Attacking
Iran For Israel?
By Ray McGovern
01 November, 2007
Consortiumnews.com
Secretary
of State Condoleeza Rice is at her mushroom-cloud hyperbolic best, and
this time Iran is the target. Her claim last week that “the policies
of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American
security interests in the Middle East and around the world” is
simply too much of a stretch.
To gauge someone’s
reliability, one depends largely on prior experience. Sadly, Rice’s
credibility suffers in comparison with Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Basing his judgment on the
findings of IAEA inspectors in Iran, ElBaradei reports that there is
no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program there.
If this sounds familiar it
is, in fact, déjà vu. ElBaradei said the same thing about
Iraq before it was attacked. But three days before the invasion, American
nuclear expert Dick Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert, “I think
Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong.”
Here we go again. As in the
case of Iraq, US intelligence has been assiduously looking for evidence
of a nuclear weapons program in Iran; but, alas, in vain. Burned by
the bogus “proof” adduced for Iraq-the uranium from Africa,
the aluminum tubes-the administration has shied away from fabricating
nuclear-related “evidence.” Are Bush and Cheney again relying
on the Rumsfeld dictum, that “the absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence?” There is a simpler answer.
Cat Out of the Bag
The Israeli ambassador to
the US, Sallai Meridor, let the cat out of the bag while speaking at
the American Jewish Committee luncheon on Oct. 22. In remarks paralleling
those of Rice, Meridor said Iran is the chief threat to Israel. Heavy
on the chutzpah, he then served gratuitous notice on Washington that
countering Iran’s nuclear ambitions will take a “united
United States in this matter,” lest the Iranians conclude, “come
January ‘09, they have it their own way.”
Meridor stressed that “very
little time” remained to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
How so? Even were there to be a nuclear program hidden from the IAEA,
no serious observer expects Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon much sooner
than five years from now.
Truth be told, every other
year since 1995 US intelligence has been predicting that Iran could
have a nuclear weapon in about five years. It has become downright embarrassing-like
a broken record, punctuated only by so-called “neo-conservatives”
like James Woolsey, who in August publicly warned that the U.S. may
have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt Tehran’s nuclear
weapons program.
Woolsey, self-described “anchor
of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs,” put it this way: “I’m afraid that within,
well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [the Iranians]
could have the bomb.”
The day before Ambassador
Meridor’s unintentionally revealing remark, Vice President Dick
Cheney reiterated, “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
That remark followed closely on President George W. Bush’s apocalyptic
warning of World War III, should Tehran acquire the knowledge to produce
a nuclear weapon.
The Israelis appear convinced
they have extracted a promise from Bush and Cheney that they will help
Israel nip Iran’s nuclear program in the bud before they leave
office. That is why the Israeli ambassador says there is “very
little time”-less than 15 months.
Never mind that there is
no evidence that the Iranian nuclear program is any more weapons-related
than the one Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld persuaded President Gerald Ford
to approve in 1976. Westinghouse and General Electric successfully lobbied
for approval to sell the Shah for $6.4 billion the kind of nuclear facilities
that Iran is now building, but the deal fell through when the Shah was
ousted in 1979.
With 200-300 nuclear weapons
in its arsenal, the Israelis enjoy a nuclear monopoly in the Middle
East. They mean to keep that monopoly and Israel’s current leaders
are pressing for the US to obliterate Iran’s fledgling nuclear
program.
Anyone aware of Iran’s
ability to retaliate realizes this would bring disaster to the whole
region and beyond. But this has not stopped Cheney and Bush in the past.
And the real rationale is reminiscent of the one revealed by Philip
Zelikow, confidant of Condoleezza Rice, former member of the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and later executive director of
the 9/11 Commission. On Oct. 10 2002, Zelikow 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-it’s the threat to 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.”
Harbinger?
The political offensive against
Iran coalesced as George W. Bush began his second term, with Cheney
out in front pressing for an attack on its nuclear-related facilities.
During a Jan. 20, 2005 interview with MSNBC, just hours before Bush’s
second inauguration, Cheney put Iran “right at the top of the
list of trouble spots,” and noted that negotiations and UN sanctions
might fail to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Cheney then added,
with remarkable nonchalance:
“Given the fact that
Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of
Israel, the Israelis might decide to act first, and let the rest of
the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
Does this not sound like
the so-called “Cheney plan” being widely discussed in the
media today? An Israeli attack; Iranian retaliation; the United States
springing to the defense of its “ally” Israel?
A big fan of preemption,
the vice president was the first U.S. official to speak approvingly
of Israel’s air attack on Iraq’s reactor at Osirak in 1981.
He included that endorsement in his important speech of Aug. 26, 2002,
in which he set the terms of reference for the subsequent campaign to
persuade Congress to approve war with Iraq.
Cheney has done little to
disguise his attraction to Israel’s penchant to preempt. Ten years
after the attack on Osirak, then-Defense Secretary Cheney reportedly
gave Israeli Maj. Gen. David Ivri, commander of the Israeli Air Force,
a satellite photo of the Iraqi nuclear reactor destroyed by U.S.-built
Israeli aircraft. On the photo Cheney penned, “Thanks for the
outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981.”
Nothing is known of Ivri’s
response, but it is a safe bet it was along the lines of “we could
not have done it without your country’s help.” Indeed, although
the U.S. officially condemned the attack (the Reagan administration
was supporting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq at the time), intelligence
and operational support that the Pentagon shared with the Israelis made
a major contribution to the success of the Israeli raid. With Vice President
Cheney now calling the shots, similar support is a virtual certainty
in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran.
