US
Planning Major Air Attack On Iran
By Seymour Hersh
13 April, 2006
Democracy
Now!
We are joined today
by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh. In the latest issue
of the New Yorker, Hersh reports
that the Bush administration has increased clandestine activities inside
Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Sources
told Hersh that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets,
and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under
cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government
ethnic-minority groups.
One of the military's initial option plans calls for the use of a bunker-buster
tactical nuclear weapon against suspected underground nuclear sites.
On Monday, President Bush
dismissed Hersh's article saying, "What you're reading is wild
speculation." Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused
to comment on possible plans for military action against Iran at a press
conference on Tuesday. Rumsfeld told reporters, "We have, I don't
know how many, various contingency plans in this department and the
last thing I am going to start telling you, or anyone else in the press
or the world, at what point we refresh a plan or don't refresh a plan,
and why. It just isn't useful,"
Meanwhile Iran is moving
forward on its nuclear program. On Tuesday Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad announced that the country had succeeded for the first time
in enriching uranium on a small scale. The Iranian president insisted
that the country's nuclear program is for peaceful means and not to
build nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Bush dismissed Hersh’s article.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
What you're reading is wild speculation, which is -- it’s kind
of a, you know, happens quite frequently here in the nation's capital.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, reporters
questioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday about Hersh's report.
REPORTER: In recent weeks
or months, have you asked joint staff at Central Command, possibly through
General Pace, to update, refine, modify the contingencies for possible
military options against Iran?
DONALD RUMSFELD: We have,
I don't know how many, various contingency plans in this department,
and the last thing I’m going to do is to start telling you or
anyone else in the press or the world at what point we refresh a plan
or don't refresh a plan and why. It just isn’t useful.
REPORTER: Are you satisfied
with the state of planning for Iran options right now?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I am
never satisfied.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday. Meanwhile, Iran's moving forward
on its nuclear program. On Tuesday, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
announced the country had succeeded for the first time in enriching
uranium on a small scale. The Iranian president insists the country's
nuclear program is for peaceful means and not to build nuclear weapons.
We're joined right now in Washington by investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh. Welcome to Democracy Now!
SEYMOUR HERSH: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to
have you with us. Well, talk about what you have found and written about
in your piece, "The Iran Plans."
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, very
simply, as you said in the introduction. This is not wild speculation.
It's simply a fact that the planning has gone beyond the contingency
stage, and it’s gone into what they call the operational stage,
sort of an increment higher. And it's very serious planning, of course.
And it's all being directed at the wish of the President of the United
States. And I can understand why they don't want to talk about it, but
that's just the reality.
AMY GOODMAN: You say that
it's a pretty widespread -- or that there's a growing conviction among
members of the U.S. military and the international community that President
Bush's ultimate goal is regime change in Iran.
SEYMOUR HERSH: There's no
question that there's a lot of skepticism, particularly among our former
allies -- the allies we now have, the European allies who have been
with us. The United States joined late after the negotiations began,
but England, France and Germany have been talking to the Iranians for
years, three years now, about doing something about -- to keep them
away from the nuclear edge. Our allies there are frankly skeptical about
what this president really wants to do. They don't think necessarily,
although there’s -- it's not that the President isn't concerned
about any enrichment. He’s set that as a red line. He's publicly
said many times that when Iran begins to enrich, that's a line we won't
let them do. It's that they really think that beyond -- the whole issue
is really predicated on a belief that we've got to get rid of these
ruling clerics and replace it with Bush's idea, that he thinks he's
still pushing very hard, which is of a democratic Middle East.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, you
write in your piece about a military official who says that the military
planning is premised on the belief that a sustained bombing campaign
in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership. Can you talk more about
what this defense official said?
SEYMOUR HERSH: It’s
a former defense official who still does a lot of highly classified
stuff, so he has access and he was given a briefing or a look at what
they’re planning. And, you know, it's hard to know. This is a
White House that's very dominated -- this kind of planning is very dominated
by the Vice President's office. In that office, you have a number of
people who have been long associated with what we call the neoconservative
point of view, the American Enterprise Institute point of view, which
is a very hard line towards the Middle East. They've been the great
pushers on this idea of democracy in that area, and it's those people
who I think are pushing most effectively the President and the Vice
President to believe that you can -- if you bomb and if you sustain
the bombing, you will humiliate the clerics, the mullahs, who run the
country.
