| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2006 11:58 am Post subject: Iran and the jaws of a trap |
| http://www.atimes.com
SPEAKING FREELY
Iran and the jaws of a trap
By Paul Levian
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
Judging from the rather frantic behind-the-scenes efforts of Russia and China in Iran, they seem to appreciate that the Iranian leadership is in for a big and probably deadly surprise. The Bush administration has not only handled its Iran dossier much more skillfully than Iraq, but also managed to set up Iran for a war it can neither win nor fight to a draw.
If the Iranian leaders think they can deter an attack because the
US is bogged down in Iraq they are already between the jaws of a well-set trap. Though a Western war against Iran will be a big geopolitical defeat for Russia and China, they cannot but resign themselves to this outcome if they are unable to convince the Iranians to accept the Russian proposal - ie uranium enrichment in Russia.
The Russians saw the writing on the wall when France, Germany and Britain began to march in lockstep with the United States. In particular, the widely but wrongly discounted nuclear belligerence of President Jacques Chirac last month implied that France was ready to accept the US use of nuclear weapons in a war against Iran if they saw fit to do so.
The Iranian leadership's obvious confidence in its ability to deter the US, Britain and Israel seems to rest on mainly four assumptions. Iran is militarily much stronger than Iraq, much larger, its terrain more difficult, its society more cohesive - thus more difficult to defeat, to occupy and to pacify. In addition, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad seems to take particular comfort from the widely anticipated wave of popular outrage and anti-Western attacks in the wider Middle East if Iran should be attacked.
Moreover, the economic costs of a war against Iran in terms of the price of oil and the interruption of the Iranian supply would propel the world economy into a tailspin. And finally, Iranian leaders seem to accept at face value the US moans over its overstretched military forces and the demoralization of US forces in Iraq.
Certainly, Iranian misconceptions are helped mightily by the defeatism of the Western debate about such a war. "No good options" has become something like the consensus view: an airborne and special forces "surgical strike" (as well as a massive attack) against the Iranian nuclear industry and military targets could at best delay its nuclear program and will be followed by retaliation in Iraq, Lebanon etc; a ground attack is out of the question because most of deployable US ground forces are desperately busy in Iraq.
If such things could be planned, one might be persuaded to consider this debate as an aspect of strategic deception. In fact, the US and British forces in Iraq and in the Persian Gulf as well as the forces in Afghanistan are quite able to redeploy on short notice, for example during the days of an initial air campaign against Iran for large-scale operations against the remaining Iranian forces and can be reinforced during the war. The US military infrastructure at the borders of Iran has a very substantial capability to deal with surge requirements.
The somewhat standard scenario for this war - as indicated by Chinese and Russian war games - has the following features:
An initial Israeli air attack against some Iranian nuclear targets, command and control targets and Shahab missile sites. Iran retaliates with its remaining missiles, tries to close the Gulf, attacks US naval assets and American and British forces in Iraq. If Iranian missiles have chemical warheads (in fact or presumed), the US will immediately use nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian military and industrial infrastructure. If not, an air campaign of up to two weeks will prepare the ground campaign for the occupation of the Iranian oil and gas fields.
Mass mobilization in Iraq against US-British forces will be at most a nuisance - easily suppressed by the ruthless employment of massive firepower. And Israel will use the opportunity to deal with Syria and South Lebanon, and possibly with its Palestinian problem.
The character of this war will be completely different from the Iraq war. No show-casing of democracy, no "nation-building", no journalists, no Red Cross - but the kind of war the United States would have fought in North Vietnam if it had not had to reckon with the Soviet Union and China.
Paul Levian is a former German intelligence officer.
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Rumsfeld says military force option against Iran:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/02/07/rumsfeld-says-military-force-option-against-iran-for-israel.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 8:57 am Post subject: Nuclear Iran? |
| Just saw the following at www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Nuclear%20Iran_.txt
12 January 2006
Nuclear Iran?
By Gwynne Dyer
When the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed last
Tuesday that Iran had broken the seals on its nuclear research facility at
Natanz, many people reacted as if the very next step was the testing of an
Iranian nuclear weapon. In the ensuing media panic, we were repeatedly
reminded that Iran's radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared
just months ago that Israel should be "wiped off the map." How could such
a lethally dangerous regime be allowed to proceed with its nuclear plans?
