New
Yorker Article Points To Advanced US Preparations For War On Iran
By Peter Symonds
04 October, 2007
WSWS.org
A
lengthy article by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published in the
New Yorker on Sunday provides further confirmation of the Bush administration’s
well-developed military and political preparations for attacking Iran.
According to Hersh, the Pentagon has drawn up new war plans, the CIA
has allocated substantial extra resources and the White House has already
sounded out US allies, including Israel, Britain and Australia, for
support in any military strike.
The article “Shifting
Targets: The Administration’s plan for Iran” focusses on
the changing pretext for war: from allegations that Tehran is building
a nuclear bomb to a new propaganda campaign claiming that Iran is arming,
training and supporting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan who are killing
US troops. The cynical ease with which the White House has switched
from one unsubstantiated claim to another underscores the fact that
a US attack will have nothing to do with any threat posed by Iran, but
will aim at furthering US ambitions for the domination of the resource-rich
region.
Like the lies that were used
to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration is casting
around for a casus belli to try to stampede public opinion behind an
attack on Iran. At the same time, however, the White House confronts
deep-seated suspicion, hostility and opposition—in the US and
internationally—to any new US military adventure.
Hersh told CNN on Sunday:
“The name of the game used to be, they’re a nuclear threat...
Sort of the same game we had before the war in Iraq. And what’s
happened is in the last few months, they’ve come to the realisation
they’re not selling it. It isn’t working... So they switched
really.”
According to Hersh, the new
bombing plan targets the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), which
Washington alleges has been assisting Shiite militias in Iraq. “The
strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more
precisely targetted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans
to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply
depots, and command and control facilities,” he wrote in the New
Yorker.
A former senior American
intelligence official told Hersh: “[Vice President Dick] Cheney’s
option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes. The
Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the
Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even
AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The
Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.”
Hersh also cited a Pentagon
consultant who explained that the air war would be accompanied by “short,
sharp incursions” by Special Forces units against suspected Iranian
training sites. “Cheney is devoted to this, no question,”
he said. Ominously, the consultant also explained that while the initial
bombing campaign might be limited, there was an “escalation special”
that could also include attacks on Iran’s ally Syria, as well
as against the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. “[A]dd-ons are always
there in strike planning,” he said.
In the early northern summer,
Hersh reports in the New Yorker, President Bush told Ryan Crocker, the
US ambassador to Iraq, via a secure videoconference that he was thinking
of attacking Iranian targets across the border and that the British
“were on board”. Bush concluded by instructing Crocker to
tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.
In a separate interview with DemocracyNow, Hersh admitted that Bush
had been even blunter. “The President was very clear that he is
interested in going across the border and whacking the Iranians,”
he said.
The New Yorker article presents
the new war plans as limited, precision strikes against specific IRGC
targets, but such acts of aggression always entail the danger of rapid
escalation into all-out war for which military planners prepare. Moreover,
other recent articles in the British press have pointed to a discussion
in Washington of a far more extensive “shock and awe” bombardment
aimed at levelling Iran’s military, industrial capacity, transport
and communications.
As Hersh acknowledged in
an interview with DemocracyNow, a limited military strike appeared to
be a tactical factional compromise in the White House between Cheney
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has previously advocated
extended diplomatic moves. “She [Rice] favours a limited bombing,
so I hear,” Hersh said. “If you want to really get a dark
scenario, Cheney has gone along with the limited bombing. Basically,
they call the limited bombing the third option, because there’s
one option to do nothing, the other is to bring in the Air Force and
rake...everything.”
Not only the military, but
the CIA has now made Iran the top priority. A recently retired CIA official
explained: “They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk. They’re
dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s
just like the fall of 2002 [prior to the invasion of Iraq]... The guys
now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with
Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will
react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”
Hersh told CNN that the CIA
has established “something called the Iranian Operations Group.
We had the same kind of a group for the Iraq war... It’s suddenly
exploded in manpower. And they have been going around, just dragging
a dozen people here, a dozen there. They built it up into a large, large
operational group.” He also explained that “the National
Security Council inside the White House is focussed much more on attacking
Iran and what’s going on in Iran than it has been before.”