After all, as we know, the
Middle East basically, oversimplifying it, but it’s this culture
dominated by shame. We operate out of guilt here in the West. And shaming
them will make them vulnerable to the masses. And there's no question,
by the way, the masses in Iran, most of them, it's fair to say that
a great large percent of them are very secular. They're all good Muslims,
but they're secular. They’re not interested in religious leadership.
So there is a tension. And that was the thought: Bomb them, and there
will be an overthrow, and you'll have a democratic regime that, you
know, can dance happily with the democratic regime the President thinks
is going to emerge out of Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: And you quote
further this defense official, who talked about the belief that the
Bush administration has of humiliating the religious leadership, as
saying, “I was shocked when I heard it and asked myself, ‘What
are they smoking?’”
SEYMOUR HERSH: That's what
he said.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain
what the Science Defense Board is, the Defense Science Board, and what
it has to do with this?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Actually,
a lot. And it's interesting, because this hasn't been picked up, and
it's just hanging there sort of like ripe fruit for the press, if they
wanted to. It's an advisory board that’s traditionally a defense
science board, obviously. It’s just an advisory board of scientists
who advise the Secretary of Defense on issues, and they do some very
serious work. They just did a paper recently on the declining rate of
high-tech scientists inside that are capable of doing the kind of work
we need to continue our leadership in outer space stuff, etc., etc.,
with a military point of view. And their whole purpose, of course, is
a military point of view.
Many of them also work for
large defense contractors. There’s a lot of inherent problems
in that, too, but nonetheless, in this case the board is headed by a
guy named Dr. Bill Schneider, William Schneider, a former -- very conservative
guy, very outspoken. Schneider is among a small group of very influential
members of the Bush government, who in 2001 produced a paper, just as
Bush was coming into office for the first term, they produced a paper
advocating or saying, ‘Let's not rule out the use of nuclear weapons.
There is a need for tactical nuclear weapons, and they should be in
the arsenal and accepted as a rational part of the arsenal, particularly
when you're going after hard targets like the underground nuclear facilities
in North Korea and Iran, if you were to target them.’
And the people that signed
that report include Schneider, as I say, but also Stephen Hadley, who
is now the National Security Adviser, Stephen Cambone, who’s the
head of the intelligence for the Pentagon and one of Rumsfeld's closest
advisers, and also Robert Joseph, who’s the Under Secretary of
State for Nonproliferation Affairs, the man who replaced John Bolton
in that job and who's been very much a hawk and very tough on Iran in
public and even tougher in private. And so, you have these very influential
people advocating that tact nukes have some sense and some bearing in
the policy.
And I've been told that in
the last few months a debate has been sort of ongoing inside the highest
levels of the military, and the debate is simply between those senior
generals and admirals -- who think using and even planning or talking
about using a nuclear weapon in Iran is wacko -- and the White House,
because the White House wants it kept in the plan. There's a lot of
tension there. But in any case, the science board has been sending papers
in saying, ‘Hey, you know, we can tool this weapon up and down.’
The B61, apparently, the yield can be adjusted. You can get more bang
for the buck, a larger yield with less radioactive fallout. And so,
these kind of papers go on.
What's interesting, Amy,
is in all of the conversations we've had about bombing and not bombing
and whether to use weapons, what weapon or how much bombing, as, not
surprisingly, I don't think there's been any serious discussion of possible
civilian casualties. That never seems to be discussed in any of these
papers, but that's the way it is.
AMY GOODMAN: And your response
to the Iranian president saying Iran has joined the nuclear countries
of the world?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, he's
another sort of wacko, too. The Iranian president, he’s very mouthy,
and he says a lot of things. I think the consensus among our allies
who have embassies in Tehran and have had much more contact and know
much more about that society than we do -- America is very, we're pretty
much opaque on Iran. We haven't been there diplomatically in, you know,
25, 26 years, since the Shah’s days. Most people think the Ayatollah
Khomeini, who’s the supreme leader, probably controls the nuclear
option, although certainly the Revolutionary Guards, in which the Iranian
president is a major player, have something to say.
