Pushing War With Iran
By: William F. Jasper
October 29, 2007

“Bush Warns of a Nuclear Armed Iran,” blared the headline of an Associated Press report on the president’s October 3, 2007 speech before the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Do the increasingly strident statements by the president, as well as by State Department and Pentagon officials, over the past several months signal that a U.S. military attack on Iran may be imminent? Both opponents and supporters of a military strike believe it is coming soon, based not only on official administration rhetoric and the observable preparatory movement of U.S. military assets, but also on the White House’s use of private sources to build a pro-war constituency among the American public.

In recent months there has been a marked escalation of calls — by neoconservative think tanks, radio talk shows, and media organs closely allied to the Bush administration — for a massive pre-emptive U.S. military strike on Iran. Some prominent spokesmen are openly calling for the U.S. to use tactical nuclear missiles. Is this a spontaneous crescendo of popular support or a huge propaganda campaign initiated by White House spinmeisters?

On September 30, the Israeli internet news site, IsraelNationalNews.com, reported on the comments of two of the leading neoconservative war hawks, John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz. The story by Gil Ronen, entitled “Bolton, Podhoretz Say: Bomb Iranian Nuclear Plants,” reports:

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Conservative Party delegates in Britain on Sunday that UN efforts to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country. Influential conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz told a British paper that he has advised U.S. President George W. Bush to do just that.

As THE NEW AMERICAN reported in its April 2 cover story, “Engineering War,” the Bush administration has been strongly signaling for months that it is preparing militarily for a massive attack on Iran. It also has been trying to prepare the public psyche to accept this aggression as a course of action that is unavoidable; there is, supposedly, no other alternative.

Neocon War Drums

That is the unmistakable message that is being sent repeatedly through the neoconservative transmission belts in the blogosphere, the lecture circuits, talk radio, television news, and the political campaign trails. The building crescendo has the sound and smell of a government-orchestrated propaganda campaign. Back on August 31, the New Yorker posted an online report from Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin who cited an unnamed Washington neoconservative source who says the current warmongering upsurge has come specifically at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney. According to Mr. Rubin:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be a heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this — they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

We cannot confirm whether or not the above-mentioned news organs are taking direction from Mr. Cheney. We don’t need to; all of them are, in point of fact, carrying out a “heavy sustained assault” for an imminent pre-emptive attack on Iran. And their voices are being amplified by the usual war-hawk choristers that have usurped the conservative label.

But Bolton’s speech in England shows that the propaganda line has a built-in mission-creep message. Although the initial selling point to the party faithful is that Iran’s WMD capabilities must be taken out because of the potential threat posed to Israel and America, the war plans are morphing into much grander objectives, starting with “regime change.” (Where have we heard that before; and where has it ever ended with that, once regime change was effected?)

Mr. Bolton told his British audience that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove “the source of the problem,” namely, Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Here’s how IsraelNationalNews.com reported it:

“If we were to strike Iran,” Bolton said, “it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change as well, because I think that really sends the signal that we are not attacking the people, [but rather] the nuclear weapons program. The U.S. once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back.” His words were met with applause and cheers.

Of course, if Ahmadinejad were removed (and even executed), we would soon find (as we found in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq when Milosevich, the Taliban and Saddam, respectively, were removed) that the mission had “evolved” from regime change to nation building. Which, naturally, means perpetual occupation of Iran by U.S. military forces (already spread deadly thin) or UN “coalition-of-the-willing” military forces paid for by the American taxpayers (already bled thin).

Mr. Podhoretz is now a senior foreign-policy adviser to GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, who seems to revel in his image as the most hawkish of the Republican hopefuls. Giuliani has publicly stated his position in favor of a pre-emptive military strike and doesn’t rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain are also keeping the nuclear option on the table.

Pre-emptive Blitz

The Sunday Times of London reported on September 2 that the Pentagon had already drawn up plans for a “three day blitz” on over one thousand targets to take out Iran’s entire military:

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.”

Alexis Debat, the French terrorism and security “expert” cited by the Times, has been a major neocon cheerleader for widening the Iraq War policies and for a pre-emptive attack on Iran. He has been presented as an expert on terrorism and/or national security, not only by the Sunday Times (an organ of Rupert Murdoch’s hawkish media empire), but also by ABC News, PBS, the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Time, the International Herald Tribune, and the National Interest. He was until recently a reporter and consultant for ABC News and a senior fellow at the prestigious Nixon Center. However, it turns out that Monsieur Debat is a complete fraud. “Dr.” Debat’s Ph.D. from the Sorbonne doesn’t exist. The interviews he supposedly conducted with Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, Barak Obama, Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, and others were totally fabricated. ABC News and the Nixon Center have quietly announced that he “resigned” recently from their employ.

However, the one story the now-toxic and discredited Alexis Debat very likely did not fabricate out of thin air is his report on the administration’s plans for an upcoming “shock and awe” assault on Iran. Debat’s claim of an imminent massive strike against the Tehran regime tracks very closely with the stories that the Bush spin doctors have been feeding to other trusted sources — such as Bolton, Podhoretz, and other neocons. Even more importantly, it tracks with the concentrated deployment of U.S. carrier groups and other military assets to the Persian Gulf over the past year and the escalating saber-rattling by Bush war hawks in the Pentagon, the State Department, and on Capitol Hill.

 http://www.thenewamerican.com/node/5999

Israel & America Plotting War On Iran
 http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?6578S

Ironic that the military has to protect the American people from its unelected Government.