But talk is cheap, and not to be confused with actions or even
intentions. Ahmadinejad was quoting directly from the founder of Iran's
Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, but neither during Khomeini's life
nor in the sixteen years since his death has Iran made any effort to wipe
Israel off the map, because to do so could mean the virtual extermination
of the Iranian people. Israel has held a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the
Middle East since shortly after Ahmadinejad was born, and now possesses
enough of them to strike every Iranian AND every Arab city of over 100,000
people simultaneously.
Ahmadinejad's comment was as foolish, but also ultimately as
meaningless, as Ronald Reagan's famous remark into a microphone that he
didn't know was open: "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today
that I have signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin
bombing in five minutes." Nobody doubted that Reagan wanted the "evil
empire" to be wiped from the face of the earth, but nobody seriously
believed that he intended to attack it. Russia had nuclear weapons too, and
the US would have been destroyed by its retaliation.
Ahmedinejad was not joking about wanting Israel to vanish, but he
was expressing a wish, not an intention, because Iran has been thoroughly
deterred for all of his adult life by the knowledge of those hundreds of
Israeli nuclear warheads. And Iran would still be deterred if it had a few
nuclear weapons of its own, just as Mr Reagan was deterred from striking
the Soviet Union even though the United States had thousands of the things.
So why would Iran want nuclear weapons at all? Mostly national pride,
plus a desire to keep up with the neighbours.
Iran's neighbours include almost every nuclear-armed power on the
planet. Right on its borders, or just one or two countries over, are
Russia, China, Pakistan, India and Israel, plus US forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan, so many Iranians think their country should have nuclear
weapons to protect it from nuclear blackmail. They also want to be taken
seriously as a regional power, and share the widespread belief that nuclear
weapons are a ticket to the top table. Yet despite ample resources and a
large, well-educated scientific elite, the regime has failed to develop
nuclear weapons during 26 years in power.
For Iran, nuclear weapons fall into the class of "nice to have"
rather than life-or-death necessity. Israel cannot invade it, and even the
United States would be reluctant to do so: it is a very big, mountainous
and nationalistic country. In almost any regional conflict, Iranian
nuclear weapons would make it more likely to be a target for nuclear
attacks, not less. So the Iranians have chipped away at the task of
building the scientific and technological basis for a nuclear-weapons
programme in a desultory way for several decades, without ever getting
really serious about it.
That is still the pattern. When the IAEA demanded that Iran explain
certain irregularities in its nuclear power research programme three years
ago, the regime did not respond like North Korea, which immediately
abrogated its membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and went
all out to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible. Instead, Iran
voluntarily allowed the IAEA to put seals on its nuclear research
facilities while it investigated the discrepancies in Iran's earlier
reports.
Now it has removed those seals, although the investigation is still
not complete, and plans to resume its research on nuclear power. This will
also enhance its capacity to work on nuclear weapons eventually, but that
can't be helped.
The current US campaign to impose United Nations sanctions on Iran
is doomed to fail, because it is not breaking the law. As a signatory of
the NPT, it is fully entitled to develop nuclear power for peaceful
purposes, including the technology for enriching uranium, even though that
also takes it much of the way to a nuclear-weapons capability. In any case,
it is practically unimaginable that all the veto-holding powers on the UN
Security Council would agree to impose sanctions on a major oil-producer on
the mere suspicion that it ultimately intends to break the law.
And there is no need for such a dramatic confrontation. Iran has
never been in a great rush to get nuclear weapons. Even if the CIA is
unduly optimistic in assuming that Tehran is still ten years away from a
bomb (and the spooks usually err in the pessimistic direction), there is
still plenty of time and room for patient negotiation, and no need for the
current histrionics.
_______________________________
To shorten to 725 word, omit paragraph 5. ("Iran's neighbours...power")
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 9:19 am Post subject: Hawks have warplanes ready if the nuclear diplomacy fails |
| Just saw the following at www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2027979,00.html
The Times February 07, 2006
Hawks have warplanes ready if the nuclear diplomacy failsBy Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor
::nobreak::IT IS the option of last resort with consequences too hideous to contemplate. And yet, with diplomacy nearly exhausted, the use of military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme is being actively considered by those grappling with one of the world’s most pressing security problems.