Look, they didn't join the
nuclear club yesterday. They've enriched -- they've done a partial enrichment
of some uranium to a low level, a level that could possibly be used
to run a peaceful reactor. They've done this before in a pilot program.
Certainly, it's a feat that’s technically capable. Many governments
have done it, not just the eight nuclear powers.
And so, what he's doing by
embellishing -- and this is my guess, my sort of heuristic guess, because
I don't know, but what I think he's doing, he’s basically playing
chicken, like in the old James Dean movie, the two cars going at each
other at high speed. He's playing chicken with the President of the
United States. So that's what we're into. We’ve got the President
of the United States, who’s been making -- Bush, as you know,
and Cheney have been making an awful lot of bellicose statements in
the last couple months, saying that they’ll rule out no option,
which obviously is a nuclear suggestion, also making declarations about
red lines and where Iran can or cannot go. So the bellicosity of the
United States is now being matched by the bellicosity of the Iranian
president. I mean, great way to run a world.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking
to investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. His piece in The New Yorker
magazine is called "The Iran Plans: Would President Bush Go to
War to Stop Tehran from Getting the Bomb?" Can you talk about the
list of targets?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you
know, I don't really know the list, and I don't want to know the list.
It’s not my -- when I write about troops, I’m vague about
what I know and what I’m writing, because nobody wants to put
anybody in the position of jeopardizing any of our forces on the ground,
and you should know that I go to great lengths before I publish a story.
I have people that I can -- I can drop a draft of an article in a mailbox
in, you know, rural Washington, somewhere in the suburbs, where people,
serious people, live, and they'll review it for me to make sure. I don't
do it with this government, but I do do it with serious people on the
inside and take their advice on what to publish or not publish.
But the targeting -- look,
first of all, we don't know much about Iran. The intelligence is skimpy.
We really don't know what they're doing. We know that one major facility
is an underground, called Natance. It’s an underground -- I don't
know what you call it -- research plant, 75 feet below the ground in
very heavy rock. This is why there's some talk of using a nuclear weapon.
The only way of guaranteeing its destruction is with a tact nuke. It’s
so deep underground.
There's also about 16 to
20 sites that have been declared. All of this is not being done in a
vacuum. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the I.A.E.A., has been
monitoring Iran’s declared sites. For example, when Iran enriched
uranium, as it was announced yesterday, that was done under I.A.E.A.
supervision. And so, Iran has been a member of the -- I should add it's
not illegal, because under the N.P.T. they're entitled to do enrichments,
as long as it's for peaceful purposes, and that's the claim the Iranians
make.
Nobody has any illusions.
Iran undoubtedly would like to get in the position where they could
have the capability and the know-how and the materials, the enriched
materials, to make or fabricate a nuclear weapon, sort of an on-off
switch. They'd like to be able to toggle it. But the best guess, even
the Israelis, who are, of course -- they view Iran as an existential
threat, Israel does. The Israelis, they can tell you that Iran is anywhere
from two to three years at the best, by their estimate, from actually
being in a position to do it. But the American intelligence estimate,
which was published last summer by the Washington Post, what they call
the N.I.E., the National Intelligence Estimate, an official document,
said something like eight to ten years away.
‘So, what's the rush?’
is what I’m hearing from the military people and the diplomats
involved. What are we setting red lines for about small pilot production?
And so, there is time, but if you're going to do it, if you're going
to hit Iran and you're going to bomb and you give it to the planners,
you're going to get this. You're going to get targeting for the known
facilities, targeting facilities we suspect, and then you're going to
get countermeasures. You're going to get the Air Force -- nobody in
the American government wants to see American boys, pilots, shot down
and paraded through the streets of Tehran, as we did in Vietnam, if
you remember that happened in Hanoi.
So if you're going to do
systematic bombing or sustained bombing, you're going to take out the
air fields. Iran has an old integrated air force, based -- many of the
planes were given to the Shah by us back in the 1970s. But they still
fly, and they're still armed with missiles. Iran, as many in your audience
know, kicks out about four million barrels of oil a day and has -- the
prices are very high, going higher -- huge financial reserves -- has
been buying a lot of sophisticated radar, anti-missile radars and other
sort of anti-aircraft radars from the Chinese and, I think, even from
Russia.
