Fwd: Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed for Iran

[Guest guest]

Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed for Iran

By Ray McGovern

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Monday 06 February 2006

 

What President George W. Bush, FOX news, and the Washington Times were

saying about Iraq three years ago they are now saying about Iran. After

Saturday's vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report

Iran's suspicious nuclear activities to the UN Security Council, the

president wasted no time in warning, " The world will not permit the Iranian

regime to gain nuclear weapons. "

 

The next IAEA milestone will be reached on March 6, when its director,

Mohamed ElBaradei, makes a formal report to the Security Council regarding

what steps Iran needs to take to allay growing suspicions. The Bush

administration, however, has already mounted a full-court press to indict

and convict the Iranian leaders, and the key question is why.

 

Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that

the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for

peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, as she

did last month, " There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian

regime to resume uranium enrichment, " she is being, well, disingenuous

again.

 

If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 President

Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald

Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet

future energy requirements. This is what Iranian officials are saying today,

and they are supported by energy experts who point out that oil extraction

in Iran is already at or near peak and that the country will need

alternatives to oil in coming decades.

 

Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the

reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear

reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US

corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project fell

through when the Shah was ousted three years later.

 

It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have a

nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their nuclear

program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be fools not to.

Iran is one of three countries earning the " axis-of-evil " sobriquet from

President Bush and it has watched what happened to Iraq, which had no

nuclear weapons, as well as what did not happen to North Korea, which does

have them. And Iran's rival Israel, which has not signed the

Non-Proliferation Treaty but somehow escapes widespread opprobrium, has a

formidable nuclear arsenal cum delivery systems.

 

Israeli threats to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities simply provide

additional incentive to Tehran to bury and harden them against the kind of

Israeli air attack that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in

1981. Although the US (together with every other UN Security Council member)

condemned that attack, Dick Cheney and other senior officials do not

disguise their view that it was just what the doctor ordered at the time ...

and that the same prescription might take care of Iran.

 

Who Is Threatened by Iranian Nukes?

 

The same country that felt threatened by putative nuclear weapons in the

hands of Iraq. With at least 200 nuclear weapons and various modes of

delivery at their disposal, the Israelis have a powerful deterrent. They

appear determined to put that deterrent into play early to pre-empt any

nuclear weapons capability in Iran, rather than have to deal with one after

it has been put in place. Israeli leaders seem allergic to the thought that

other countries in the region might be able to break its nuclear monopoly

and they react neuralgically to proposals for a nuclear-free zone in the

Middle East. Bending over backwards to such sensitivities, the US delegation

to the IAEA delayed the proceedings for a day in a futile attempt to delete

from Sunday's report language calling for such a zone. The final report

called for a " Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction. " This is the

first time a link has been made, however implicitly, between the Iranian and

Israeli nuclear programs.

 

The argument that the US is also threatened directly by nuclear weapons

in Iranian hands is as far-fetched as was the case before the war in Iraq,

when co-opted intelligence analysts were strongly encouraged to stretch

their imaginations - to include, for example the specter that Iraqi weapons

of mass destruction could be delivered by unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs)

launched from ships off the US coast. No, I'm not kidding. They even

included this in the infamous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of

October 1, 2002.

 

That canard was held up to ridicule by the US Air Force, which was

permitted to take a footnote in the NIE. The scare story nonetheless

provided grist for the president's key speech in Cincinnati on October 7,

2002 - three days before Congress voted to authorize war. That was also the

speech in which he also warned, " Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot

wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of

a mushroom cloud. "

 

While Congress was voting for war on October 10, more candid

observations came in highly unusual remarks from a source with excellent

access to high-level thinking at the White House. Philip Zelikow, at the

time a member of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory

Board and confidant of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (and

later Executive Director of the 9/11 commission), said this to a crowd at

the University of Virginia:

 

Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll

tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990 -

it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak

its name ... the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it

rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

 

More recently, in the case of Iran, President Bush has been unabashed in

naming Israel as the most probable target of any Iranian nuclear weapons. He

has also created a rhetorical lash-up of the US and Israel, referring three

times in the past two weeks to Israel as an " ally " of the US, as if to

condition Americans to the notion that the US is required to join Israel in

any confrontation with Iran. For example, on February 1 the president told

the press, " Israel is a solid ally of the United States; we will rise to

Israel's defense if need be. " Asked if he meant the US would rise to

Israel's defense militarily, Bush replied with a startlingly open-ended

commitment, " You bet, we'll defend Israel. "

 

In repeatedly labeling Israel our " ally, " Bush is following his own

corollary to the dictum of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that if

you repeat something often enough, most people will believe it. In an

unusual moment of candor in a discussion of domestic affairs last May, Bush

noted:

 

That's the third time I've said that. I'll probably say it three more

times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and

over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

 

Why No Treaty?

