which anyone who has chosen to offer a sober perspective on the horrors and disasters of a misbegotten war has been accused by the administration and its henchpeople of betraying the troops and comforting the enemy.

It’s that deep engagement with reality — that willingness to confront the world as we find it, not as we wish it — that has provided us with so much success in post-Saddam Iraq. </sarcasm>