For five years the West has used every diplomatic device at its disposal to entice Iran into complying with strict conditions that would prevent its nuclear programme being diverted to produce an atomic bomb.
Those efforts, however, are now faltering. US leaders are openly discussing the looming conflict. A recent poll showed that 57 per cent of Americans favoured military intervention to stop Iran building a bomb.
Tehran scoffs at threats by the West, has pledged to press on with its nuclear progamme and defend itself if attacked.
The military option may be the only means of halting a regime that has threatened to annihilate Israel from developing a bomb and triggering a regional nuclear arms race.
Experts agree that America has the military capability to destroy Iran’s dozen known atomic sites. US forces virtually surround Iran with military air bases to the west in Afghanistan, to the east in Iraq, Turkey and Qatar and the south in Oman and Diego Garcia. The US Navy also has a carrier group in the Gulf, armed with attack aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles. B2 stealth bombers flying from mainland America could also be used.
The air campaign would not be easy. The Iranians have been preparing for an attack. Key sites are ringed with air defences and buried underground. Sensitive parts of the Natanz facility are concealed 18 metres (60ft) underground and protected by reinforced concrete two meters thick. Similar protection has been built around the uranium conversion site at Esfahan.
“American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq centre in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq,” said the Global Security consultantcy.
Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former US Air Force officer, predicted that knocking out nuclear sites could be over in less than a week. But he gave warning that would only be the beginning.
Iran has threatened to defend itself if attacked. It could use medium-range missiles to hit Israel or US military targets in Iraq and the region. It could also use its missiles and submarines to attack shipping in the Gulf, the main export route for much of the world’s energy needs. “Once you have dealt with the nuclear sites you would have to expand the targets,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Gardiner. “There are another 125 to deal with including chemical plants, missile launchers, airfields and submarines.”
While this huge US offensive is underway Iran would almost certainly deploy its most powerful weapon. It would unleash a counter-attack through proxies in the region. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia, would attack Israel. Moqtadr al-Sadr, the militant Iraqi Shia religious leader, could order his Mahdi Army to rise up against American and British forces in Iraq. Iranian-backed groups could wreak havoc against Western targets across the world.
What began as a military operation to maintain a balance of power in the Middle East, could instead plunge the region into another conflict.
“It will have to be diplomats, not F15s that stop the mullahs,” said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “An air strike against the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan would inflame Muslim anger, rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular government. Finally, the strike would not, as it often said, delay the Iranian programme. It would almost certainly speed it up,” he wrote in an article.
PUBLIC OPTIONS
‘All options — including the military one — are on the table’
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defence Secretary
‘There is only one thing worse than military action, that is a nuclear armed Iran’
John McCain, Republican senator for Arizona and US presidential hopeful
‘We are not seeking a military confrontation, but if that happens we will give the enemy a lesson that will be remembered throughout history’
Abdolrahim Moussavi, head of Iran’s joint chiefs of staff
‘Give another year to make HEU (highly-enriched uranium) for a nuclear weapon and a few more months to convert the uranium into weapon components, Iran could have its first nuclear weapon in 2009’
David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, Institute for Science and International Security
‘There isn’t a military option. There certainly isn’t one on the table, let’s be clear about that.’
Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary
‘Obviously we don’t rule out any measures at all’
Tony Blair | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 9:34 pm Post subject: Another Neocon publication making case to bomb Iran for Isra |
| Another Neocon publication making case to bomb Iran for Israel
From: rbleier@igc.org
To: "rbleier" <rbleier@igc.org>
Subject: E.Luttwak: US could easily take out Iran's nukes -- in a single night
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 12:11:29 -0500
Most reader s of these lists understand that there is little to prevent a US/Israeli attack on Iran which is not unlikely to happen this year, perhaps in a month or two. Luttwak's article argues that such strikes are likely to be effective, and that Iran's military retaliatory capability is virtually non existent.
Luttwak doesn't address the possibility raised by some that Iran could retaliate in Iraq by setting the Iraqi Shiite community against US forces there. But an Iraqi Shiite uprising against US forces could simply play into the hands of the Bush administration (and the Israelis too?) giving them the rationale for intensifying and expanding the war. --Ronald
Note: There may be copyright restrictions in connection with distributing this material.
February 8, 2006
COMMENTARY
DOW JONES REPRINTS
• See a sample reprint in PDF format.
