Crazed retired US Air Force general urges war on Iran

I can’t get full-text versions of Wall Street Journal articles online. So it’s good that on Friday WaPo blogger Bill Arkin offered some substantial excerpts from a crazed and inflammatory opinion piece that retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney had in that day’s WSJ…
Arkin tells us that McInerney’s favored approach to Iran would be,

what he calls “minimal military pressure” through a “tit-for-tat” of U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities every time an American soldier is killed with a so-called “explosively formed penetrator,” a shaped charge being used in Iraq in IED attacks. A soldier is killed in Iraq, the U.S. bombs in Iran, that’s McInerney’s recommendation.

Arkin, who lives considerably closer to the real world than McInerney, is completely (and rightly) scornful of this idea:

The idiocy of this “calculated response,” as McInerney calls it, is not only that such a direct attack would be a declaration of war, but also it imagines a level of control in the world and in warfare that doesn’t exist in the real world.
First, it imagines that Tehran indeed controls what happens in Iraq and that the regime itself is indeed responsible for the EFPs. There are some who desperately want to trace the EFPs back to the Iranian regime, but that is by no means a foregone conclusion.
Second, McInterney’s calculated response wrongly imagines that the United States can bomb and control what happens thereafter. Haven’t we yet learned that this doesn’t work, that it didn’t work in Afghanistan, where we are still fighting and not controlling the situation on the ground; and it certainly did work in Iraq, where we are just hoping for an honorable exit?
Don’t worry though: If escalation indeed occurs, McInerney is happy and ready with what he calls an “air offensive” and a military strategy directed at Iran that he likens to the Reagan administration’s military buildup that bankrupted the Soviet Union and won the Cold War…

I would add to this the extremely salient fact that any US airstrike on any kind of target inside Iran would, by constituting a clear act of war, put at immediate risk not only the 140,000-plus US soldiers distributed throughout Iraq but also all the very thick (and vulnerable) supply lines that support them.
McInerney lives in cloud cuckoo-land. (Didn’t stop him working in the past as a Vice President for the huge US defense contractor Unisys/Loral.)
Arkin does us all a service by underlining this:

Fortunately for us, the professionals in the military dismiss this kind of armchair generalship for what it is: amateurish and promiscuous speculation devoid of any political context or reality.

I note, too, that it was a technology-crazed air-force planner– Chief of Staff Dan Halutz– who got Israel into all the bad trouble it got into last summer (and hasn’t recovered from since), when he “sold” to his political bosses there the idea that the use of airpower-based “massive retaliation” against Lebanon could solve all his country’s problems there…
Arkin continues,

But what about the Iranians? I’m afraid they read this drivel in the Wall Street Journal and imagine that it is some kind of “message” written by White House neocons, that it is an American threat.
Of course, sophisticated Iranians will see it as just another article and will cable back to Tehran or caution their bosses not to be spooked or provoked. On the other hand, hard liners in the Iranian regime will believe every word, using and misusing such a description of war as justification for their own desired Iranian moves, moves that push us closer and closer to confrontation.
This just goes to prove that there are clumsy and foolish players on both sides, in Iran and in the United States.
It should be a reminder that before we declare Iran the next enemy we think through the implications of our own declarations. Even our words can be like bombs dropping, the effects of which we don’t really understand and can’t control.

At the head of the piece, Arkin writes,

The conspiracy theorists will pick up on the news out of San Diego that the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier battle group will sail Monday for the Persian Gulf as meaning WAR with Iran…
The USS Nimitz is sailing Monday, but Navy spokesmen tell The Los Angeles Times that there will be no overlap of three aircraft carriers in the Gulf.
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will be returning to the United States.
The decision to send another carrier to the Gulf is itself a signal of a change; at least for now, it appears that the United States will maintain a two carrier presence in the region rather than just one.
Even if that two carrier presence isn’t specifically intended to be directed at Iran, it does have that effect.
Aircraft carrier exercises, moreover, such as the one the United States recently concluded, the “largest” since 2003, have the impact of signaling American military readiness.
One can’t help but think that Iran’s capture of the Royal Marines and sailors must be connected to the desire to have some kind of bargaining chip at a time when Tehran perceives that America is readying for war.

As I noted above, in my view the Iranians already have plenty of human “bargaining chips”, in the form of the US (and UK) troops spread out throughout Iraq.. The wide distribution of those troops gives Teheran much more “insurance” against US military adventures than any small group of 15 UK sailors and marines. And what’s more, the US not only put those bargaining chips into place for the Iranians but has also recently been adding to their number!
I am worried, though, about what Arkin writes about the general political mood in Washington regarding Iran:

Iran has not so slowly taken on the mantle of favorite enemy to many in Washington, even to the geopolitically challenged who seem content, even desperate, to join the neocons in blithely referring to war there as more justified than Iraq.

Are the war-drums for an attack on Iran really being drummed so heavily and with such success in Washington as he implies? This seems extremely scary to me. I’d really welcome any information or evidence that readers can provide on this point.