From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 10:50 PM
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/010807.html
Bush's Rush to Armageddon
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Monday 08 January 2007
George W. Bush has purged senior military and intelligence officials who were
obstacles to a wider war in the Middle East, broadening his options for both
escalating the conflict inside Iraq and expanding the fighting to Iran and
Syria with Israel's help.
On Jan. 4, Bush ousted the top two commanders in the Middle East, Generals
John Abizaid and George Casey, who had opposed a military escalation in Iraq,
and removed Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who had stood by
intelligence estimates downplaying the near-term threat from Iran's nuclear
program.
Most Washington observers have treated Bush's shake-up as either routine or
part of his desire for a new team to handle his planned "surge" of U.S. troops
in Iraq. But intelligence sources say the personnel changes also fit with a
scenario for attacking Iran's nuclear facilities and seeking violent regime
change in Syria.
Bush appointed Admiral William Fallon as the new chief of Central Command
for the Middle East despite the fact that Fallon, a former Navy fighter pilot
and currently head of the Pacific Command, will oversee two ground wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
The choice of Fallon makes more sense if Bush foresees a bigger role for
two aircraft carrier groups now poised off Iran's coastline, such as support
for possible Israeli air strikes against Iran's nuclear targets or as a
deterrent against any overt Iranian retaliation.
Though not considered a Middle East expert, Fallon has moved in
neoconservative circles, for instance, attending a 2001 awards ceremony at the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank dedicated to
explaining "the link between American defense policy and the security of
Israel."
Bush's personnel changes also come as Israel is reported stepping up
preparations for air strikes, possibly including tactical nuclear bombs, to
destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, such as the reactor at Anton, south of
Tehran, where enriched uranium is produced.
The Sunday Times of London reported on Jan. 7 that two Israeli air
squadrons are training for the mission and "if things go according to plan, a
pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down
through the layers of hardened concrete [at Natanz]. Other pilots will then be
ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole."
The Sunday Times wrote that Israel also would hit two other facilities - at
Isfahan and Arak - with conventional bombs. But the possible use of a nuclear
bomb at Natanz would represent the first nuclear attack since the United States
destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II six
decades ago.
While some observers believe Israel may be leaking details of its plans as
a way to frighten Iran into accepting international controls on its nuclear
program, other sources indicate that Israel and the Bush administration are
seriously preparing for this wider Middle Eastern war.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called the possibility of an Iranian
nuclear bomb an "existential threat" to Israel.
After the Sunday Times article appeared, an Israeli government spokesman
denied that Israel has drawn up secret plans to bomb Iranian nuclear
facilities. For its part, Iran claims it only wants a nuclear program for
producing energy.
Negroponte's Heresy
Whatever Iran's intent, Negroponte has said U.S. intelligence does not
believe Iran could produce a nuclear weapon until next decade.
Negroponte's assessment in April 2006 infuriated neoconservative hardliners
who wanted a worst-case scenario on Iran's nuclear capabilities, much as they
pressed for an alarmist view on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the
U.S. invasion in 2003.
Unlike former CIA Director George Tenet, who bent to Bush's political needs
on Iraq, Negroponte stood behind the position of intelligence analysts who
cited Iran's limited progress in refining uranium.
"Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a
number of years off, and probably into the next decade," Negroponte said in an
interview with NBC News. Expressing a similarly tempered view in a speech at
the National Press Club, Negroponte said, "I think it's important that this
issue be kept in perspective."
Some neocons complained that Negroponte was betraying the President.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a leading figure in the neoconservative Project for
the New American Century, called for Negroponte's firing because of the Iran
assessment and his "abysmal personnel decisions" in hiring senior intelligence
analysts who were skeptics about Bush's Iraqi WMD claims.
In an article for Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, Gaffney attacked
Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as
assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill,
who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which
debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking uranium ore
from Africa.
Fingar's Office of Intelligence and Research had led the dissent against
the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be Bush's false claims
that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb.
"Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar
and Brill ... gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to
be years away from having nuclear weapons?" wrote Gaffney, who was a senior
Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.
