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-Caveat Lector- Eye of the beholder
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, April 24, 2006
At least three unofficial Iranian emissaries have been in Washington this spring with the same recommendation: Send a high-ranking current or former U.S. official to Qom for secret talks with Ayatollah Ali Khameini to explore a geopolitical deal before Iran passes yet another nuclear milestone -- e.g., a nonaggression treaty in return for taking Iran's gauntleted hand off the nuclear sword and resheathing it in an International Atomic Energy Agency scabbard. An American exit from Iraq would be part of the diplomatic mix.
For President Bush, this is rank appeasement. He sees his embattled presidency as a throwback to Winston Churchill on the backbenches of Parliament surrounded by appeasers. Now it's a world of appeasers trying to blunt America's sword. Mr. Bush tells his out-of-town visitors to think of how history will judge his administration 20 years hence and not to worry about setbacks in Iraq.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote a long story for the New Yorker the gist of which is that Mr. Bush is contemplating a tactical nuclear strike against Iran's nuclear installations, now spread in at least 17 different locations. The absurd idea is not denied by Mr. Bush. He simply calls it "wild speculation."For the rest of the world this means that the only power in history to have used nuclear weapons -- "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" incinerated almost 200,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in less than a second -- is seriously thinking of doing it again.
Mr. Bush's "wild speculation" description is now taken seriously in foreign media as yet another indication America's global imperial hubris is out of control.The damage this is doing to America's image is hard to quantify, but it is at least as serious as the Abu Ghraib "torture" pictures.
Neoconservative supporters of the Bush administration are confident the president will order air strikes against Iran between the November 2006 elections and November 2008, when his successor will be elected. The post-strike scenario was put to one of these neocon supporters:
(1) Swift minelayers sail from Bandar Abbas, the Iranian naval base at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz and sow a few score mines in the world's busiest oil shipping lane. All tanker traffic stops. U.S. and NATO minesweepers head for Hormuz. Iranian naval commandos in Zodiak rubber speedboats come alongside a supertanker and sink it by sticking limpet mines along the waterline. Oil futures quickly pass $100 a barrel and keep climbing,
(2) Saudi Arabia's Shi'ite minority, employed in the eastern Saudi oilfields, begins blowing oil pipelines. Sabotage is reported at Ras Tanura, the world's largest oil loading port.
(3) U.S. air strikes obliterate Bandar Abbas.
(4) Iraq's two Shi'ite militia, armed and funded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, are ordered into action against Iraq's U.S.-funded and trained army and police forces and against U.S. forces. U.S. casualties mount again. Congress calls for immediate evacuation of U.S. forces into Kuwait. The Kuwaiti Parliament balks and declares its neutrality in what is now the new U.S.-Iran war.
(5) Hezbollah and Hamas fire several thousand rockets and missiles over Israel's protective barrier killing scores of Israelis. The Israeli Defense Force is ordered back into Gaza to wipe out the terrorists.
(6) Hezbollah's militia goes into action against U.S. interests in Beirut.
(7) Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs close ranks against the U.S.-Zionist enemy. Arab streets erupt in mass anti-U.S. demonstrations. Arab governments recall their ambassadors from Washington.
(8) The entire Muslim world closes ranks behind Iran.
(9) A "dirty bomb" explodes in Lower Manhattan. Casualties are far lower than on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed. But a 60-square-block area has to be permanently evacuated. It will be uninhabitable for several years due to dangerous radiation.
The neocon interlocutor smiled, then shrugged his shoulders and called the scenario "wild speculation."White House calculus ignores the fact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president and a member of a fanatic sect of Shi'ite Islam, believes in the apocalypse in his own lifetime. Some people who know him say he thinks global death and destruction is only two years away and that this will be followed by the return of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi.
Iran's president, who claims the Nazi Holocaust was pure fiction and that Israel should be erased from the map, only has power over his Cabinet. Under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei come the intelligence services, armed forces, revolutionary guards, parliament, broadcasting -- and the government. The time for secret talks with the real No. 1 was yesterday.
Richard Armitage, a tough Republican who was deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, says it would behoove the U.S. to talk to Iran directly -- not simply at the level of the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad to talk about the future of Iraq. So far, the U.S. has resisted direct talks with Tehran about its nuclear aspirations and mandated the EU3 -- the United Kingdom, France and Germany -- as its surrogate.
The stakes are so high, Mr. Armitage says, the situation "merits talking to the Iranians about the full range of our relationship... everything from energy to terrorism to weapons to Iraq. We can be diplomatically astute enough to do it without giving anything away."
When Nikita Khrushchev warned the U.S. that the Soviet Union would bury America, Washington didn't break diplomatic relations but went on talking throughout the Cold War, and the evil empire collapsed.
During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with the world poised on the edge of nuclear war, brilliant U.S. diplomacy always left Khrushchev a way out of his geopolitical power play. He was trying to find a shortcut to nuclear parity with the U.S. The Soviet dictator took his missiles home, the U.S. agreed not to invade Cuba, and later took its obsolete Jupiter missiles out of Turkey.
Perhaps Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not a student of Machiavelli. But Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Schlesinger are still among us -- and ready to serve, not a public circus, but a top-secret head-to-head with Velayat-e-Faqih, "the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent." That's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Prophet's proconsul in the holy city of Qom.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.------------------------Are We Really Going To Nuke Iran?