• Order a reprint of this article now.
In a Single Night
By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
February 8, 2006; Page A16
Many commentators argue that a pre-emptive air attack against Iran's nuclear installations is unfeasible. It would not be swift or surgical, they say, because it would require thousands of strike and defense-suppression sorties. And it is likely to fail even then because some facilities might be too well hidden or too strongly protected. There may well be other, perfectly valid reasons to oppose an attack on Iran's nuclear sites. But let's not pretend that such an attack has no chance of success. In fact, the odds are rather good.
The skeptics begin sensibly enough by rejecting any direct comparison with Israel's 1981 air attack that incapacitated the Osirak reactor, stopping Saddam Hussein's first try at producing plutonium bombs. Iran is evidently following a different and much larger-scale path to nuclear weapons, by the centrifuge "enrichment" of uranium hexafluoride gas to increase the proportion of fissile uranium 235. It requires a number of different plants operating in series to go from natural uranium to highly enriched uranium formed in the specific shapes needed to obtain an explosive chain reaction. Some of these plants, notably the Natanz centrifuge plant, are both very large and built below ground with thick overhead protection.
It is at this point that the argument breaks down. Yes, Iraq's weapon program of 1981 was stopped by a single air strike carried out by less than a squadron of fighter-bombers because it was centered in a single large reactor building. Once it was destroyed, the mission was accomplished. To do the same to Iran's 100-odd facilities would require almost a hundred times as many sorties as the Israelis flew in 1981, which would strain even the U.S. Air Force. Some would even add many more sorties to carry out a preliminary suppression campaign against Iran's air defenses (a collection of inoperable anti-aircraft weapons and obsolete fighters with outdated missiles). But the claim that to stop Iran's program all of its nuclear sites must be destroyed is simply wrong.
An air attack is not a Las Vegas demolitions contract, where nothing must be left but well-flattened ground for the new casino to be built. Iran might need 100 buildings in good working order to make its bomb, but it is enough to demolish a few critical installations to delay its program for years -- and perhaps longer because it would become harder or impossible for Iran to buy the materials it bought when its efforts were still secret. Some of these installations may be thickly protected against air attack, but it seems that their architecture has not kept up with the performance of the latest penetration bombs.
Nor could destroyed items be easily replaced by domestic production. In spite of all the claims of technological self-sufficiency by its engineer-president, not even metal parts of any complexity can be successfully machined in Iran. More than 35% of Iran's gasoline must now be imported because the capacity of its foreign-built refineries cannot be expanded without components currently under U.S. embargo, and which the locals cannot copy. Aircraft regularly fall out of the sky because Iranians are unable to reverse-engineer spare parts.
The bombing of Iran's nuclear installations may still be a bad idea for other reasons, but not because it would require a huge air offensive. On the contrary, it could all be done in a single night. One may hope that Iran's rulers will therefore accept a diplomatic solution rather than gamble all on wildly exaggerated calculations.
Mr. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113937026599968085.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 10:03 pm Post subject: John Pilger: The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon |
| http://www.truthout.org
The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 10 February 2006
Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."
That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbor, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.
However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.
Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.
Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.
Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.
For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."
It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.
That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.
While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all."
But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June.
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 12:57 am Post subject: Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn |
| http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/02/12/iran_is_prepared_to_retaliate_experts_warn/
Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | February 12, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Iran is prepared to launch attacks using long-range missiles, secret commando units, and terrorist allies planted around the globe in retaliation for any strike on the country's nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence assessments and military specialists.
US and Israeli officials have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to thwart its nuclear ambitions. Among the options are airstrikes on suspected nuclear installations or covert action to sabotage the Iranian program.
But military and intelligence analysts warn that Iran -- which a recent US intelligence report described as ''more confident and assertive" than it has been since the early days of the 1979 Islamic revolution -- could unleash reprisals across the region, and perhaps even inside the United States, if the hard-line regime came under attack.
''When the Americans or Israelis are thinking about [military force], I hope they will sit down and think about everything the ayatollahs could do to make our lives miserable and what we will do to discourage them," said John Pike, director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, referring to Iran's religious leaders.
''There could be a cycle of escalation."