We have to take that out.
We don't want radars targeting our planes. We have to take out all of
their defense measures, so we can bomb with impunity. So, how many targets
are you looking for? I quoted one paper done by a retired Air Force
colonel, a planner named Sam Gardener, who has been doing a lot of war
games, who’s a very prudent -- by everybody's account, a prudent,
careful man. And Colonel Gardener, in a paper he delivered in Europe
the other week, said 400 aim points. And some of the aim points may
have more than one or two bombs dropped on them, so it's a huge enterprise.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking
to investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, and we're going to come back
to him in a minute to talk more about his piece, "The Iran Plans,”
what the President of the United States plans are for Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest in
Washington D.C. is Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter with The New
Yorker magazine. His latest article is called "The Iran Plans:
How Far Will the White House Go?” In the lead-up to the invasion
of Iraq, Sy, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and President Bush
were at Camp David. They held a news conference, and they said that
the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency had a report that said that
Iraq was six months away from building nuclear weapons. And President
Bush said I don't know how much more evidence we need. Well, it turned
out any evidence would have helped, that the I.A.E.A. did not have such
a report. Do you see parallels here with Iran?
SEYMOUR HERSH: How can you
not? You know, what's interesting about that I.A.E.A. issue is that
they were -- as you know, they had inspectors there until 1968, late
‘68. And in late ’67, the I.A.E.A. published an extensive
analysis of the Iranian nuclear complex and basically said nothing –
nada – there, I mean, categorical. That's why I was very –
because it's a long -- I happen to be working, doing a lot of reporting
on what was going on in the U.N. then with the UNSCOM, it was called,
the U.N. inspection process. So I had read that report. So, anybody
reading that report would have known there was nothing there.
You do have a lot of parallels,
because right now it's been taken away from the I.A.E.A., I must say
to the disappointment and probably anger, definitely anger, of the leadership
there, because at least the I.A.E.A. has inspectors in some legal right
to be inside Iran right now. And they've taken it to the U.N., where
there’s, you know -- are there going to be sanctions or not? I
mean, I don't know what kind of economic sanctions you can put on a
country that puts out four million barrels of oil a day, and they're
swimming in U.S. dollars. And, of course, everybody knows inside, all
of the people involved know, that Russia and China will never go along.
It's almost inconceivable they will go along with sanctions. China is
one of the recipients of oil. Russia does a lot of business there. So,
basically you’ve put yourself in a situation where you've got
a dead end. And you know it's going to be a dead end, at least you can
anticipate. It could change. Something could happen, but at this point,
it's a dead end. And so, the parallel is obvious.
Everybody I talk to, the
hawks I talk to, the neoconservatives, the people who are very tough
absolutely say there's no way the U.N. is going to work, and we're just
going to have to assume it doesn’t in any way. Iran, by going
along with the U.N., what they're really doing is rushing their nuclear
program. And so, the skepticism -- there's no belief, faith here, ultimately,
in this White House, in the extent of the talk, so you've got a parallel
situation. The President could then say, ‘We've explored all options.
We've done it.’ I could add, if you want to get even more scared,
some of our closest allies in this process -- we deal with the Germans,
the French and the Brits -- they're secretly very worried, not only
what Bush wants to do, but they're also worried that -- for example,
the British Foreign Officer, Jack Straw, is vehemently against any military
action, of course also nuclear action, and so is the Foreign Office,
as I said, but nobody knows what will happen if Bush calls Blair. Blair's
the wild card in this. He and Bush both have this sense, this messianic
sense, I believe, about what they've done and what's needed to be done
in the Middle East. I think Bush is every bit as committed into this
world of rapture, as is the president.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, you
write about a meeting in Vienna between Mohamed El Baradei, the Nobel
Peace Prize winner and head of the I.A.E.A., and Robert Joseph, the
Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, and the relationship between
El Baradei and the United States.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, Joseph
basically was, you know, essentially just -- I heard a lot about it,
because it was pretty blustery. And he just went in and basically told
off the head of the -- the Nobel Prize winner and said, you know, ‘You
will stop--’ The European and American complaint against El Baradei
is this: they say, ‘My God, he's treating this issue as if both
sides have some justification, that Iran's aspirations equal the American
and European's desire not for them to go nuclear. He's treating them
both as parodies. And they're not. We're right, and they're wrong, and
he doesn't reflect that.’ So they think he's unfair. They think
he's being too balanced, too nuanced, and that was the message that
Joseph gave, basically, with a significant loss of temper, or let's
put it, “intemperate” behavior, basically saying, ‘You
will desist from saying anything that interferes with us. We view this
as our gravest national security threat.’