Decoding our options
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, April 10, 2006
What are we to make of Seymour Hersh's bombshell, in this week's New Yorker, that not only is President George W. Bush keen to attack Iran's nuclear facilities but that several higher-ups in the White House and the Pentagon would like to do so with nuclear weapons?According to Hersh, an "option plan," presented this past winter by the Pentagon to the White House, calls for the use of B61-11 nuclear bunker-busters against Iran's underground sites, especially the Natanz facility, which houses the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium and which is reported to be dug 75 feet beneath the earth's surface. (If it really is that deep, and if Bush wanted to destroy it and not just disable its operations briefly, a non-nuclear bomb wouldn't be powerful enough.)Hersh also reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to remove the nuclear option from "the evolving war plan for Iran," but the White House insisted on leaving it in. The chiefs will soon give Bush "a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran." Some officers are thinking about resigning if he rejects their views.Is this for real? Is President Bush or anyone else in a position of power truly, seriously thinking about dropping nuclear bombs on a country that poses no direct threat to the United States, possesses no nuclear weapons of its own, and isn't likely to for at least a few years? Pre-emptive war —attacking a country to keep it from attacking us or an ally— is sometimes justifiable. Preventive war —attacking a country to keep it from developing a capability to attack an ally sometime in the future— almost never is. And preventive war waged with nuclear weapons is (not to put too fine a spin on it) CRAZY.The only time the United States ever used nuclear weapons, in 1945, was at the end of a world war that had been raging for years. And at the time, the bombing was seen as an alternative to an invasion of the Japanese mainland that might have killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. In the 60 years since, the world has declared and observed a clear threshold between the use and nonuse of nuclear weapons. To violate that threshold —for a purpose that falls far short of pre-empting an imminent threat or protecting our national survival— would not only be immoral; it would incite outrage across the Middle East and the Muslim world; it would inspire vast recruitment drives by anti-American terrorists (and any resulting sequels to 9/11 would be seen, even by our friends, as just deserts); and it would legitimize nuclear weapons as everyday tools of warfare and spur many nations into building their own arsenals, if just to anticipate and match their neighbors' impending arsenals.In short, it would be a disaster of head-spinning proportions.So, again, is this for real? Are Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney really thinking about nuking Iran? If they're not, and assuming that Hersh's sources are good (as they usually are), what are these nuclear options, debates, and war plans all about? Here are a few possibilities:The Madman Theory. In his first few years as president, Richard Nixon tried to force North Vietnam's leaders to the peace table by persuading them that he was a madman who would do anything to win the war. His first step, in October 1969, was to ratchet up the alert levels of U.S. strategic nuclear forces as a way of jarring the Soviet Union into pressuring the North Vietnamese to back down. A few years later, he stepped up the bombing of the North and put out the word that he might use nukes. In neither case did this ploy have any effect whatsoever. Nor is there much reason to believe it would make the Iranians shake in their boots. A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran today returned the volley by dismissing the report as part of a "psychological war" campaign. The danger of this rhetorical escalation (if that's all it is) is that it can spin out of control. If Washington and Tehran are playing a game of global chicken (as I speculated last week), upping the stakes with nukes is like loading the front bumper with a barrel of dynamite and a crying baby.The Madman Theory, Variation B. If Iran is immune to such pressures, our European allies might not be. Many of them already regard Bush as a religious zealot and Cheney as a warmonger. If they believe that the White House might really resolve the dispute with Iran by dropping nuclear bombs, they might suddenly start pushing for sanctions—a move they've stopped short of, mainly to protect their own trade relations with Tehran—as a comparatively moderate way of pressuring Iran to stop enriching uranium. Whether or not this is Bush's intent, there's evidence in Hersh's piece that the escalation might have the same effect. The Europeans, Hersh writes, are "rattled" by "their growing perception that Bush and Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed." He quotes one European diplomat as saying, "We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the [Iranian] regime to its senses. … I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed"—in sanctions—"is sufficient, [the Iranians] may back down."Bureaucratic Politics. Nowhere does Hersh contend that Bush has decided to use nuclear weapons. He writes that the idea was in "one of the military's initial option plans" (not that it's part of some final plan), and that the White House won't take the option off the table (not that they've put it on the table). A debate is heating up, but it hasn't been settled. It is a long-standing practice for Washington insiders to use press leaks as a means of publicizing debates and rallying support for their positions. Hersh's main sources for this story—"current and former American military and intelligence officials"—are all opposed to the nuclear option. One source, "a Pentagon adviser on the war on terror," is quoted as saying that high-level support for using nukes is "a juggernaut that has to be stopped." The same source also says that "if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen." The Madman Theory presupposes that at least some of Hersh's sources are using him to disperse disinformation. The Bureaucratic Politics Theory posits that they're using him to promote one faction within the government. The two theories are not mutually exclusive; a mix of both might be operative.The Three-Options Theory. Another possibility is that Bush is going to launch some sort of raid on Iran, and if people think he might drop nuclear bombs, they'll be relieved —they'll consider it a relatively moderate gesture— if he confines the attack to conventional bombs. It's a variation on the game that national-security advisers sometimes use in laying out options to their bosses. Option 1: Declare all-out war. Option 2: Surrender. Option 3 is the course of action that the adviser wants to pursue. Hersh's story might be serving the same purpose. Option 1: Nuke 'em. Option 2: Shut your eyes and do nothing, like the Europeans would prefer. Option 3: Attack Iran's facilities, but with 2,000-pound smart bombs, not 5-kiloton nuclear bombs.Or … Or maybe there's NO gamesmanship going on here.Maybe Hersh is simply reporting on a nuclear war plan that President Bush is really, seriously considering, a "juggernaut" that might not be stopped. If it's as straightforward as that, we're in deeper trouble than most of us have imagined.www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
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