Gaffney also accused Negroponte of giving promotions to "government
officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President's
policies," an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill. The neocons have long
resented U.S. intelligence assessments that conflict with their policy
prescriptions. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
In his personnel shakeup, Bush shifted Negroponte from his Cabinet-level
position as DNI to a sub-Cabinet post as deputy to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. To replace Negroponte, Bush nominated Navy retired Vice
Admiral John McConnell, who is viewed by intelligence professionals as a
low-profile technocrat, not a strong independent figure.
A Freer Hand
Negroponte's departure should give Bush a freer hand if he decides to
support attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. Bush's neocon advisers fear that
if Bush doesn't act decisively in his remaining two years in office, his
successor may lack the political will to launch a preemptive strike against
Iran.
Bush reportedly has been weighing his military options for bombing Iran's
nuclear facilities since early 2006. But he has encountered resistance from the
top U.S. military brass, much as he has with his plans to escalate U.S. troop
levels in Iraq.
As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number
of senior U.S. military officers were troubled by administration war planners
who believed "bunker-busting" tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were
the only way to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities buried deep underground.
A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that the White House
refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they're shouted
down," the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006
]
By late April 2006, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House
to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant
at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable,
Hersh reported.
"Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear
planning," one former senior intelligence official said. [New Yorker, July 10,
2006]
But one way to get around the opposition of the Joint Chiefs would be to
delegate the bombing operation to the Israelis. Given Israel's powerful
lobbying operation in Washington and its strong ties to leading Democrats, an
Israeli-led attack might be more politically palatable with the Congress.
Attacks on Iran and Syria also would fit with Bush's desire to counter the
growing Shiite influence across the Middle East, which was given an unintended
boost by Bush's ouster of the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq.
The original neocon plan for the Iraq invasion was to use Iraq as a base to
force regime change in Syria and Iran, thus dealing strong blows to Hezbollah
in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
This regional transformation supposedly would have protected Israel's
northern border and strengthened Israel's hand in dictating final peace terms
to the Palestinians. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq backfired, descending into a
sectarian civil war with Iraq's pro-Iranian Shiite majority gaining the upper
hand.
In effect, by ousting Saddam Hussein, Bush had eliminated the principal
buffer who had been holding the line against the radical Shiites in Iran since
1979. By tipping the strategic balance to the Shiites, Bush also unnerved the
Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia.
A Nightmare
By 2006, the dream of a U.S.-orchestrated transformation of the Middle East
had turned into a nightmare of rising Shiite radicalism. To address this
unanticipated development, Bush began pondering how best to throttle Shiite
expansionism.
In summer 2006, Washington Post foreign policy analyst Robin Wright wrote
that U.S. officials told her that "for the United States, the broader goal is
to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush
administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing
field in the Middle East." [Washington Post, July 16, 2006]
Bush's advisers also blamed the governments of Syria and Iran for
supporting anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq.
Yet lacking the military and political capacity to expand the conflict
beyond Iraq, the Bush administration turned to Israel and its new Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert. By summer 2006, Israeli sources were describing Bush's
interest in finding a pretext to take Syria and Iran down a notch.
That opening came when border tensions with Hamas in Gaza and with
Hezbollah in Lebanon led to the capture of three Israeli soldiers and a rapid
Israeli escalation of the conflict into an air-and-ground campaign against
Lebanon.
Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the Israeli-Lebanese conflict as
an opening to expand the fighting into Syria and achieve the long-sought
"regime change" in Damascus, Israeli sources said.
One Israeli source told me that Bush's interest in spreading the war to
Syria was considered "nuts" by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime
Minister Olmert generally shared Bush's hard-line strategy against Islamic
militants. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Wants Wider War."]
In an article on July 30, 2006. the Jerusalem Post also hinted at Bush's
suggestion of a wider war into Syria. "Defense officials told the Post ... that
they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in
seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.
In August 2006, the Inter-Press Service added more details, reporting that
the message was passed to Israel by Bush's deputy national security adviser
Elliott Abrams, who had been a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the
1980s.
"In a meeting with a very senior Israeli official, Abrams indicated that
Washington would have no objection if Israel chose to extend the war beyond to
its other northern neighbor, leaving the interlocutor in no doubt that the
intended target was Syria," a source told the Inter-Press Service.