President Bush has said military force should be the last resort in international efforts to deter Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet Bush has stated unequivocally that the United States would not tolerate an Iranian nuclear arsenal, which the CIA estimates could be in place in three to 10 years. Iran maintains its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electricity, not weapons.
Israel, which Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has threatened to annihilate, asserts that Tehran is much closer to going nuclear and has been far more direct with its counter-threats.
The Israel Defense Forces, which destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, has said it is perfecting ways to launch a preventative strike against Iranian nuclear sites, including outfitting its Air Force with American-made, bunker-busting munitions.
US intelligence officials have said that Iran, which fought a war with Iraq from 1980-1988 that cost one million lives, still has the most threatening armed forces in the immediate region. Its combined ground forces are estimated at about 800,000 personnel. The CIA has concluded that Iran is steadily enhancing its ability to project its military power, including by threatening international shipping.
But it is Iran's unconventional weapons and tactics -- rather than its conventional military -- that would pose the greatest threat, according to the intelligence officials.
Bush's new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, outlining the conclusions reached by a variety of US spy agencies, warned in his first overall annual threat assessment this month to Congress that Iran is capable of sparking a much wider conflict it comes under threat.
A major worry: newly acquired long-range missiles. Obtained with the assistance of North Korea, the Shahab 3 could strike Israel and perhaps even hit the periphery of Europe, according to a recent report by the Pentagon's National Air and Space Intelligence Center.
The missiles could also be tipped with chemical warheads and threaten US military bases in the region.
Iran is believed to have at least 20 launchers that are frequently moved around the country to avoid detection.
''Iran has an extensive missile-development program and has received support from entities in Russia, China, and North Korea," the Pentagon report said, estimating their range to be at least 800 miles.
New missile designs under development could travel 400 miles farther, it said, while Iran purchased at least a dozen X-55 cruise missiles from Ukraine in 2001 that are capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Italy.
Meanwhile, Iranian agents and members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, widely believed to have a large presence in Iraq, could attempt to foment an uprising by the their fellow Shi'ite majority in Iraq or join insurgents in directly attacking US troops there, Negroponte warned.
He reported that Tehran has ''constrained" itself in Iraq because it is generally satisfied with the political trends in favor of the Shi'ite majority and to avoid giving the United States another excuse to attack Iran. But that could change if Iran were targeted militarily.
A leading Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia has clashed with US troops and rival Shi'ite groups, vowed in a visit to Tehran last month to defend Iran if it were attacked.
The assessment presented by Negroponte said the Iranian regime already provides ''guidance and training" to militant groups in Iraq and ''has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anticoalition attacks by providing Shia militants with the capability to build" improvised explosive devices.
Government and private analysts assert that Iran's intelligence apparatus and Revolutionary Guard Corps could cause serious damage to US efforts to pacify Iraq.
''The Iranian ayatollahs may deploy an 'asymmetric' answer and incite a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq," the respected Russian military publication ''Defense and Security," warned last month, referring to a military strategy that employs such tactics as guerrilla warfare. ''That would be disastrous for the United States."
Iran, believed to be responsible for the bombing of a US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, also would be expected to enlist its terrorist allies around the world to come to its aid if attacked, US officials and private specialists contend.
''Tehran continues to support a number of terrorist groups, viewing this capability as a critical regime safeguard by deterring US and Israeli attacks, distracting and weakening Israel, and enhancing Iran's regional influence through intimidation," according to Negroponte's assessment to Congress.
Primary among them is Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group that killed 241 US Marines when it bombed a Beirut barracks in 1983.
''Lebanese Hezbollah is Iran's main terrorist ally, which . . . has a worldwide support network and is capable of attacks against US interests if it feels its Iranian patron is threatened," according to the report.
''They have all kinds of people that would like to embrace martyrdom," Pike said of Iran, raising the specter that a terrorist group allied with Iran would be capable of launching attacks inside the United States to avenge a strike against Iran.
Intelligence officials also point out that Iran controls a small island at the mouth the Strait of Hormuz and could use missiles and gunboats to temporarily shut off access to the economically vital Persian Gulf, sparking an oil crisis.
