This week, two political novels about the looming confrontation with Iran hit bookstores: Vince Flynn’s Protect and Defend and my The Writing on the Wall. For the first time in recent American literary history two political novels dealing with exactly the same subject, yet advancing two world views that couldn’t be more different, are directly competing against each other. While next year’s presidential race between the current front runners appears to regress into a duel between moderates and ultra-Republicans pandering to the same constituency, this dispute about foreign policy and the future of "the war on terror" held on the stage of fiction truly sets research and facts based scenarios against ‘Mission Accomplished’-like pipe dreams. And while one shouldn’t delude himself about this contest being already decided long before it begun in terms of sales figures, in bookstores, at least, customers are given the clear choice American voters are denied.
Gary Kamiya despairs in yesterday’s Salon.com:
The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. Let's repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America's political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking ... This is surreal. It's as if we're back on Sept. 12 and Iraq never happened.
Thankfully, Vince Flynn’s Protect and Defend neither belongs to the lunatic fringe’s concoctions, nor was it co-authored by Joe Lieberman and Norman Podhoretz. After Mossad’s special operations having pancaked the main Iranian nuclear enrichment facility, the U.S. government persuades the notorious Mujahideen e-Kalq, MEK, the courted-all-across-Washington equivalent of Ahmed Chalabi in the run up to this war, to claim responsibility with the intention to name and shame the Iranian government. The CIA counts on this public embarrassment to lead to a variation of Eastern Europe’s color revolutions in Tehran. The second half of the book is dedicated to American secret service agents torturing Hezbollah fighters and Hezbollah fighters torturing American secret service agents until the ultra-evil, Holocaust-denying, Iranian president is deposed in a bloodless coup by the moderate faction within the Council of Guardians. Although, as usual in American media, he overstates the sway President Ahmatullah (Ahmadinejad) has over Iranian politics, one has to give Flynn credit for doing a fairly decent job in portraying the various competing factions within Iran’s government and not beating the war drums too excessively. In fact he even hints the possibility for a détente between the two antagonists, yet the negotiations described, remind one of Peter Minuit acquiring Manhattan for some glass beads - old colonial attitudes never seem to die. His hero Mitch Rapp indulging with self-righteous gusto in the torture of alleged Islamist fundamentalists and pillorying ethical doubters as "don’t tell me you’ve gone soft"-milksops is a common feature in all of Flynn’s recent novels. Here, "the war on terror" is fought as it ought to be fought, according to Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez and Michael ‘Waterboarding?’ Mukasey, no matter whether Abu Ghraib has done more damage to the perception of America in the Arab world than the whole Iraq invasion. The deliberate sexual humiliation of the Iranian prisoners remind one of techniques taken from "Copper Green" manuals and, I can’t help myself, but come across as ex post vindications of Lynndie England and Charles Graner.
What’s most troubling about Flynn’s approach, though, is him acting as the imprudent mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s favorite alternative to war: the Iranian people rising against the odious theocracy with a lil’ help from their good friends in Langley and Camp Ashraf (MEK’s headquarter in Iraq twelve miles west of the Iranian border, where they’re guarded and nurtured by the U.S. Army). Let me get this straight. This master plan from cloud-cuckoo-land equates to you bloggers, motivated by several Oklahoma City bombing-like terrorist attacks on innocent Americans - you know darn well to have been funded by, and orchestrated in Moscow or Beijing - to storm Washington and topple George Bush. It’s just plainly ridiculous to believe that the American people at large would support you in such an uprising, and what was planned to broaden into a nation wide mass protest soon will have you and your co-conspirers face a firing squad as the curtain falls to your pathetic act. The fact is, in Iran, MEK is less popular than Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf are at the moment in Pakistan; these former water boys of Khomeini’s revolution, who turned against their allies when they couldn’t accumulate the sinecures they had dreamed of, hardly are qualified to rally the masses behind their cause, neither ideologically nor in terms of public outreach. These Pentagon-funded minions acting as a spearhead for a counter-revolution in Iran is as likely as a statue of Timothy McVeigh being erected in downtown Oklahoma. This policy guided by wishful thinking instead of facts, reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld promising that U.S. soldiers will be as genially welcome in liberated Baghdad as they were in Germany during WW II, perfectly highlights the neocons’ schizophrenia, though. On the one hand they portray Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics as the personification of evil capable of annihilating Israel and triggering WW III, on the other hand they’re a regime rotten from within on the brink of crack-up that just requires a little pushing from MEK and Delta Forces (with Vince Flynn writing the script) to collapse like a house of cards. Please Decider, decide as what you want to sell them to us.
