11-02-06, 8:36 am
If, however, you have a highly polarized atmosphere and a community with a strong stake in believing something, no matter the facts, then repeated incorrect predictions, far from discrediting you with that community, can even make you an expert.
Such was the case with Thomas Friedman, prowar liberals, and Iraq. As FAIR documented quite nicely, he has assembled a huge store of predictions that “the next six months” in Iraq will be “critical.” Of course, they never have been. Even so, Friedman remained the perfect liberals’ “expert” on Iraq and the Middle East – no matter that he knew very little about Iraq and didn’t understand those things he did know.
Such is the case with the antiwar movement and Iran. Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter have distinguished themselves by repeatedly pointing to the imminence of war with Iran. In Hersh’s case, he has simply been acting in his own well-established journalistic modality – passing along things he gleans from a large group of dissidents inside the military and intelligence establishments. When this involves hard evidence like the My Lai massacre, Barry McCaffrey’s order to shoot some Iraqi prisoners of war after the Gulf War, or the Abu Ghraib atrocities, his reporting is unique and invaluable. When it involves passing along the complaints and speculations of his sources, it is less so – his sources are not always the most astute of political analysts.
Ritter has not only frequently cried wolf about Iran, he predicted that war would happen in June 2005. When June cam around, he followed that up with an article saying that it was in fact happening.
Now that they have established their expertise on Iran, of course, future pronouncements about war with Iran coming from them must be taken very seriously. Iran is already by far the most written-about war that never happened.
Recent developments have once again ramped up concern about war. The near-confluence of midterm elections and joint naval exercises near Iran under the umbrella of President Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative, in which a U.S.-led multinational force will war-game stopping ships carrying nuclear materials, has triggered a slew of apocalyptic predictions.
Paul Craig Roberts, a maverick Reagan-era government official who is regularly published in Counterpunch, says the Bush administration will use nuclear weapons on Iran; Chris Hedges, a usually very insightful and nuanced journalist, wrote a rather hysterical article along the same lines; and even United for Peace and Justice, quoting those two, put out an action alert suggesting that there’s a good chance of imminent war.
The Iranian government, on the other hand, had a pretty sensible response, decrying the maneuvers as adventurist but also playing them down and pointing out that similar maneuvers have been held many times in the past.
The last time this cycle played itself out, I broke my own rule on predictions: In February, I went out on a limb and said that war with Iran was very unlikely in the near future.
Most of the arguments I made then carry over to the current situation without change. A new piece of evidence regarding this comes from a special meeting Bush had with conservative columnists. Although the critical passages are off the record and redacted from the released text, when they come back on the record, a columnist asks, “Are you saying that a military attack is not feasible?” Of course, Bush returns to the standard line that no options are off the table, but the upshot is that Bush obviously said something to disappoint his few remaining hawkish fans.
By itself, this would mean little. It’s only when you add it to the well-established analysis of the idiocy of military strikes on Iran, the near impossibility of regime change, and the potential to totally destroy the already precarious U.S. position in Iraq that this particular datum becomes significant.
Anyway, I’ll break my own rule again – don’t expect war with Iran in the near future.
From Empire Notes
--Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes and author of two books: 'The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism' (April 2002, Monthly Review Press) and 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond' (June 2003, Seven Stories Press).
