Office of the Independent Blogger

Little known to much of the public, the Cuban Missile Crisis posed a threat to America from within. President Kennedy’s military advisors were hellbent on invading, or bombing, Cuba, believing that the only reasonable course of action. That is the inevitable result of having Curtis Lemay serving as a Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it was an awful result, and the tensions inside of the White House became so heavy that Robert Kennedy told his brother that it would be better to just fire the Joint Chiefs mid-crisis. John responded that they couldn’t do that — “It’d look like there’d been a coup attempt,” and in a way, there had been.

Almost half a century later, and the United States is in another nuclear confrontation. Smaller in scope, sure, and nobody believes that the Iranians have weapons aimed at us now, but the situation is still critical, and requires sensitive diplomacy. No, I’m not arguing that we hold hands and take the Ayatollah to supper at Disneyworld (sorry Mr. Cheney, sensitive has a lot of meanings). The similarities between this situation and the Missile Crisis aren’t just parellel in terms of danger: they’re perpendicular. Instead of it being the military this time hell-bent on assault and refusing to be sensible, it’s the White House.

In President Bush’s June speech, he accused Iran of pursuing a secret weapons program along with its civilian nuclear-research program (which it is allowed, with limits, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). The senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the President’s contention that Iran intends to eventually build a bomb, but they are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former senior intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking, “What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys”—the Iranians—“have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We’re coming up with jack shit.”

A senior military official told me, “Even if we knew where the Iranian enriched uranium was—and we don’t—we don’t know where world opinion would stand. The issue is whether it’s a clear and present danger. If you’re a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is the capability of the Iranian response, and the likelihood of a punitive response—like cutting off oil shipments? What would that cost us?” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides “really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary,” he said.

Does that sound familiar, by any chance?

There are two historical lessons that we should draw upon with regard to Iran. The first comes from the Second World War: when your enemy is clearly, and undeniably, hellbent on war and hot on the heels of aggression, you don’t appease them. When that time where a nation is no longer showboating has come, you will know it, recognize it, and prepare for action. Until then, diplomacy should reign. Iran is not Hitler — not yet, and maybe not ever — so we shouldn’t be afraid to negotiate. The second lesson we should take comes from the Cuban Missile Crisis: frustrating though negotiations may be, nobody wants to evaporate. Talk accordingly.

Iran will bend if pressured far enough, I think, and engaged well-enough. If not, then we have a variety of deterrents with which to contain the regime. Military action shouldn’t even be something on the table right now, if ever. I’m just surprised that General Peter Pace is making that case to President Lemay. This is a backward White House in every which way.

For years I’ve talked Al Gore up as the best candidate for President in 2008. Whether or not he runs is entirely up to him, and either way, I’ll be happy for him. If he feels himself better able to change the world from the outside, I’ll think him naive but respect him all the same. (Isn’t it more a sign of my own innocence that I think you can make more changes from the inside than from the out? I think political “maturization” goes like this: innocence, and change from the inside; cynicism, change from without; resignation, and change from within. I am presently at the innocent level, although I think, and hope, that I’ll always think that the greatest changes can be made from within as long as you have a little help from the outside.)

Rolling Stone is an awkward forum for an Al Gore profile, considering that his wife waged a war against music in the 1980s that many musicians considered “censorship,” but despite this — perhaps to spite the President, who they have criticized in articles as the worst President? — they’re running a short profile of Al Gore.

Gore is in the middle of an exhaustive campaign to promote An Inconvenient Truth, a surprise hit that transposes to film a lecture about global warming that he has given more than a thousand times in the past six years. (An accompanying book of the same title is climbing the best-seller lists.) But while Gore’s message may be grim — in a nutshell, a warming climate threatens civilization, and if the human race wants to survive, we’ve got about ten years to start turning things around — Gore himself seems funnier, warmer and more relaxed than he ever did during his political years. You used to think: I wouldn’t mind taking a class from this guy. Nowadays, you wouldn’t mind having a beer with him. His recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, when he addressed the nation as president and boasted that gas prices were so low that the government had to bail out the big oil companies, was the single funniest moment on the show all season.

Gore’s renewed visibility has only fueled speculation that this is all part of a carefully orchestrated plan to launch his third bid for the presidency. Although Gore refuses to rule it out, he suggests that he’s having too much fun, and is too engaged in his various business interests, to subject himself to the endless slog of political life. It’s not unreasonable to hope that Gore runs, but the dream of a Gore candidacy also underscores the pathetic core of today’s Democratic Party: It has become so unusual to hear a mainstream Democratic politician speak from a sense of conviction that when one does, people practically start begging him to run.

Al Gore is my generation’s Bobby Kennedy but substantially greater and, if I do say so myself, exponentially more truthful and sincere.

In al-Qaeda news, bin Laden is out of his cage again, this time praising al-Zarqawi for having died a “lion of Islam” and promising to take the battle to the infidels. When you look at the message, however, it gives you a sense of optimism, or it does me. You see, Osama has been reduced to releasing tape after tape but saying nothing new at all, and adding nothing to our political system, nor has he attacked our country. bin Laden is in bad shape, and so is al-Qaeda. If our handling of the War in Iraq has been an embarrassment of epic proportions from the Pentagon’s point, we have surely beaten al-Qaeda brutally.

For some reason, I failed to mention this article here before, and I’m sorry I did, but in the War On Terror, we’ve driven bin Laden to beg for mud huts.

bin Laden’s latest appeals have a very changed character. His messages used to be lyrical, sharp and highly intelligent. They operated at a high plane, rarely revealing anything about Al Qaeda’s operations. In fact, intelligence agencies looked for small signs—an offhand reference, an item of apparel—to reveal where Al Qaeda would strike next. Bin Laden’s most recent appeal is a mishmash of argument and detail, and seems slightly crazed. He has broadened his verbal attacks against the “Zionist-Crusaders” to include the United Nations and China. The latter he condemns because it “represents the Buddhists and Pagans of the world.”

Like Hitler crazily declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, bin Laden is adding to his slew of formidable enemies: China was the only major world power that was unconcerned about him. (And his reference to the United Nations as a “Zionist-Crusader tool” would surely surprise most Israelis.) Bin Laden also makes some plaintive appeals to Muslims to rise up and attack the “crusaders” in the west of Sudan. This shows desperation because there are no “crusaders” in Sudan. The troops there are African Union peacekeepers. But more interestingly, the victims in Darfur are Muslim. Bin Laden’s real objective appears to be to support the government in Sudan—which once housed him—as it brutally exterminates tribes that oppose it. What does this have to do with Islam? Most revealingly, bin Laden makes a parochial appeal for foreign aid, to help those Qaeda supporters in Waziristan who have been rendered homeless by Pakistani Army attacks. That suggests he and his friends are having a rough time. Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden’s audiotape is the sign of a seriously weakened man. [snip…]The West, and the United States in particular, has a long history of seeing the enemy as 10 feet tall—think of Soviet Russia and Saddam Hussein. But as we paint Al Qaeda in those lofty terms, let’s please remember last week, when Osama bin Laden appealed on a crackling audiotape for a little money to build a few huts in Waziristan.

I think that that message holds as true today as it did when first published a couple of months ago, and I’m happy to see the state of al-Qaeda today. If only we were as skilled at battling an insurgency as we are disrupting a terrorist group, but our President doesn’t do diplomacy.