Iran crisis: A new case of wagging the dog?

THERE has always been a lot of intermingling between American popular culture and politics, and between Hollywood and Washington. Perhaps this explains why a former movie actor (Ronald Reagan) and a reality television show star (Donald Trump) were able to mount a successful run for the presidency, and why after retiring from office, many politicians end up having their own television and radio talk shows and writing bestsellers - or even, in the case of Barack Obama, getting to stream their own stuff on Netflix.

From that perspective, the lines between reality and fiction tend to get blurred when Hollywood decides to go to Washington and make films about its power players.

Case in point: The 1997 American political satire comedy, Wag the Dog, starred Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro as a Hollywood producer and a Washington spin doctor manufacturing a war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. The movie was released a month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal.

At the time, whenever President Bill Clinton initiated a military intervention abroad, including a bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia, his detractors and the media were prompted to draw a comparison between the movie and the political reality. Mr Clinton, it was charged, was "wagging the dog" in order to divert attention from his sex scandal and the ensuing Congressional impeachment trial against him.

Mr Clinton and his supporters dismissed the comparison and insisted that the decisions the president had made to use military force came in response to real threats to US national security and had nothing to do with domestic American politics.

But Mr Clinton's adversaries were not convinced, and since then, the accusation of a conspiracy theory that the White House occupant was wagging the dog (going to war to score political points) has come up every time any president deploys US troops abroad, launches missiles against America's enemies or assassinates a terrorist that the American people hate.

So it was not surprising that after President Trump had ordered the killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani, a decision that ignited fears of a wider war between the US and Iran, his critics and the media started speculating that this was another case of wag the dog - an attempt on the part of the White House to distract attention from the president's political problems at home, and in particular, from the impeachment proceedings he is facing.

The main problem with the "wag the dog" theory is that while drawing the US into a foreign war could perhaps serve the political interests of the White House in the short run by helping to rally the American people around the president as he confronts a threat to the nation, a long and costly war, as the American experience in Vietnam and Iraq has demonstrated, can hurt any president in the long run.

Indeed, most opinion polls indicate that a clear majority of Americans are opposed to the idea of their nation being drawn into new military adventures in the Middle East and are alarmed over the prospects of a war with Iran.

Opposition to new foreign military entanglements is apparent among members of President Trump's electoral base, who were drawn to the nationalist candidate because, among other things, he had criticised the war in Iraq and pledged to end US military interventions in the Middle East and bring the troops back home.

So while many Americans may applaud the taking out of a "bad guy" like the Iranian general through a swift and clean military operation, the same Americans are bound to turn against Mr Trump when American soldiers start returning home from the Middle East in coffins.

So if that happens, any Democratic presidential candidate facing Mr Trump in November would be in a position to use a war with Iran against the current White House occupant, especially if the conflict in the Middle East would not only raise the number of American casualties, but also exert upward pressure on energy prices, in the process slowing down the US economic recovery.

But then, whether the Democrats succeed in exploiting Mr Trump's potential troubles in the Middle East to their political advantage depends very much on the message delivered by their presidential candidate, and that in turn depends on the identity of that candidate.

The ongoing Iran crisis has exposed growing tensions between members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, who embrace a sweeping anti-war and anti-interventionist agenda and who promote the withdrawal of American troops from the Middle East and US disengagement from the region, including by reassessing the traditional alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia and the pursuit of diplomatic détente with Iran.

These positions are being held by two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), who have blasted Mr Trump's decision to kill Qassem Soleimani and who accuse the current commander-in-chief of driving the US into a war with Iran.

At the same time, the more centrist presidential candidates - including former vice-president Joe Biden, Minnesota senator Amy Klobucha and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg adopted a more balanced stand regarding the escalation of tensions with Iran.

The trio have criticised the strategic wisdom of killing the Iranian general, a risky move that, they said, was not in US interest, but have also insisted that Iran remains a threat to the US as well as to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and that Washington needs to remain engaged in the Middle East in order to help maintain the stability in the region.

The concern among some Democrats is that bashing Mr Trump's Middle East policies from the peacenik left, as senators Sanders and Warren are doing, would antagonise many middle-of-the-road voters and play into the Republicans' hands by helping them to portray the Democrats as "defeatist" and "anti-American".

As such, they contend that Mr Biden, with his long experience in foreign policy and his traditional policy prescriptions, is in a better position to debate the Middle East and Iran with Mr Trump in the coming months.