''Military attack is not the solution to this problem," Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the leading dissident group, said in a telephone interview from Paris. ''The regime is absolutely focusing on nonconventional responses. Missiles and terrorist operations are the strong points." | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:16 am Post subject: Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran? |
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Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 13 February 2006
The question looms large against the backdrop of the hearing on whistleblowing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon by Christopher Shays, chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. Among those testifying are Russell Tice, one of the sources who exposed illegal eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, and Army Sgt. Sam Provance, who told his superiors of the torture he witnessed at Abu Graib, got no satisfaction, and felt it his duty to go public. It will not be your usual hearing.
I had the privilege of being present at the creation of the international Truth-Telling Coalition on September 9, 2004 and of working with Daniel Ellsberg in drafting the coalition's Appeal to Current Government Officials to put loyalty to the Constitution above career and to expose dishonesty leading to misadventures like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Whether or not encouragement from the Coalition played any role in subsequent disclosures, we are grateful for those responsible for the recent hemorrhaging of important information - from the "Downing Street Minutes," showing that by summer 2002 the Bush administration had decided to "fix" intelligence to "justify" war on Iraq, to disclosures regarding CIA kidnappings, secret prisons, and state-sponsored torture.
As former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who leads the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, keeps reminding us, "Information is the oxygen of democracy." And with this administration's fetish for secrecy and our somnolent Fourth Estate, we would likely all suffocate without patriotic truth-tellers (aka whistleblowers).
Whistleblowing and Vietnam
There are several times as many potential whistleblowers as there are actual ones. I regret that I never got out of the former category during the early stages of the Vietnam War, when I had a chance to try to stop it. I used to lunch periodically with my colleague Sam Adams, with whom I trained as a CIA analyst and who was given the task of assessing Vietnamese Communist strength early in the war. Sam proved himself the consummate analyst. Relying largely on captured documents, he concluded that there were twice as many Communists (about 600,000) under arms in the South as the US military there would admit to.
Adams learned from Army analysts that Gen. William Westmoreland had placed an artificial cap on the official Army count rather than risk questions regarding the prospects for "staying the course" (sound familiar?). It was a clash of cultures, with Army intelligence analysts following politically dictated orders, and Sam Adams aghast. In a cable dated August 20, 1967, Westmoreland's deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, set forth the rationale for the deception. The new, higher numbers, he said "were in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press." Noting that "We have been projecting an image of success over recent months," Abrams cautioned that if the higher figures became public, "all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion."
When Sam's superiors decided to acquiesce in the Army's figures, Sam was livid. He told me the whole story over lunch, and I remember a long silence as each of us ruminated on what might be done. I recall thinking to myself, someone should take the Abrams cable down to the New York Times (at the time an independent newspaper). The only reason for the cable's "SECRET EYES ONLY" classification was to hide the deception.
I adduced a slew of reasons why I ought not to: a plum overseas assignment for which I was in the final stages of language training; a mortgage; the ethos of secrecy; and, not least, the analytic work (which was important, exciting work, and which Sam and I both thrived on). One can, I suppose, always find reasons for not sticking one's neck out. For the neck, after all, is a convenient connection between head and torso. But if there is nothing for which you would risk your neck, it has become your idol, and necks are not worthy of that. I much regret giving such worship to my own neck.
As for Sam, he chose to go through grievance channels and got the royal run-around, even after the Communist countrywide offensive at Tet in January-February 1968 proved beyond any doubt that his count of Communist forces was correct. When the offensive began, as a way of keeping his sanity, Adams drafted a cable saying, "It is something of an anomaly to be taking so much punishment from Communist soldiers whose existence is not officially acknowledged." But he did not think the situation at all funny.
Dan Ellsberg Steps In
Sam kept playing by the rules, but it happened that - unbeknownst to Sam - Dan Ellsberg gave Sam's figures on enemy strength to the (then independent) New York Times, which published them on March 19, 1968. Dan had learned that President Lyndon Johnson was about to bow to Pentagon pressure to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos, and up to the Chinese border - perhaps even beyond. Later, it became clear that his timely leak - together with another unauthorized disclosure to the Times that the Pentagon had requested 206,000 more troops - prevented a wider war. On March 25, Johnson complained to a small gathering, "The leaks to the New York Times hurt us ... We have no support for the war ... I would have given Westy the 206,000 men."
Ironically, Sam himself played by the rules; that is, until he learned that Dan Ellsberg was on trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers and was being charged with endangering national security by revealing figures on enemy strength. Which figures? The same old faked numbers from 1967! "Imagine," said Adams, "hanging a man for leaking faked numbers," as he hustled off to testify on Dan's behalf.
