US
Spy Agencies Pressed For “Intelligence” To Justify
War Against Iran
By Bill Van Auken
28 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
With the clock ticking to an
August 31 deadline set by the United Nations Security Council’s
resolution demanding that Iran abandon its uranium enrichment program,
a section of the American ruling establishment is pressing US intelligence
agencies to produce “evidence” that Iran’s nuclear
ambitions pose an imminent nuclear weapons threat.
The aim is the same as that
pursued by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration
in the run-up to the Iraq war who sought to manufacture phony “intelligence”
that Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction
justified a US invasion and occupation of the country.
This is the political significance
of the hastily written and shoddy report issued by the House Intelligence
Committee last Wednesday, a day after Iran issued its response to the
UN ultimatum, which Washington deemed to have fallen “short”
of the resolution’s conditions for avoiding sanctions.
While Russia and China—both
veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council—have indicated
support for Iran’s call for further negotiations, Washington is
having none of it, demanding instead that Teheran unconditionally surrender
to the UN diktat.
Iran has shown no inclination
to follow such a course. Instead, on Saturday, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad staged a symbolic inauguration of a heavy water plant near
Arak, in central Iran. He insisted that the facility was intended solely
for peaceful purposes, serving medical, scientific and agricultural
needs. But Western powers have stressed that it is possible to extract
plutonium—a material used in the production of nuclear weapons—from
spent fuel produced at an associated heavy water, research reactor that
is still under construction.
The Bush administration has
vowed to make an “expedited” push for economic sanctions
unless the Iranian government fully submits before the August 31 deadline.
There is every indication that it is deliberately pushing towards a
confrontation with Teheran, making demands that it knows will be rejected
and, as in the buildup to the war against Iraq, going through the motions
at the UN in order to ultimately proclaim that the body is incapable
of dealing with the crisis and unilateral American action is required.
According to the Washington
Post, the House Committee report was drafted principally by a Republican
committee staff member named Frederick Fleitz, who is a former CIA agent
known for his hardline views on Iran. Fleitz became a special assistant
to John Bolton, who, before being appointed US ambassador to the United
Nations, was the State Department’s number-three official, responsible
for arms proliferation.
Bolton, presumably with Fleitz’s
assistance, played a prominent role in demonizing the governments of
the so-called “axis of evil”—Iraq, Iran and North
Korea—and sought to foment a scare campaign against Cuba by floating
demonstrably false claims about Havana running a secret bio-weapons
program.
The House Intelligence Committee
report, entitled “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat,”
is a piece of war propaganda. It features a lurid cover bearing a color
photograph of Iranian President Ahmadinejad speaking at a podium bearing
the logo “The World without Zionism.”
The thrust of the document
is its contention that “the United States lacks critical information
needed for analysts to make many of their judgments with confidence
about Iran and there are many significant information gaps.”
It accuses the CIA and other
US intelligence agencies of failing to demonstrate “the ability
to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments on these
essential topics, which have been recognized as essential to US national
security.”
It goes on to produce its
own wildly inflated charges against Iran, many of them based on willful
distortions of intelligence reports issued by the US as well as those
of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. Other claims are
founded on assertions, culled from newspaper reports, by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials.
Falsifying data on Iran’s enrichment program
Its unsubstantiated claims
about Iran’s nuclear program contradict all estimates by the US,
the UN and the Iranian government itself. Thus, it claims that Iran
is “enriching uranium to weapons grade using a 164-machine centrifuge
cascade.” In reality, Iran has achieved 3.5 percent enrichment,
not the 80 percent required to make a bomb. Making enough of such material
for a weapon would require 16,000 centrifuges, not 164.
This attempt to invent ominous
“intelligence” is apparently meant to counter well-established
intelligence estimates that Iran is years away from achieving nuclear
weapons. These estimates undercut attempts to use Iran’s nuclear
program as a pretext for launching a “preventive war” of
aggression.
The Bush administration’s
director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, for example, told
the BBC last June that Iran will not be “in a position to have
a nuclear weapon” until “sometime between the beginning
of the next decade and the middle of the next decade.” Similarly,
last February, Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee that
US intelligence believes Iran has neither a nuclear weapon nor the fissile
material needed to make one.
The House committee report
goes on to make unsubstantiated claims portraying the recent Israeli
war against Lebanon as the result of an Iranian-ordered provocation
by Hezbollah, which it portrays as a mere Iranian pawn—an assessment
rejected by virtually all those with knowledge of the region. This supposed
relationship is then portrayed as an example of Iran using “terrorist
proxies” to achieve a global reach.
The document states, “The
nature of Iran’s relationship with Al Qaeda, if any, is unclear,
and US intelligence must enhance its insights into this critical dynamic.
Iran’s relationship with its proxies give [sic] it a global reach,
which would be even more alarming should Tehran divert WMD to these
groups.”
This is almost identical
language to that employed by administration officials in 2002, when
unsubstantiated reports and outright lies were used to invent an Iraqi-Al
Qaeda connection. This fabrication was the basis of a campaign to terrorize
the American people with the specter of terrorists, armed by Iraq, attacking
US cities with nuclear weapons.
The document suggests that
similar “intelligence” is required about Iran. It states,
“Analysts must evaluate all contingencies and consider out-of-the
box assessments that challenge conventional wisdom.” It adds,
“Iran analysts must also make greater use of open source intelligence
on Iran, the availability of which is augmented by Iran’s prolific
(if persecuted) press.”