 

The trouble is that, strictly speaking, allies are not picked by

presidential whim - or by smart staffers like the top Bush aide who bragged

that he and his colleagues are " history's actors ... creating new

realities. " Bush's speech writers are acting as though the " new realities "

they create can include defense treaties. But unless they've changed the

Constitution, in our system nations become allies via treaty; and treaties

have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

 

There is no treaty of alliance with Israel.

 

But why? Earlier, I had had the impression that it must be because of US

reluctance - despite widespread sympathy for Israel - to get entangled in

the complexities of the Middle East and gratuitously antagonize Arab

countries. Comparing notes with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for

Sanity (VIPS) colleagues with more experience in the Middle East, however, I

learned that the Israelis themselves have shown strong resistance to a

US-Israel defense treaty - for reasons quite sound from their perspective,

and quite instructive from ours.

 

The possibility of a bilateral treaty was broached after the 1973 Yom

Kippur war as a way to reduce chances of armed conflict between Israel and

its Arab neighbors. But before the US could commit to defending Israel, its

boundaries would have had to be defined, and the Israelis wanted no part of

that. Moreover, the Israelis feared that a defense pact would curb their

freedom of action - as would signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were

aware that in a crisis situation, the US would almost certainly discourage

them from resorting to their familiar policy of massive - often

disproportionate - retaliation against the Arabs. It became quite clear that

the Israelis did not want the US to have any say over when they would use

force, against whom, and what (US or non-US) equipment might be employed.

 

Aside from all that, the Israelis were, and are, confident that their

influence in Washington is such as to ensure US support, no matter what.

And, as President Bush's rhetoric demonstrates, they are correct in thinking

they can, in effect, have their cake and eat it too - a commitment

equivalent to a defense treaty, with no binding undertakings on Israel's

part.

 

That is a very volatile admixture. Congress would do well to wake up to

its Constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities in this key area -

particularly now that the juggernaut to war has begun to roll.

 

Preparing the Public

 

One major task is to convince the public and, as far as possible, our

allies that the Iran-nuclear problem is critical. This would be an uphill

task, were it not for the success of our domesticated media in suppressing

the considered judgment of the US intelligence community that Iran is

nowhere near a nuclear weapon.

 

Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer, to her credit, drew on several

inside sources to report on August 2, 2005, that the latest NIE concludes

Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a

nuclear weapon until " early to mid-next decade, " with general consensus

among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest. That

important information was ignored in other media and quickly dropped off the

radar screen.

 

In the Washington of today there is no need to bother with unwelcome

intelligence that does not support the case you wish to make. Polls show

that hyped-up public statements on the threat from Iran are having some

effect, and indiscriminately hawkish pronouncements by usual suspects like

senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain are icing on the cake. Ahmed

Chalabi-type Iranian " dissidents " have surfaced to tell us of secret tunnels

for nuclear weapons research, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps

reminding the world that Iran is the " world's leading state sponsor of

terrorism. " Administration spokespeople keep warning of Iranian interference

on the Iraqi side of their long mutual border - themes readily replayed in

FOX channel news and the Washington Times. This morning's Chicago Tribune

editorial put it this way:

 

There will likely be an economic confrontation with Iran, or a military

confrontation, or both. Though diplomatic efforts have succeeded in

convincing most of the world that this matter is grave, diplomatic efforts

are highly unlikely to sway Iran.

 

On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that Congress

has the political will to use military force against Iran, if necessary,

repeating the mantra " We cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear nation. "

Even Richard Perle has come out of the woodwork to add a convoluted new

wrinkle regarding the lessons of the attack on Iraq. Since one cannot depend

on good intelligence, says Perle, it is a matter of " take action now or lose

the option of taking action. " One of the most influential intellectual

authors of the war on Iraq, Perle and his " neo-conservative " colleagues see

themselves as men of biblical stature. Just before the attack on Iraq, Perle

prophesized:

 

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it

entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage

a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

 

Those songs have turned out to be funeral dirges for over 2,250 US

troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

 

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the

ecumenical Church of the Saviour. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is

now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

(VIPS).

 

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