In December 2006, Meyray Wurmser, a leading U.S. neoconservative whose
spouse is a Middle East adviser to Vice President Cheney, confirmed that
neocons inside and outside the Bush administration had hoped Israel would
attack Syria as a means of undermining the insurgents in Iraq.
"If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion in Iraq would have ended,"
Wurmser said in an interview with Yitzhak Benhorin of the Ynet Web site. "A
great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real
enemy, the one backing Hezbollah.... If Israel had hit Syria, it would have
been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and (changed)
the strategic map in the Middle East."
But the Israeli summer offensives in Gaza and Lebanon fell short of
Olmert's objectives, instead generating international condemnation of Tel Aviv
for the large numbers of civilian casualties from Israel's bombing raids.
Wounded Leaders
Now, as two politically wounded leaders, Bush and Olmert share an interest
in trying to salvage some success out of their military setbacks. So, they are
looking at possible moves that are much more dramatic than minor adjustments to
the status quo.
Democrats and some Republicans are questioning why Bush wants to send
20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq and offer Iraqis some jobs programs, when
similar tactics have been tried unsuccessfully in the past.
Indeed, one source familiar with high-level thinking in Washington and Tel
Aviv said an unstated reason for Bush's troop "surge" is to bolster the
defenses of Baghdad's Green Zone if a possible Israeli attack on Iran prompts
an uprising among Iraqi Shiites.
The two U.S. aircraft carrier strike forces off Iran's coast could provide
further deterrence against Iranian retaliation. But the conflict would almost
certainly spread anyway.
Likely Hezbollah missile strikes against Israel would offer another pretext
for Israel to invade Syria and finally oust Hezbollah's allies in Damascus, as
the U.S. neocons had hope would happen in summer 2006, the source said.
In the neoconservative vision, this wider war would offer perhaps a last
chance at achieving the regional transformation that has been at the heart of
Bush's strategy of "democratizing" the Middle East through violence if
necessary.
However, few Middle East experts believe that Bush really would want the
results of truly democratic elections in the region because Islamic militants
would almost surely win resoundingly amid the anti-Americanism that has grown
even more intense since the hanging of Saddam Hussein in late December.
An Israeli assault on Iran could put the region's remaining pro-American
dictators in jeopardy, too. In Pakistan, for instance, Islamic militants with
ties to al-Qaeda have been gaining strength and might try to overthrow Gen.
Pervez Musharraf, conceivably giving Islamic terrorists control of Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal.
For some U.S. foreign policy experts, this potential for disaster from a
U.S.-backed Israeli air strike on Iran is so terrifying that they ultimately
don't believe Bush and Olmert would dare implement such the plan.
But Bush's actions in the past two months - reaffirming his determination
to achieve "victory" in Iraq - suggest that he wants nothing of the "graceful
exit" that might come from a de-escalation of the war.
Losing Faith
Bush has dug in his heels even as some senior administration officials have
lost faith in his strategy.
On Nov. 6, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Bush a memo suggesting a
"major adjustment" in Iraq War policy that would include "an accelerated
drawdown of U.S. bases" from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces
only committed to Iraqi areas that request them.
"Unless they [the local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces
would leave their province," Rumsfeld wrote.
Proposing an option similar to a plan enunciated by Democratic Rep. John
Murtha, Rumsfeld suggested that the commanders "withdraw U.S. forces from
vulnerable positions - cities, patrolling, etc. - and move U.S. forces to a
Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be
available when Iraqi security forces need assistance."
And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush's lofty rhetoric
about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration
should "recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about
them) - go minimalist." [NYT, Dec. 3, 2006
]
On Nov. 8, two days after the memo and one day after American voters
elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Bush fired Rumsfeld. The
firing was widely interpreted as a sign that Bush was ready to moderate his
position on Iraq, but the evidence now suggests that Bush got rid of Rumsfeld
for going wobbly on the war.
On Dec. 6, when longtime Bush family counselor James Baker issued a report
by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group urging a drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq,
Bush wasted little time in slapping it down.
Instead, Bush talked about waging a long war against Islamic "radicals and
extremists," an escalation from his original post-9/11 goal of defeating
"terrorists with global reach."
