Published: 2007-04-02
With U.S. forces already bogged down, stretched thin, and wearing out in Iraq and Afghanistan, will the Bush administration actually launch another war against an even larger, more formidable foe: Iran? Will it dare to do so without first obtaining the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war? And will it do so in spite of the marked shift in American public opinion in favor of withdrawal from Iraq?
Denials notwithstanding, the evidence suggests that the Bush administration is fully committed to a “pre-emptive” war against Iran, possibly as early as April. Though the administration claims that it is pursuing all diplomatic means available to avert a war with Iran, President Bush has been concentrating naval, air, and missile forces on Tehran’s doorstep. Almost any provocation or pretext could now trip the hair trigger that has been put in place and unleash a full-scale war that would quickly dwarf the war in Iraq. It could also set in motion a whole series of catastrophic consequences — including major upheavals in Iraq and the Middle East, as well as 9/11-magnitude terrorist strikes in Europe and the United States.
One of the most likely results of a U.S. attack on Iran would be a huge and sudden increase in U.S. casualties in Iraq, as the pro-Iran Shiite militias and the Shiite government — the government we have put in power and are busy training and arming — openly turn against the U.S.-led coalition forces. Muktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who commands the private militia known as the al-Mahdi Army in Iraq, has said he will attack our forces if the United States attacks Iran. Abd Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Tehran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Adel Abd al-Mahdi, head of SCIRI’s heavily armed Badr Brigades, have made similar threats.
Up to now, the U.S. military in Iraq has been engaged primarily in fighting the minority Sunni insurgency. Except for the battles against Shia forces in Najaf in 2004, and some other relatively minor battles with Shiites, most of the serious fighting over the last four years has been with the Sunnis. And our troops have had their hands full at that. The consensus among most military and intelligence experts is that President Bush’s planned “surge” of 20,000-40,000 additional troops will not be adequate even to pacify and stabilize Baghdad against the Sunnis. If hundreds of thousands of Shiites join the fray, the situation for U.S. troops in Iraq will go from bad to worse.
American Buildup
Is an unprovoked U.S. attack on Iran really that imminent? Let us simply note that in the past couple months pieces have been shifted into place in such a way that it is difficult to imagine a triggering incident not occurring, whether by design or accident.
The build-up has been ominous. In early January President Bush deployed a Patriot Missile battalion from Fort Bliss, Texas, to the Middle East. Why? The Patriots are for shooting down missiles. But the Sunni insurgents don’t have missiles. The Sunnis are targeting our troops with sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, car bombs, and roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices), not missiles. The Iranians do have missiles, like the Chinese-made intermediate-range ballistic missiles known as the Shihab-3. If and when we attack Iran, the Tehran regime will surely cut loose with as many missiles as they can fire, aimed at Israel and our troops, bases, and ships in the region, as well as at the oil platforms and tankers of Saudi Arabia and the gulf emirates.
Which brings us to the gathering American armada in the Persian Gulf region. On February 20, the USS John C. Stennis, a Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier, and its accompanying strike group joined the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier group in the Sea of Oman. The Stennis strike group also includes the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam and guided-missile destroyers USS O’Kane and USS Preble. The USS Nimitz carrier group is headed to the area, ostensibly to replace the USS Eisenhower. But there is good reason to suspect that rather than replace the Eisenhower, the plan may actually be for it to join the gathering naval firepower, which also includes British and Australian vessels.
In addition, U.S. Air Force units in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the region reportedly have been gearing up for major action. Special operations teams have also reportedly stepped up activities inside Iran over the past several months, including ops teams that provide laser guidance to direct precision bombs to their targets.
The announcement in January that Admiral William Fallon would be taking charge of Central Command (CENTCOM) — responsible for our forces in the Middle East — puzzled many observers. Why put a naval aviator in charge of two ground wars, they asked? Unless, of course, his main focus is not going to be the ground wars already underway in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the air war that is being planned for Iran. The war that administration officials insist they are not planning.
“We are not planning for a war with Iran,” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters when asked about the deployment of the second aircraft carrier group to the region’s waters. “The purpose of that [deployment] is simply to underscore to our friends, as well as to our potential adversaries in the region, that the United States has considered the Persian Gulf and that whole area and stability in that area to be a vital American national interest,” he said.