Diplomatic feelers have already
been put out to a number of countries. But as Hersh explained, even
among close US allies there is scepticism and resistance. One of the
reasons for scaling back the attack plans and shifting emphasis is to
secure backing in Europe in particular, where few believe that Iran
will have the capacity to construct a nuclear bomb, even if it wanted
to, in less than five years. Plans for a strike have received the “most
positive reception” from the British government. Hersh explained
to CNN that the White House had received “expressions of interest”
from Australia and other countries. While backing the strikes, Israel
is still insisting on a more extensive war that includes the destruction
of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The new casus belli
The Bush administration’s
new justification for war is just as riddled with holes as the previous
one. Beyond repeated bald assertions that Iran is helping to kill US
troops and lurid stories fed to a compliant American media about the
sinister activities of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force in Iraq, the
only publicly presented “evidence” has been the occasional
display of Iranian manufactured weapons. No attempt has been made to
rule out other obvious sources for such arms, including the region’s
extensive blackmarket in weapons and the huge stockpiles of arms that
existed in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.
In his interview with DemocracyNow,
Hersh pointed to the scepticism in US military and intelligence circles
over the Bush administration’s claims. “There is a tremendous
dispute about all of those assertions inside the American government.
There’s just a lot of questions about it inside the government.
They don’t see the case as being nearly as strong as the White
House is saying in public,” he said.
Some of the most telling
comments have been those of David Kay, former CIA adviser, UN weapons
inspector and the man who headed the large US team hunting for evidence
of WMDs following the 2003 invasion. Even though he was a vigorous proponent
of the pre-invasion lies about Iraqi WMDs, Kay was forced to conclude
that Saddam Hussein’s regime had no biological, nuclear or chemical
weapons, their precursors or any plans for their future construction.
To deflect attention from the lies concocted by the Bush administration,
Kay attributed his findings to a massive “intelligence failure”.
Kay told Hersh that his inspection
teams had been astonished, in the aftermath of the two Iraq wars, by
“the huge amounts of arms” it had found. “He recalled
seeing stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges
that had been recovered from unexploded cluster bombs. Arms also had
been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their Shiite allies in southern
Iraq,” Hersh explained. The existence of “stockpiles of
explosively formed penetrators” or EFPs, is particularly significant
as one of the Pentagon’s chief accusations is that Tehran is currently
supplying EFPs to Iraqi insurgents. It raises the possibility that these
weapons were looted during the US invasion and obtained by militias,
either directly or through the blackmarket.
Commenting on Bush’s
campaign, Kay told Hersh: “When the White House started its anti-Iran
campaign six months ago, I thought it was all craziness.” Even
as he repeats the current White House line, Kay is cautious in his assessment:
“Now it looks like there is some selective smuggling by Iran,
but much of it has been in response to American pressure and American
threats—more a shot across the bow sort of thing, to let Washington
know that it was not going to get away with its threats so freely. Iran
is not giving the Iraqis the good stuff—the anti-aircraft missiles
that can shoot down American planes and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”
Well aware of public scepticism,
Patrick Clawson, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
advised the Bush administration to provide some evidence for its increasingly
improbable claims. “If you are going to attack, you have to prepare
the groundwork, and you have to be prepared to show some evidence,”
he told Hersh. Clawson also cautioned that an attack on Iran could compound
US problems in Iraq, where it relies on a government headed by Shiite
parties with longstanding ties to Tehran. “What is the attitude
of Iraq going to be if we hit Iran? Such an attack would put a strain
on the Iraqi government,” he said.
Hersh noted that the Bush
administration would not be deterred from war by the potential impact
on the Republican Party. A former intelligence official explained: “There
is a desperate attempt by Cheney et al. to bring military action to
Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile the politicians are saying, ‘You
can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated,
and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’
But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican
worries, and neither does the President.”
The New Yorker article explained
that the Bush administrated planned to counter any objections from the
Democrats by pointing to the record of the Clinton administration in
unilaterally bombing Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq during the 1990s. But
there is already ample evidence that the Democrats would support a new
war on Iran. The main Democratic presidential candidates—Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards—have already declared that
all options are on the table. A majority of Democrats supported a Senate
amendment last week calling on the administration to provocatively declare
the entire 125,000-strong Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be a “terrorist
organisation”.
Even the support of the Democrats,
however, will not halt the eruption of mass antiwar opposition. To energise
its own rightwing base, the Bush administration desperately needs to
goad the Iranian regime into a confrontation, or, failing that, to concoct
an incident that can be blamed on Tehran. Asked about his assessment
of the new US war plans, a retired four-star general candidly told Hersh
that the revised bombing plan “could work—if it’s
in response to an Iranian attack. The British may want to do it to get
even, but the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s
do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’
It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.”
All of Hersh’s sources
stressed that the President had not yet issued a final, formal “execute
order”. But in emphasising that the US military is not about to
attack Iran tomorrow, their comments only confirm that the administration’s
plans for war are far advanced and can be executed at short notice.
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