The Coming War with Iran

Whether President Bush gets his 40,000 new troops in Iraq, or as the generals have reportedly told him recently, a paltry 9,000 available from our "overstretched" 1.4 million warriors in uniform, they will, beyond a doubt, be needed.

Someone needs to guard Fort Apache when we send out the cavalry to attack Iran.

The majority of pundits who are examining Bush's idea for a troop surge - with all the zeal of Rubik's Cube fanatics - are rightly baffled by the move. What on earth could a temporary boost in troops do for Iraq? And if it really has a chance to work, why the hell make it temporary?

The problem is that the prognosticators, with few exceptions, are spending all their time with a rigged Cube that Bush and company tossed them. Bush isn't producing an "I Love the '80s" VH-1 special, he's playing football. And Iran is his Hail Mary play.

If Bush were a boxer, he'd be known as "The Telegraph Kid" to anyone who had the vaguest expertise in fisticuffs or the waging of war. In 2002, he sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. and coalition troops to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all the while saying war was still avoidable - if only Iraq would turn over its weapons of mass destruction. However, no president in the 20^th century has ever employed gunboat diplomacy or "poker politics" by sending invasion-level troops next door to a perceived enemy as a "bluff" or "intimidation tactic." To do that, you send carrier groups. You move 5,000 to 10,000 Marines up close and personal on ships. You don't spend all that money on charter airliners and commercial shipping to build up a 300,000-member Bluff Force.

But thanks to the ever-gullible mainstream media pundits in this country, most believed Bush when he assured us that there was still a chance of peace up to the last minute - even up to the days before the invasion when Bush kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq. (See: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/17/iraq/main544280.shtml)

The only military reason for a surge in troops in Iraq is to guard against the inevitable Shia retaliation against American troops when we bomb Iran, and a possible, but foolish, invasion of Iraq by Iran's military, also in retaliation. The USS John C. Stennis carrier strike group will be departing this month from Washington to add a second carrier task force to the Persian Gulf. The administration has characterized the additional ships as a "show of force" to warn Iran.

Warn Iran against what, exactly? Apparently, the administration is confident that Iran will be so intimidated by two carrier groups off of its coast, instead of one group and two standing U.S. armies next door, that they'll stop sending explosives, weapons and Jihadists to Iraq to kill Americans. Yeah, sure. If only the Feds had sent a dozen more agents to Chicago in the '30s - certainly that would have stopped Al Capone from selling bootleg liquor.

Bush's next blunderbuss hit is as easy to predict as the outcome between Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry: Ali will win, and Iran is next (the analogy ends there, and, no, Bush is most definitely not Ali). The president plans to bomb Iran's nuclear-related sites, plus Iran's military command-and-control infrastructure, and he'll do it this spring or early summer. It will be his second history-making, strategic blunder, leading to any number of horrible consequences for the future of the United States and the Middle East.

There's an outside chance that the Democrats could put a stop to the president's plan, once it becomes a fait accompli in the general media. But Bush has his reasons for doing it. They involve Israel, Saudi Arabia and his own legacy. He's also insulated against any domestic threat that the Democrats could mount.

That's all for the next column, though.