Less than thirty days before the Iowa Caucus, it appears that we are finally achieving some sort of clarity in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The contours of a real three-candidate contest are finally begining to emerge, with Newt Gingrich as the conservative insurgent, Mitt Romney as the Wall Street Establishment candidate, and Ron Paul in his now-familiar role as libertarian gadfly. From where I sit, Ron Paul can’t win the nomination and Mitt Romney can’t beat Barack Obama, but Gingrich could do both; and that should give pause to anyone who cares about avoiding what could be an unimaginable conflagration in the Middle East sometime in mid to late 2013.
Just today, Gingrich pledged to nominate former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to the post of Secretary of State if he becomes President. Bolton has long been one of the chief advocates for global, unilateral, and pre-emptive US military intervention and occupation. He was of course a cheerleader for the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and has opposed American withdrawal from those countries. He celebrated the Israeli siege of Gaza and has long advocated launching a pre-emptive war against Iran. Most recently, Bolton has suggested that only having President Obama in the White House makes American intervention in Syria unwise. With Obama gone and, say, President Gingrich in office, Bolton’s Syrian assessment would presumably change. One of Bolton’s biggest boosters and confidants in the Neoconservative intelligentsia is Max Boot, who in separate columns this week has demanded two new pre-emptive American wars, one against Syria and another against Iran.
Both Bolton and Boot predictably deploy the Hitler analogy whenever they talk about Iran. Bolton, for instance, has said, “If the choice is them continuing [towards a nuclear bomb] or the use of force, I think you’re at a Hitler marching into the Rhineland point … We’re still in 1936, but not for long.” In an article linked above, Boot writes, “After the failure to stop Hitler and Bin Laden, among others, Westerners were said to have suffered a ‘failure of imagination.’ We are suffering that same failure today as we fail to face up to the growing threat from the Islamic Republic.” Both Bolton and Boot deployed the same analogy nine years ago in the run-up to our unprovoked war against Iraq. Their argument is always based on the supposed irrationality and apocalypticism of their targeted regimes, whether Hussein’s Iraq or Ahmadinejad’s Iran. But those repeated invocations of Hitler and 1936 by Bolton and Boot themselves represent a kind of irrational, apocalyptic thinking. Moreover, their views fit very neatly into the irrational and apocalyptic worldview of that most important element in the Republican Party base: Evangelical Christians. It is that faction that gives the views of Bolton and Boot credence, that endorses their insistence that Israel is the only vital US interest in the Middle East, and that drives otherwise sophisticated and intelligent people to contemplate igniting a conflict the outcome of which we can only imagine.
Of course, the views of Bolton and Boot are, let’s admit, already the views of Newt Gingrich, right down to the Hitler analogy. Gingrich has recently said, “It’s like the 1930s. The Iranian regime is dedicated to creating a second Holocaust, in terms of wanting to annihilate Israel.” And in debate after debate, he has pledged to take unilateral military action against Iran, beginning with a bombing campaign aimed at overturning the regime. So, as the campaign for the Republican nomination clarifies, let’s be clear about one other thing: If Newt Gingrich is elected President, and presuming it hasn’t already happened, the United States will deliberately initiate, without provocation, a pre-emptive war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. And we will reap the whirlwind.
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