Ellsberg, who copied and gave the Pentagon Papers - the 7,000-page top secret history of US decision-making on Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post, has had difficulty shaking off the thought that, had he released them in 1964 or 1965, war might have been averted.
Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else - above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong.
And so was I, it now seems, in not asking Sam for that cable from Gen. Abrams. Sam, too, eventually had strong regrets. When the war drew down, he was tormented by the thought that, had he not let himself be diddled by the system, the left half of the Vietnam Memorial wall would not be there, for there would be no names to chisel into such a wall. Sam Adams died prematurely at age 55 with nagging remorse that he had not done enough.
In a letter appearing in the (then independent) New York Times on October 18, 1975, John T. Moore, a CIA analyst who worked in Saigon and the Pentagon from 1965 to 1970, confirmed Adam's story after Sam told it in detail in the May 1975 issue of Harper's magazine:
My only regret is that I did not have Sam's courage ... The record is clear. It speaks of misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, of outright dishonesty and professional cowardice. It reflects an intelligence community captured by an aging bureaucracy, which too often placed institutional self-interest or personal advancement before the national interest. It is a page of shame in the history of American intelligence.
Next Challenge: Iran
Anyone who has been near a TV in recent weeks has heard the drumbeat for war on Iran. The best guess for timing is next month.
Let's see if we cannot do better this time than we did on Iraq. Patriotic truth tellers, we need you! In an interview last year with US News and World Report, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel said that on Iraq, "The White House is completely disconnected from reality ... It's like they're just making it up as they go along."
Ditto for an adventure against Iran. But the juggernaut has begun to roll; the White House/FOX News/Washington Times spin machine is at full tilt. This is where whistleblowers come in. Some of you will have the equivalent of the Gen. Abrams cable, shedding light on what the Bush administration is up to beneath the spin. Those of you clued into Israeli plans and US intelligence support for them might clue us in too. Don't bother this time with the once-independent Congressional oversight committees; you will have no protection, in any case, if you choose that route - CIA Director Porter Goss's recent claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor should you bother with the once-independent New York Times. Find some other way; just be sure you get the truth out - information that will provide the oxygen for democracy.
Better Late Than Never?
Don't wait until it's too late - like Dan Ellsberg and Sam Adams did on Vietnam. Any number of people would have had a good chance of stopping the Iraq war, had they the courage to disclose publicly what they knew BEFORE it was launched.
One of them, Paul Pillar, was national intelligence officer for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, and has just published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq." It is an insider's account of his tenure and the "disturbing developments" he witnessed on the job. In substance it tells us little more than what we have long since pieced together ourselves, but it provides welcome confirmation.
Sadly, Pillar speaks of the politicization of intelligence as though it were a bothersome headache rather than the debilitating cancer it is. Interviewed on NPR, he conceded without any evident embarrassment that, with respect to Iraq, "intelligence was not playing into a decision to be made. It was part of the effort to build support for the operation." So, in the vernacular of Watergate, Pillar's article is "modified limited hangout," in which he pulls many punches. Nowhere in Pillar's 4,450 words, for example, appears the name of former CIA director George Tenet, whom he now joins at Georgetown University.
It should qualify as another "disturbing development" that Pillar parrots the administration's default explanation for what drove its decision to topple Saddam: "namely, the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures in the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region." The word "oil" appears once in Pillar's article: "military bases" and "Israel" not at all. He splits hairs to be overly kind to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. "To be fair," writes Pillar, "Secretary Powell's presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda." Pillar seem to have forgotten how Powell used that speech to play up "the potentially more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder," and spoke of a "Saddam-bin Laden understanding going back to the early and mid-1990s."
Truly Disturbing
Generally absent is any sense of the enormity of what the Bush administration has done and the urgent imperative to prevent a repeat performance. With no perceptible demurral from inside the government, George W. Bush launched a war of aggression, defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" - like torture, for example.
If this doesn't qualify for whistleblowing, what does? Let us hope that administration officials, or analysts - or both - will find the courage to speak out loudly, and early enough to prevent the "disconnected-from-reality" cabal in the Bush administration from getting us into an unnecessary war with Iran.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A veteran of 27 years in the analysis division of CIA, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