In a statement issued on February 23, the Pentagon said: “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran. To suggest anything to the contrary is simply wrong, misleading and mischievous.”
In early February, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that there is “zero chance” of the United States going to war against Iran. Later, during a Senate hearing, Gen. Pace denied “categorically” that the Pentagon is planning air strikes against Iran. Indeed, the administration insists that it is vigorously pursuing diplomatic solutions to the Iranian nuclear problem through the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Iraqi government’s proposed “neighbors meeting” with Iran and Syria in Baghdad.
However, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other administration officials have been stoking the war-with-Iran fires for the past couple of years, in precisely the same way that they set the table for war with Iraq. As with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, they have been sounding the “regime change” siren against Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, who has replaced Saddam as the new Hitler who threatens world peace with programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. While acknowledging that Iran is most likely several years away from completing nuclear weapons, the regime-change chorus is calling for a pre-emptive strike now. But the war plans the administration has drawn up call not merely for a few surgical strikes against the suspected nuclear facilities at Bushehr, Natanz, and Isfahan, but hundreds of other targets as well.
A number of current government officials have spoken off the record to various journalists about the detailed plans for an air-naval “shock and awe” attack on Iran, while other former Bush officials have spoken openly about the plans. Wayne White, former deputy director of Middle East intelligence for the Bush State Department, said in a February 14 radio interview that “we are talking [about] a huge package of air strikes. We are talking in the neighborhood of 1,500 combat sorties by aircraft and launches of cruise missiles against various targets.”
Phony Intelligence Replay
America backed the administration’s call to go after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001. But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many Americans were not convinced of the need to go to war against Iraq. Everybody agreed Saddam was a bad guy, but that alone was not sufficient cause for invading Mesopotamia. So the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans cooked up the “intelligence” deemed plausible to provide sufficient cause. The Office of Special Plans, under neocons Douglas Feith, Abram Shulsky, and Lawrence Franklin, came up with forged documents purportedly showing that Saddam was buying yellowcake uranium to build nuclear weapons. Together with other disinformation ploys, this “proved” the grave and imminent threat of Saddam’s WMDs. Secretary of State Colin Powell was given the task of presenting this fabricated evidence to the world in a speech to the United Nations.
The same neocon elements at the Office of Special Plans are behind the current intelligence-cooking efforts to justify starting a war against Iran. (Franklin has been sent to prison for spying for Israel, but Feith, Shulsky, and many of the original Office of Special Plans team remain in place.) Most recently, the administration has put out the line that Iran is providing the IEDs that the Sunni insurgents are using in Iraq against U.S. troops. The White House and State Department are replaying the WMD inspection gambit with the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“It is absolutely parallel,” says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, noting the administration’s near-identical propaganda campaigns against Iraq and Iran. “They’re using the same dance steps: demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux.”
Giraldi reported in August 2005 that Dick Cheney had ordered Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to prepare:
a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States … [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons … not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.
Hillary Mann Leverett, President Bush’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, has accused her former colleagues of scheming to deceive us into war. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,” said Leverett in a February 12 CNN interview.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has accused both the Bush administration and Congress of using “the talk of a troop surge and jobs program in Iraq” to “distract Americans from the very real possibility of an attack on Iran.”
Paul added, “Rumors are flying about when, not if, Iran will be bombed by either Israel or the US, and possibly with nuclear weapons. Our CIA says Iran is ten years away from producing a nuclear bomb and has no delivery system, but this does not impede our plans to keep ‘everything on the table’ when dealing with Iran.”
Rep. Paul continued in his January 11 remarks on the House floor:
We should remember that Iran, like Iraq, is a third-world nation without a significant military.... I am concerned, however, that a contrived Gulf of Tonkin-type incident may occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran.... Even if such an attack is carried out by Israel over U.S. objections, we will be politically and morally culpable since we provided the weapons and dollars to make it possible.
Coming from the other end of the political spectrum is Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser and a key player in the team that overthrew the Shah and put the revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Khomeini into power. A committed internationalist, Brzezinski, nevertheless, has accused the Bush administration of planning a provocation that would draw us into war with Iran.