At his news conference on Dec. 20, Bush cast this wider struggle against
Islamists as a test of American manhood and perseverance by demonstrating to
the enemy that "they can't run us out of the Middle East, that they can't
intimidate America."
Bush suggested, too, that painful decisions lay ahead in the New Year.
"I'm not going to make predictions about what 2007 will look like in Iraq,
except that it's going to require difficult choices and additional sacrifices,
because the enemy is merciless and violent," Bush said.
Rather than scale back his neoconservative dream of transforming the Middle
East, Bush argued for an expanded U.S. military to wage this long war.
"We must make sure that our military has the capability to stay in the
fight for a long period of time," Bush said. "I'm not predicting any particular
theater, but I am predicting that it's going to take a while for the ideology
of liberty to finally triumph over the ideology of hate....
"We're in the beginning of a conflict between competing ideologies - a
conflict that will determine whether or not your children can live in a peace.
A failure in the Middle East, for example, or failure in Iraq, or isolationism,
will condemn a generation of young Americans to permanent threat from overseas."
Escalation
Since then, Bush has floated the idea of a troop "surge" and replaced
commanders who disagreed with him. Bush also removed U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad, a Sunni Muslim generally considered a voice for moderation in
U.S. policy who privately objected to Bush's decision to press ahead with the
hanging of Saddam Hussein.
There are even indications of tension between Bush and Cheney, who like his
old friend Rumsfeld, appears to have grown disillusioned with the war.
In a little-noticed comment on Jan. 4, Sen. Joseph Biden, the new chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Cheney and Rumsfeld "are really
smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their
faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can't fix
it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?"
[Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2007]
But Bush does not appear to share that goal of limiting the damage.
Instead, he is looking for ways to "double-down" his gamble in Iraq by joining
with Olmert - and possibly outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair - in
expanding the conflict.
Since the Nov. 7 congressional elections, the three leaders have conducted
a round-robin of meetings that on the surface seem to have little purpose.
Olmert met privately with Bush on Nov. 13; Blair visited the White House on
Dec. 7; and Blair conferred with Olmert in Israel on Dec. 18.
Sources say the three leaders are frantically seeking options for turning
around their political fortunes as they face harsh judgments from history for
their bloody and risky adventures in the Middle East.
But there is also a clock ticking. Blair, who now stands to go down in the
annals of British history as "Bush's poodle," is nearing the end of his tenure,
having agreed under pressure from his Labour Party to step down in spring 2007.
So, if the Bush-Blair-Olmert triumvirate has any hope of accomplishing the
neoconservative remaking of the Middle East, time is running out. Something
dramatic must happen soon.
That something looks like it may include a rush to Armageddon.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of
the Bush Dynasty From Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999
book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
###
EMERGENCY PROTEST
Of Bush's Plan to Escalate Iraq War
Stop the War on Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
WHEN: This Thursday, January 11, 5 pm
WHERE: Corner of Wilshire Blvd. & Western Ave., Los Angeles
(Wilshire & Western is a Metro Red Line and Bus stop)
For more info call 323-464-1636 or email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Join the ANSWER Coalition at an emergency protest this Thursday night to
demonstrate against President George Bush's announcement of an escalation of
the Iraq war. The night before the protest, Bush will set out his
administration's new strategy to "win" in Iraq. It will be Bush's first major
policy speech since the Nov. 7 midterm elections. His plan will include a troop
increase and a massive escalation of violence against the Iraqi people, who
have been suffering under U.S. occupation for nearly four years.
People in the U.S. overwhelmingly oppose the war. A troop increase will only
cause more death and destruction. Already 655,000 Iraqis and over 3,000 U.S.
troops have died as a result of the war. The number of dead and injured is
mounting each day.
Come out this Thursday to protest this outrageous escalation of a deadly war
based on lies. Bring signs, banners and express your opposition to the Iraq
war. The people are the only force that can stop the war and bring the troops
home now!
---------------------------------------------------
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism
323-464-1636
http://www.answerla.org
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
1800 Argyle Ave, #410
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Join us each Tues at 7 pm for A.N.S.W.E.R. Activists Meetings.
###
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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