I can also tell you Joseph
has said the same thing in Turkey to the Turkish officials. He went
there, and they also reported a very boisterous meeting. And the American
ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency is a guy named
Greg Schulte, who was until last summer, August of 2005, was in charge
of the Situation Room in the White House, and who from 1988 to 1992
worked for -- he's a career diplomat, but worked -- a career bureaucrat.
He’s not in the diplomatic service. He worked for Dick Cheney,
when he was Secretary of Defense, now the Vice President, and did nuclear
stuff for him. So he's very connected to the vice President. He's also
quite direct and not very diplomatic in what he believes, and it’s,
you know, it’s ‘They're bad guys, we're good guys,’
that sort of approach. There's no instinct.
What's amazing, Amy, about
this is this, and what always surprises me about my country is, here
we have a president that doesn't talk to people he disagrees with. And
anybody who's been around little boys, big boys, knows that when they
get out of control, you grab them. If you're a nursery school teacher,
you grab the little four-year-olds by the scruff of the neck, and you
pull them together, and you say, ‘You two guys, shake hands and
make up, and go play in the sandbox.’
Bush doesn't talk to people
he's mad at. He doesn't talk to the North Koreans. He didn't talk to
the insurgency. When the history is done, there were incredible efforts
by the insurgency leaders in the summer of 2003. I’m talking about
the Iraqi insurgency, the former Sunni generals and Sunni and Baathist
leaders who were happy to see Saddam go, but did not want America there.
They wanted to talk to us. Bush wouldn't. Whether it got to Bush, I
don’t know, it got in to four stars. Nobody wanted to talk to
them. He doesn't talk to the president of Syria; in fact, specifically
rejects overtures from al-Asad to us. And he doesn't talk to the Iranians.
There's been no bilateral communication at all.
Iran has come hat-in-hand
to us. A former National Security Council adviser who worked in the
White House, Flynt Leverett, an ex-C.I.A. analyst who's now working
at Brookings, wrote a piece a month or so ago, maybe six weeks ago,
in the New York Times, describing specific offers by the Iranians to
come and ‘let's deal.’ Let's deal on all issues. I’m
even told they were willing to talk about recognizing Israel. And the
White House doesn't talk. And it's not that he doesn't talk, it's that
nobody pressures him to talk. There's no pressure from the media, no
pressure from Congress. Here's a president who won't talk to people
he's walking us into a confrontation with.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh,
we will leave it there. I want to thank you very much for being with
us. But let me ask you one last thing, and that is where we started,
with President Bush's comments about your report, saying, ‘What
you're reading is wild speculation, which is kind of, you know -- happens
quite frequently in the nation's capital.’ Your response?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, he gave
a speech at Johns Hopkins on Monday, that's one of his more remarkable
speeches, not only because of his manner, which was a funny affectation
-- he was hopping around, almost jocular. Forget what he said about
me. It's what he said about Iraq that was very troubling to me. He once
again said there's great progress, this is a wonderful thing we’re
doing, I’m proud that we're doing it, we're bringing democracy.
I have it in front of me, because I always carry it around. He said
-- he compared this -- ‘This is an ideological struggle we're
having with Iran that equates the best part of the Cold War, when we
defeated the Russians.’ He's once again comparing this to the
Cold War. He's once again saying that things are wonderful, that it's
a noble enterprise. ‘Does anybody there read the newspapers?’
is what I wonder.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh,
thanks very much for being with us.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Glad to be
here
AMY GOODMAN: Investigative
reporter for The New Yorker magazine. The piece in the latest edition
is called “The Iran Plans: How Far Will the White House Go?"