In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1, Brzezinski stated: “A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran.” “To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter,” he continued, “is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Again, the Iraq precedent offers plenty of reasons to suspect a provocation. Last year the British press published the contents of several pages of minutes of a January 31, 2003 Oval Office meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair and several of their advisers. The notes, taken by Blair’s main foreign adviser, David Manning, show the two leaders agreeing to begin the bombing of Iraq on March 10, 2003, followed by invasion and occupation.
Bush and Blair both envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government. Manning wrote that Bush predicted it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Mr. Blair agreed.
However, the duo admitted they had a problem: no WMDs had been found in Iraq and none were likely to be found before the bombing date. Manning reported that President Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire. “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach,” Manning noted.
Then there is the notorious “Downing Street Memo,” showing an even earlier admission of “fixing” intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq. The memo concerns a secret July 23, 2002 meeting of top Blair government officials. The memo was written by Britain’s MI6 spy chief, Sir Richard Dearlove:
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. [Emphasis added.]
However, according to former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, the deception and provocation strategy for war against Iraq preceded the 9/11 attacks. O’Neill says that from day one of the Bush administration, there was discussion only of “how” to effect regime change in Iraq and not “why.” No sooner had the Bush team taken office, O’Neill has stated, than “there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.” He added: “It was all about finding a way to do it. The president was saying: ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”
Iran: Iraq Redux?
It is no secret that the Ahmadinejad/Khameini regime in Tehran is malevolent and a major font of subversion and terrorism. This magazine has reported on that in detail over the past three decades. Moreover, it is clear that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. However, best estimates are that Iran is several years away from being able to produce nuclear weapons.
Are we now witnessing the same kind of deception, propaganda, and provocation to get America to support an unprovoked attack on Iran? The evidence overwhelmingly screams, “YES.” A successful repeat of that deception/propaganda/provocation campaign would spell utter disaster for the United States.
There is no evidence of a grave and imminent danger requiring a pre-emptive military attack, especially since the consequences could be horrendous, and other more reasonable options exist. What are some of those potential consequences? Here are but a few:
- As already mentioned, an immediate widening and intensification of the violence in Iraq, as Shi’ite forces join the fray, resulting in a drastic increase in U.S. casualties.
- Rather than causing Iranians to revolt against Ahmadinejad, as the neocons claim, an attack on Iran will most likely solidify Iranian nationalism behind the regime, causing even moderate Iranians to rally against the invaders, as Saddam found out when he tried the same thing.
- The whole Middle East will be further destabilized; many oil fields, pipelines, tankers, and shipping ports in the region will be damaged, destroyed, or shut down; oil prices will skyrocket, and America’s economy will be greatly harmed.
- Russia and China will be the big winners in the region, as both powers continue to solidify their influence and play against America’s image as the imperialist, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab superpower.
- Anti-Americanism and Islamic jihadism will be whipped into a new frenzy.
- Terrorist cells already allowed into the United States, due to our government’s suicidal refusal to protect our own borders while policing the world, will embark on a campaign of terror attacks.
That’s just for starters. But it doesn’t need to turn out that way. We can, and must, prevail upon our fellow Americans to activate Congress to stop any plans for an attack upon Iran.
How then can we protect against the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran? As we have stated in these pages before, the key to that dilemma rests with our policies toward Moscow and Beijing. The facts and the experts attest that the Iranian nuclear threat has been and remains completely dependent on expertise, technology, and components from Russia and China. Without their continued help, it is unlikely that Iran could complete its nuclear WMD program. Yet the current Bush administration, like the Clinton and Bush Senior administrations before it, pretends that Russia and China are our “partners” in helping rein in Iran, North Korea and other “rogue” regimes. Putting all of the pressure at our disposal against Moscow and Beijing to cease this dangerous proliferation is the key to stopping the threat from Tehran.
Who Decides?
Since World War II, presidents have time and again illegally taken the United States to war — in Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq (to name but a few cases) — and always with disastrous results. Our “law of the land,” the Constitution, wrote Founding Father James Madison, has “with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.” Alexander Hamilton noted that the president’s war powers “would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral,” while the main power of the sword would rest with Congress. The Constitution grants to Congress alone the power: “To declare War”; “To raise and support Armies”; “To provide and maintain a Navy”; “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” The people must not allow presidents to usurp these powers, or the Congress to allow or abet such usurpation.
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