It is no secret that former
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was already pressing in 2003 for
an early preemptive strike, insisting that Iran was likely to obtain
a nuclear weapon much earlier than the time forecast by U.S. intelligence.
Sharon even brought his own military adviser to brief Bush with aerial
photos of Iranian nuclear-related installations.
More troubling still, in
the fall of 2004 Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security
adviser to President George H.W. Bush and as Chair of the younger Bush’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, made some startling comments to
the Financial Times.
A master of discretion with
the media, Scowcroft nonetheless saw fit to make public his conclusion
that Sharon had Bush “mesmerized;” that he had our president
“wrapped around his little finger.” Needless to say, Scowcroft
was immediately ousted from the advisory board and is now persona non
grata at the White House in which he worked for so many years.
An Unstable Infatuation
George W. Bush first met
Sharon in 1998, when the Texas governor was taken on a tour of the Middle
East by Matthew Brooks, then executive director of the Republican Jewish
Coalition. Sharon was foreign minister at the time and took Bush on
a helicopter tour of the Israeli occupied territories. An Aug. 3, 2006
McClatchy wire story by Ron Hutcheson quotes Matthew Brooks:
“If there’s a
starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s
the day in late 1998, when he stood on a hilltop where Jesus delivered
the Sermon on the Mount, and, with eyes brimming with tears, read aloud
from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’ He was very emotional.
It was a tear-filled experience. He brought Israel back home with him
in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.”
Bush made gratuitous but
revealing reference to that trip at the first meeting of his National
Security Council on Jan. 30, 2001. After announcing he would abandon
the decades-long role of “honest broker” between Israelis
and Palestinians and would tilt pronouncedly toward Israel, Bush said
he had decided to take Sharon “at face value” and unleash
him.
At that point the president
brought up his trip to Israel with the Republican Jewish Coalition and
the flight over Palestinian camps, but there was no sense of concern
for the lot of the Palestinians. In Ron Suskind’s Price of Loyalty,
then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who took part at the NSC
meeting, quotes Bush: “Looked real bad down there,” the
president said with a frown. He then said it was time to end America’s
efforts in the region: “I don’t see much we can do over
there at this point.”
O’Neill reported that
Colin Powell, the newly minted but nominal secretary of state, was taken
completely by surprise at this nonchalant jettisoning of more nuanced
and balanced longstanding policy. Powell demurred, warning that this
would unleash Sharon and “the consequences could be dire, especially
for the Palestinians.” According to O’Neill, Bush just shrugged,
saying, “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify
things.” O’Neill says that Powell seemed “startled.”
It is a safe bet that the
vice president was in no way startled.
What Now?
The only thing that seems
to be standing in the way of a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear
facilities is unusual-but-sensible foot-dragging by the U.S. military.
It seems likely that the senior military leadership has told the president
and Cheney: This time let us brief you on what to expect on Day 2, on
Week 4, on Month 6-and on the many serious things Iran can do to Israel,
and to us in Iraq and elsewhere.
CENTCOM commander Admiral
William Fallon is reliably reported to have said, “We are not
going to do Iran on my watch.” And in an online Q-and-A on Sept.
27, award-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest spoke of a possible
“revolt” if pilots were ordered to fly missions against
Iran. She added:
“This is a little bit
of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief,
has said…that the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very
hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Besides,
it’s not the ‘war’ or ‘bombing’ part that’s
difficult; it’s the morning after and all the days after that.
Haven’t we learned that (again) from Iraq?”
How about Congress? Could
it act as a brake on Bush and Cheney? Forget it. If the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with its overflowing coffers supports
an attack on Iran, so will most of our spineless lawmakers. Already,
AIPAC has succeeded in preventing legislation that would have required
the president to obtain advance authorization for an attack on Iran.
And for every Admiral Fallon,
there is someone like the inimitable retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas
McInerney, a close associate of James Woolsey, “cakewalk”
Ken Adelman and other “neo-cons.” The air campaign “will
be easy,” says McInerney, a FOX pundit who was a rabid advocate
of shock and awe over Iraq. “Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that
we can’t penetrate,” he adds, and several hundred aircraft,
including stealth bombers, will be enough to do the trick:
“Forty-eight hours
duration, hitting 2,500 aim points to take out their nuclear facilities,
their air defense facilities, their air force, their navy, their Shahab-3
retaliatory missiles, and finally their command and control. And then
let the Iranian people take their country back.”
And the likely White House
rationale for war? Since, particularly with the fiasco of Iraq as backdrop,
it will be a hard sell to promote the idea of an imminent threat from
a nuclear-armed Iran, the White House PR machine has already begun focusing
on other “evidence”- amorphous so far-indicating that Iran
is supporting those who are “killing our troops in Iraq.”
The scary thing is that Cheney
is more likely to use the McInerneys and Woolseys than the Fallons and
Caseys in showing the president how “easily” it can all
be done-Cakewalk II.
Madness.
It is not as though our country
has lacked statesmen wise enough to warn us against foreign entanglements
and about those who have difficulty distinguishing between the strategic
interests of the United States and those of other countries:
“A passionate attachment
of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for
the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common
interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into
one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation
in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or
justification.”
(George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)
* * *
Ray McGovern works with Tell
the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour
in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the
Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article first appeared
at Consortiumnews.com.
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