Over the cliff with the neocons one more time?

If Dick Cheney gets his way and starts a war with Iran, that would be the case.

The September Atlantic has gotten a lot of attention because of Joshua Green's article on Karl Rove and some for Matthew Scully's piece about speechwriting for the Bush White House. But it also contains an article by neocon war cheerleader Robert Kaplan, "The Plane That Would Bomb Iran", an excerpt from his book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (2007).

The plane to which he refers is the B-2 Spirit, which he gushes over like a child admiring a plastic model:

I understood Bo's poignant, if over-the-top, infatuation with the plane. Indeed, a B-2 is endlessly fascinating merely to look at. The official Air Force description has it right: The B-2 is not so much a plane as a "flying wing," a jagged gray-black wedge with a small bubble rising out of its center, which is where the pilot and mission commander sit. Seen head-on, the bubble, with its dark windshield, looks like nothing so much as Darth Vader's mask. The ever-so-slightly-turned-down-beak design of the plane's front tip heightens the sinister effect. As you walk around the nose, the swept-back angle of the wings makes them disappear, and the plane seems to shrink in size, bringing to mind a small bat. But once you reach the back of the plane, the size of the wings becomes apparent, and you realize just how big the plane is. Its wingspan is 172 feet - greater than the distance covered by Orville Wright during his first flight at Kitty Hawk.

"Look, Mommy, look! The plane looks like Darth Vader!"

Can't these guys like Robert Kaplan find some other way to work out their arrested-development issues other than becoming war publicists who promote actual wars in which real human beings kill and die? Can't they just find a good, violent video game and entertain themselves instead?

But being a neocon also apparently means never having to learn anything from failures and disasters, either. Kaplan still is a true believer in the magic power of air war. Kaplan gushes about the high-tech fantasy that Rummy also devoutly believed in of doing war from the air without Americans having to get hurt, while the folks back home can watch the fun on FOX News and only a bunch of brown people will get killed.

Robert Kaplan's poster girl

He gives the fantasy in the form of quotes from an Air Force colonel reciting the air-power true believer line:

Colonel Wheeler made the point that in future conflicts conventional assets like the B-2 and fast-attack submarines would be used in tandem with Predator drones, Special Forces A-teams, and Marine Corps platoons. Forget the debate about having needed more troops in Iraq after the initial invasion. As true as that might be, our military's primary focus in the next few decades will not be on massive troop levels; it will be on hitting specific targets with commando-style ground units that could call in air and sea strikes from platforms that are either untouchable or unseen. For example, during a war with a regional power like Iran, down-and-dirty planes like the A-10 and the AC-130, which typically provide close air support, would be less likely to be used than a high-altitude heavy like the B-2, after Special Operations teams have gone in on the ground for limited periods to identify targets for the planes' bunker-buster and other high-impact bombs.

Such operations would require an exponential increase in complexity - a greater variety of assets used in quick, symphonic offensives. "We may not be able to mass troops like we used to," Wheeler observed. "It's not just a matter of negative publicity from a global media, but of a profusion of competitors that will increasingly have the ability to hit such large formations with weapons of mass destruction. And that will be a chance we won't want to take. (my emphasis)

No more RPGs or IEDs to worry about. No house-to-house searches or car bombs. Just high-tech whiz-bang gadgets fighting our wars for us.

But this isn't just dreaming up science-fiction stories. The Air Power Gospel teaches that everything that rally matters in war can be done by planes and drones and bombs and various accessories. The only thing that stops the US military from being invincible in every situation is that The Media report on all this depressing news about dead babies and stuff (collateral damage, you know, it happens in all wars and besides this happens less in this war than the last one and half of it is enemy propaganda anyway). And that makes the wimpy civilians and gutless politicians back home start wanting to put limits and require exit plans and things like that. But when American soldiers don't get killed, there's no problem. So we can have wars any time we want for any purpose and we'll always win.

That, by the way, was a large part of the theory that Rummy was implementing in the Iraq War. Shock and awe, and all that.

The fact that the results are different that the magic model of painless warfare (for Americans) didn't work out in Iraq any more than it ever has anywhere doesn't deter the devout for continuing to believe it. And going to war based on faith in it. (The Kosovo War of 1999 may look like an exception, but that's a whole other story.)

If the B-2 is necessary, for both our force structure and our negotiating credibility, as Colonel Wheeler believes it is, then its cost of more than $1 billion per plane is a truly depressing indicator of the price of empire. "Look at the rate of return al-Qaeda got on 9/11," one former civilian defense official told me. "For an investment of just a few hundred thousand dollars, they forced us to spend billions." In other words, as necessary as the B-2 might be, what's its rate of return - 20 percent, perhaps? "I'm not saying that we require a rate of return like al-Qaeda gets," this former official went on, "but we'll need to narrow the difference if we're going to remain a great power."

Um, that's close to a real-world thought. We're spending bejillions justified by the Great Global War on Terror (GWOT) to counter terrorists who hide out in caves and mountain villages and bring of low-tech terrorist attacks at a fraction of the cost of even one of these magic B-2 Spirits?

The Atlantic article doesn't continue with Kaplan's thoughts on how to improve the ROI on his sleek, adorable planes. If you measure the return by, say, number of bombs dropped in hostilities, then more bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanding the war to Iran and Somalia or wherever would be a way to do that.

If people just stop responding to the alleged apocalyptic, existential threat from The Terrorists, we can always switch to another enemy: China, India, Russia, maybe El Salvador or Grenada again. There are plenty of possibilities.

I know this post is written in a sarcastic and disgusted tone. But the real point here, and the reason Kaplan's article disgusted me as it did, is to see his blind faith in the high-tech mirage that always keeps receding over the horizon, but that its advocates are sure we've really attained now and it will really work this time honest-to-Pete in the next war.

And I thought of this Kaplan piece when I saw the paper by Dan Plesch (Director of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies’ Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy) and Martin Butcher, Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East 08/28/07, that I referenced in an earlier post.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. (emphasis in original)

Though some ground forces would be used in this scenario, it would be done while "avoiding a ground invasion". The magic of air power will do it all, from destroying Iran's military capability to setting up regime change. All quick and easy.

As Gene Lyons wrote a couple of weeks ago:

With the U. S. in danger of losing both wars simultaneously, Cheney is pressing for a third war against an opponent larger than the other two combined. This isn’t conservatism, neo- or otherwise. It’s madness.

Tags: iran war, robert kaplan