What is Bush and Cheney's Game vis-à-vis Iran?

In a January 2005 article in the New Yorker based on unnamed sources inside the Bush administration, Seymour Hersh argued that an ideologically rigid, militaristic, messianic, neocon clique—which included Bush and Cheney—was serious about using military force against Iran over the issue of its nuclear program. When reporters asked President Bush about such claims, his refrain was deliberately ambiguous: “This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.” My thought at the time was that for the most part the press had avoided serious attempts to explain the causes of Bush’s repeated “mixed signals.”

I believed Bush was deploying a radical coercive strategy that Nixon had earlier dubbed "the madman theory." At its core, this strategy consisted in the making of threats of excessive force by a leader who projected an image of being irrational, unpredictable, or uncontrollably angry. A leader who chose this strategy did not actually have to be certifiably crazy—reckless and ruthless perhaps, but not really mad. He (or she) simply needed to convince an adversary that he was crazy enough to carry out his threats. As game theorists like Thomas C. Schelling would put it: if the strategy worked and its practitioner won the game's payoffs, the strategy could be considered "rational" in geopolitical terms.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger had invented this strategy. Hitler—who was probably certifiably mad—had practiced it. Nuclear war theorists had discussed it during the fifties and sixties. The madman theory was and is an inherent element of terror tactics, of "atomic diplomacy," and of nuclear deterrent strategy. The nuclear "brinkmanship" of Eisenhower and Dulles was but another word for the ploy. Indeed, the strategy is as old as human history and is recorded in the clay-tablet records of the ancient Hittite empire. It has often worked; it has often failed. It failed for Nixon and Kissinger in the Vietnam War.

The strategy has several flaws. An adversary may be so desperate or so committed to a cause that he is unwilling or cannot afford to give in. Or a reckless adversary may play the game as well or better than an American leader. If an adversary recognizes the game and calls the bluff, it presents the bluffer with the dilemma of following through or backing off. The latter choice presents a great power like the United States and its leaders with the potential loss of credibility, and so the momentum of the confrontation escalates.

In January 2006, almost a year after I had proposed this thesis about Bush's motives, and as Bush and company continued to send threatening signals toward Iran (and North Korea), I had grown increasingly concerned about the direction of their policy:

Their doctrinal rigidity in favor of military force and against diplomacy . . . has put them and us in a situation in which the "game" may have taken control . . . They have, in other words, painted themselves and us into a corner. And knowing what vaulting hubris the Bush war party possesses, it would take more wisdom, honesty, and humility than they have to change course. This is how World War I came about and how the October 1962 Missile Crisis almost led to an invasion of Cuba and a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. An additional danger is that leaders in Tehran are playing the same game.

Six months later, I—along with a co-researcher, William Burr—took some comfort in new information from Sy Hersh's sources. Hersh had reported in mid July that General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military and foreign policy advisers had successfully warned Bush and Cheney of dire political, military, international, and economic repercussions should the administration choose the nuclear option against Iran. By this time, moreover, the administration's militant rhetoric toward Iran had diminished.

Just this month (January 2007), however, the president has ramped up his rhetoric, offering up a new reason for threatening Iran, one other than Teheran's nascent nuclear program; namely, its supposed arms shipments to insurgents and political meddling in Iraq, which, the administration says, threatens U.S. troops there. Bush has also expanded U.S. economic reprisals against Iran, arrested selected Iranian nationals and diplomatic officials in Iraq, put a naval-air admiral in charge of U.S. forces in the region, and sent a second carrier group into the Persian Gulf. Periodically, reports surface that Israel is training its forces and developing plans to attack Iran with American collaboration.

Tensions in the Persian Gulf are escalating. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recently said that the U.S. buildup was intended to impress on Iran that the war in Iraq has not made America vulnerable, while Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, has announced that Washington will not talk directly with Teheran and has called on Iran to back down. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, repeatedly declares that Iran will not back down, accuses Washington of having hegemonic ambitions in the region, and engages in his own saber-rattling.

Considering how easily Rice, Gates, Pace, and the JCS have caved in to Bush and Cheney on the troop "surge" into Iraq, it is reasonable to wonder whether any checks and balances against attacking Iran remain within the administration. Now there is a new concern among the citizenry, Congress, and Mideast watchers that Bush is either building up to a preemptive attack on Iran or trying to provoke the Iranians into retaliating against U.S. interests, which in turn would serve to justify U.S. military attacks. Some pundits take solace in the thought that perhaps Bush's purpose in threatening Iran is only to divert American voters' attention from the disaster in Iraq, while others dismiss reports of Israeli preparations to attack Iran as merely a rhetorical ploy to influence Teheran into backing down.

Whether Bush and Cheney actually intend to attack Iran, or merely intend to coerce Tehran into making concessions, or simply intend to divert Americans' attention away from Iraq, the strategy is reckless and could lead to military confrontation and war. The Bush-Cheney threat-strategy does not make sense to rational, realistic, practical observers, who believe that the consequences of military conflict would be disastrous in many ways and on all fronts. Even without military conflict, the strategy is preventing movement toward a diplomatic solution to the U.S.-Iranian standoff and other Mideast puzzles. David Gergen's recent assessment of Bush's rejection of real diplomacy toward Iran was,"This is nuts! It's just crazy to me."

Is the Bush-Cheney approach to Iran merely a case of neocon ideological rigidity and fascination with the madman theory of coercion—both reinforced by their isolation in an "information bubble," in which they are surrounded by groupthinking yes-men-and-women? Or is something else going on in their heads? How the mind of an individual occupying the office of the presidency works is, to say the least, noteworthy, because of the enormous power he (or she) can wield. How this mind works is even more significant when the president’s personality is highly unusual. George W. Bush's personality—as well as that of his vice-president—falls into this category. Bush and Cheney's slant on the nature of the world and foreign and military affairs is sufficiently idiosyncratic to make a difference in the calculus of foreign policy, adding an unpredictable, chaotic element to the standard formulas for war and diplomacy. The United States is not so exceptional that it has been immunized from the tragedies brought on by seriously flawed leaders throughout history who willfully, incompetently, or irrationally engaged in reckless threat-making.