Military Resistance Forced Shift on Iran Strike

by Gareth Porter
The George W. Bush administration's shift from the military option of a massive strategic attack against Iran to a surgical strike against selected targets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker earlier this month, appears to have been prompted not by new alarm at Iran's role in Iraq but by the explicit opposition of the nation's top military leaders to an unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

The reorientation of the military threat was first signaled by passages on Iran in Bush's Jan. 10 speech and followed by only a few weeks a decisive rejection by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of a strategic attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Although scarcely mentioned in press reports of the speech, which was devoted almost entirely to announcing the troop "surge" in Iraq, Bush accused both Iran and Syria of "allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Bush also alleged that Iran was "providing material support for attacks on American troops."

Those passages were intended in part to put pressure on Iran, and were accompanied by an intensification of a campaign begun the previous month to seize Iranian officials inside Iraq. But according to Hillary Mann, who was director for Persian Gulf and Afghanistan Affairs on the National Security Council staff in 2003, they also provided a legal basis for a possible attack on Iran.

"I believe the president chose his words very carefully," says Mann, "and laid down a legal predicate that could be used to justify later military action against Iran."

Mann says her interpretation of the language is based on the claim by the White House of a right to attack another country in "anticipatory self-defense" based on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. That had been the legal basis cited by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had in September 2002 in making the case for the invasion of Iraq.

The introduction of a new reason for striking Iran, which also implied a much more limited set of targets related to Iraq, followed a meeting between Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Dec. 13, 2006 in which the uniformed military leaders rejected a strike against Iran's nuclear program. Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein, reported last May that military and intelligence sources told him that Bush had asked the Joint Chiefs at the meeting about a possible strike against the Iranian nuclear program., and that they had unanimously opposed such an attack.

Mann says that she was also told by her own contacts in the Pentagon that the Joint Chiefs had expressed opposition to a strike against Iran.

The Joint Chiefs were soon joined in opposition to a strike on Iran by Admiral William Fallon, who was nominated to become CENTCOM commander in January. Mann says Pentagon contacts have also told her that Fallon made his opposition to war against Iran clear to the White House.

IPS reported last May that Fallon had indicated privately that he was determined to prevent an attack on Iran and even prepared to resign to do so. A source who met with Fallon at the time of his confirmation hearing quoted him as vowing that there would be "no war with Iran" while he was CENTCOM commander and as hinting very strongly that he would quit rather than go along with an attack.

Although he did not specifically refer to the Joint Chiefs, Fallon also suggested that other military leaders were opposing a strike against Iran, saying, "There are several of us who are trying to put the crazies back in the box," according to the same source.

Fallon's opposition to a strike against Iranian nuclear, military and economic targets would make it very difficult, if not impossible for the White House to carry out such an operation, according to military experts. As CENTCOM commander, Fallon has complete control over all military access to the region, says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, an expert on military strategy who has taught at the National War College.

Douglas McGregor, a retired Army Lt. Col. who was a tank commander in the 1991 Gulf War and has taught at the National Defense University, agrees. "I find it hard to imagine that anything can happen in the area without the involvement of the Central Command," says McGregor.

The possibility that Fallon might object to an unprovoked attack on Iran or even resign over the issue represents a significant deterrent to such an attack.

Former NSC adviser Mann believes the Iraq-focused strategy is now aimed at averting any resignation threat by Fallon or other military leaders by carrying out a very limited strike that would be presented as a response to a specific incident in Iraq in which the deaths of US soldiers could be attributed to Iranian policy. She says she doubts Fallon and other military leaders would "fall on their swords" over such a strike.

Gardiner agrees that Fallon is unlikely to refuse to carry out such a limited strike under those circumstances.

Mann believes the Bush-Cheney purpose in advancing the strategy is to provoke Iranian retaliation. "The concern I have is that it would be just enough so Iranians would retaliate against US allies," she says.

But the issue of what evidence of Iranian complicity would be adequate to justify such a strike evidently remains a matter of debate within the administration. A story published by McClatchy newspapers Aug. 9 reported that Vice President Dick Cheney had argued some weeks earlier for a strike against camps in Iran allegedly used to train Iraqi Shiite militiamen fighting US troops if "hard new evidence" could be obtained of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-US forces in Iraq.

But Cheney and his allies have been frustrated in the search for such evidence. Mann notes that British forces in southern Iraq patrolled the border very aggressively for six months last year to find evidence of Iranian involvement in supplying weapons to Iraqi guerrillas but found nothing.

After several months of trying to establish specific links between Iraqis suspected of trafficking in weapons to a specific Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard contact, the US command has not claimed a single case of such a link. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the US commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a Jul. 6 briefing that his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran."

Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is known to be closely allied with Cheney on Iran policy, has betrayed impatience with a policy that depends on obtaining proof of Iranian complicity in attacks. On Jun. 11 he called for "strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

Lieberman repeated that position on Jul. 2, but thus far it has not prevailed.

(Inter Press Service)

 http://www.antiwar.com /porter/?articleid=11781