Instead of Guantanamo-seasoned torture dabsters riding into the sunset in their Gulfstreams after having saved the free world, at the end of The Writing on the Wall, inexperienced, drafted U.S. soldiers ride into the nuclear wasteland that used to be Pakistan. For war with Iran doesn’t only serve as a mayhem I give a forceful premonition of, but also acts as a parable in my book. By depicting how maverick, straight-talking, Southwestern Senator become President in 2008, Jim Whitman, no longer able to control the forces he has pandered to on his road to the White House, is manipulated into war by a coalition of aching for Armageddon televangelists, big oil, and reckless neocons, I deliver my accounting for the road to war with Iraq. And the negotiations about the future of civil war-torn, occupied-at-horrendous-costs Iran are used for expounding the dilemma the next president faces with Iraq, thus taking along readers on a tour de force through the whole present day Middle East they surely won’t remember as a joyride.
Hands down, this book isn’t based on wishful thinking, nor does it qualify for what you may call a good-feel-title. I deliberately depict a worst case, yet realistic, scenario of the repercussions of an attack on Iran to demonstrate quite plainly that all talking about this being limitable to aerial strikes is irresponsible bogus. How do ‘Fighting Joe’ Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz and other advocates of this shock and awe strategy (implemented to such a stunning long term success in Iraq) believe Iran to react? Sit back and take things easy, counting bombs raining down on them like sheep, drifting off into peaceful slumber? During the eight years long Iran-Iraq war, at 750,000 military and civilian casualties for the former - that’s almost two hundred times the current U.S. losses in Iraq - which had ten year old basij clearing mine fields with their bodies for the revolution’s tanks to advance unimpaired, Iran established quite a reputation for exactly the contrary. Make no mistake, if attacked, the Iranian people, as much as they loathe the regime misgoverning them, will rise like one to its defense. Iran is bloody aware of this being a fight for its mere survival, and they will retaliate with all they have. First, all U.S. forces in Iraq will become prime targets served on a silver tray, then missiles will be fired on oil refineries in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar (remember that five weeks into the Gulf War, despite an average of 1,000 sorties flown per day, Iraq was still able to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia with SCUDS); if that were to prove ineffective, Iran will draw on the Shiite population in neighboring countries, who all maintain a more or less active branch of Hezbollah. Dhahran, the headquarter of Saudi Aramco, Abqaiq, the major oil processing plant, connected to the port of Yanbu with an uphill pipeline, and Ras Tanura, the world’s largest oil refinery, are all conveniently located in a Saudi Arabian province with a Shiite majority. Bahrain, a predominantly Shiite tiny island connected to the mainland via the King Fahd Causeway, and its main refinery in Sitra that also handles all crude coming in from Saudi Arabia’s northeastern fields, will be next. But these are just pinpricks. The coup de grace will be sinking two tankers in the 27 miles wide at its narrowest point, shallow Strait of Hormuz, thus cutting off the entire Persian Gulf from the outer world for at least a month. You better not attack Iran either in winter or around the dog days, cause this season you’ll have to dispense with your heating and air condition; ah yeah, no trips to Disney Land in the family-SUV either.
Describing these consequences isn’t meeting trouble halfway and may not be commercially lucrative, but these scenarios are based on military analysts’ estimations. Estimations the American public is preferred to be left in the dark about. After the Iraq debacle it’s hard enough anyway for Karl Rove’s heirs to sell the public another all-inclusive trip to the Middle East. If you tell them that they’ll have to spend $5 per gallon at their next stop at the gas station and will finance Rex Tillerson’s new yacht, you may as well try to sell chastity belts to Hugh Heffner.
That is the writing on the wall, apparent for anybody with eyes to see: a war with Iran can only lead into unprecedented disaster, setting the whole Middle East afire and triggering vast global recession. That’s common consensus at every military academy, from Carlisle to Sandhurst, from Guer to Kingston. Dozens of bloggers on this site are doing a formidable job in informing the public about these truths; I try to contribute my mite to it through fiction, in the hope to reach an audience beyond the liberal choir usually preached to, and aspire to transform my author’s tour this January into a cost-to-cost anti-Iran war campaign. I look forward to seeing you there and us all working together in preventing The Writing on the Wall from coming true.
Vince Flynn’s Protect and Defend and my The Writing on the Wall are both available on Amazon and in bookstores all across the nation. Vince Flynn already has his own fan-site, The Third Option, I feature a new podcast on mine. If after listening to it you become hell-bent on hosting a fan-site for me, you know how to contact me.
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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti Iran war novel