For “out-of-the-box
assessments” one should read fabricated intelligence on the order
of the supposed Iraqi purchase of uranium in Niger, or Baghdad’s
importation of aluminum tubes for a non-existent nuclear program.
As for the advice to rely
more on “open source intelligence” and “persecuted”
Iranian press sources, the aim is to demand greater reliance on Iranian
exile groups, which are as notorious as their Iraqi counterparts for
promoting the most lurid possible tales of weapons of mass destruction
and extensive terrorist ties.
According to a report published
August 24 in the New York Times citing unnamed official sources, the
criticism and pressure directed at US intelligence agencies by the House
committee report “reflect the views of some officials inside the
White House and the Pentagon who advocated going to war with Iraq and
now are pressing for confronting Iran directly over its nuclear program
and ties to terrorism....”
The newspaper quoted one
“senior United States official” faulting US intelligence
agencies for failing to “make judgment calls.” He added,
“We’re not in a court of law. When they say there is ‘no
evidence,’ you have to ask them what they mean, what is the meaning
of the term ‘evidence.’ ”
The definition of the term
should be abundantly clear in the wake of the Iraq invasion, in which
UN weapons inspectors and US analysts insisted there was no evidence
to substantiate Washington’s claims about Iraqi “weapons
of mass destruction.” In an attempt to counter these assessments,
officials in the White House and the Pentagon browbeat CIA analysts
into accepting the sensationalist accounts of exile groups as good coin,
and went outside established channels to fabricate their own “intelligence.”
The most glaring example
of this attempt to inflate the supposed threat from Iran came from former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The prominent Republican told the New York
Times: “When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years
away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: ‘If North Korea were to ship
them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?’ ”
The twisted logic of militarism
Of course, the same twisted
logic can be used to justify military action against Cuba, Venezuela,
Syria or any nation that is deemed an impediment to the strategic interests
of US imperialism.
The element of irrationality
that pervades this debate is striking, and the push for punishing sanctions
and even military action against Iran—given the present state
of the US occupation in Iraq and the popular repudiation of US militarism
throughout the world—appears to border on the insane.
Washington’s demand
for the speedy approval of severe sanctions against Teheran will be
met with popular contempt and hatred throughout the Arab and Muslim
world, and beyond. The world watched in disgust as for six weeks Washington
used all of its power to block any such sanctions against Israel and
veto all international efforts to halt Israel’s wanton destruction
of Lebanon and slaughter of innocent civilians.
It is widely predicted that
a war against Iran could ignite a massive rebellion by the Shia population
in Iraq against the already beleaguered US occupation forces, as well
as upheavals throughout the Middle East and a possible cut-off of much
of the world’s oil supplies, triggering a global economic crisis.
Yet the threat of war is
unmistakable and explicit and is driven by the logic of the imperialist
project initiated with the invasion of Iraq three-and-a-half years ago.
The attempt to turn Iraq into a US protectorate, thereby securing US
domination over its vast oil resources, has produced a debacle and,
by most estimates, served to strengthen the position of Iran, both within
Iraq and throughout the region. The solution, according to prominent
elements within American ruling circles, is to prepare a new war aimed
at “regime change” in Iran.
Once again, there is little
vocal opposition to such a war within the political establishment, with
prominent Democrats having criticized the Bush administration from the
right for failing to take a tough enough stand against Teheran.
In its August 24 editorial,
the Washington Post took China and Russia to task for signaling support
for Iran’s call for negotiations rather than Washington’s
demand for immediate sanctions. The editorial concluded with a clear
threat that failure to support Washington’s moves against Iran
could only hasten US military action.
“But if Russia and
China want to be accepted as forces for global stability that they claim
to be,” the Post warned, “they should not undercut Western
efforts to defuse the Iran crisis by peaceful means. No responsible
power has anything to gain from further tension in the Middle East,
still less an eventual war over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”
In other words, if you do
not support Washington’s attempts to use the UN as a cover for
its buildup against Iran, you are responsible for the US launching another
unilateral war of aggression.
Right-wing layers that have
dominated the Republican Party and played the leading role in orchestrating
Washington’s unprovoked war against Iraq are even more explicit.
They have grown increasingly bitter in their criticism of the Bush administration’s
policy toward Iran, and particularly the role played by the State Department
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This has reached a hysterical
pitch in the wake of the military setback and political defeat suffered
by the US and Israel in Lebanon, with prominent right-wing columnists
talking of “appeasement” and comparing the administration’s
role to that of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 dealings with Hitler
in Munich.
Among the most chilling examples—but
by no means out of the mainstream of the Republican right—was
a piece written last week by Townhall.com columnist Walter Williams.
“Think about it,”
wrote Williams. “Currently, the US has an arsenal of 18 Ohio class
submarines. Just one submarine is loaded with 24 Trident nuclear missiles.
Each Trident missile has eight nuclear warheads capable of being independently
targeted. That means the US alone has the capacity to wipe out Iran,
Syria or any other state that supports terrorist groups or engages in
terrorism—without risking the life of a single soldier.”
Williams goes on to lament
that Washington’s concern for “worldwide public opinion”
and “weak will” is blocking the unleashing of a nuclear
holocaust against these countries. “Any attempt to annihilate
our Middle East enemies would create all sorts of handwringing about
the innocent lives lost, so-called collateral damage.”
That such words can be written
and published by political elements politically close to the current
administration in Washington is a measure of the deep crisis of US imperialism
and the profound dangers it poses. At least for some of these layers,
victory in the “global war on terrorism” has come to mean
annihilating tens of millions of people.