[Mb-civic] Iran Next

[Michael Butler]

    Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed for Iran
    By Ray McGovern
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Monday 06 February 2006

    What President George W. Bush, FOX news, and the Washington Times were
saying about Iraq three years ago they are now saying about Iran. After
Saturday's vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report
Iran's suspicious nuclear activities to the UN Security Council, the
president wasted no time in warning, "The world will not permit the Iranian
regime to gain nuclear weapons."

    The next IAEA milestone will be reached on March 6, when its director,
Mohamed ElBaradei, makes a formal report to the Security Council regarding
what steps Iran needs to take to allay growing suspicions. The Bush
administration, however, has already mounted a full-court press to indict
and convict the Iranian leaders, and the key question is why.

    Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that
the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for
peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, as she
did last month, "There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian
regime to resume uranium enrichment," she is being, well, disingenuous
again.

    If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 President
Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet
future energy requirements. This is what Iranian officials are saying today,
and they are supported by energy experts who point out that oil extraction
in Iran is already at or near peak and that the country will need
alternatives to oil in coming decades.

    Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the
reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear
reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US
corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project fell
through when the Shah was ousted three years later.

    It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have a
nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their nuclear
program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be fools not to.
Iran is one of three countries earning the "axis-of-evil" sobriquet from
President Bush and it has watched what happened to Iraq, which had no
nuclear weapons, as well as what did not happen to North Korea, which does
have them. And Iran's rival Israel, which has not signed the
Non-Proliferation Treaty but somehow escapes widespread opprobrium, has a
formidable nuclear arsenal cum delivery systems.

    Israeli threats to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities simply provide
additional incentive to Tehran to bury and harden them against the kind of
Israeli air attack that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in
1981. Although the US (together with every other UN Security Council member)
condemned that attack, Dick Cheney and other senior officials do not
disguise their view that it was just what the doctor ordered at the time ...
and that the same prescription might take care of Iran.

    Who Is Threatened by Iranian Nukes?

    The same country that felt threatened by putative nuclear weapons in the
hands of Iraq. With at least 200 nuclear weapons and various modes of
delivery at their disposal, the Israelis have a powerful deterrent. They
appear determined to put that deterrent into play early to pre-empt any
nuclear weapons capability in Iran, rather than have to deal with one after
it has been put in place. Israeli leaders seem allergic to the thought that
other countries in the region might be able to break its nuclear monopoly
and they react neuralgically to proposals for a nuclear-free zone in the
Middle East. Bending over backwards to such sensitivities, the US delegation
to the IAEA delayed the proceedings for a day in a futile attempt to delete
from Sunday's report language calling for such a zone. The final report
called for a "Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction." This is the
first time a link has been made, however implicitly, between the Iranian and
Israeli nuclear programs.

    The argument that the US is also threatened directly by nuclear weapons
in Iranian hands is as far-fetched as was the case before the war in Iraq,
when co-opted intelligence analysts were strongly encouraged to stretch
their imaginations - to include, for example the specter that Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction could be delivered by unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs)
launched from ships off the US coast. No, I'm not kidding. They even
included this in the infamous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of
October 1, 2002.

    That canard was held up to ridicule by the US Air Force, which was
permitted to take a footnote in the NIE. The scare story nonetheless
provided grist for the president's key speech in Cincinnati on October 7,
2002 - three days before Congress voted to authorize war. That was also the
speech in which he also warned, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot
wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of
a mushroom cloud."

    While Congress was voting for war on October 10, more candid
observations came in highly unusual remarks from a source with excellent
access to high-level thinking at the White House. Philip Zelikow, at the
time a member of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board and confidant of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (and
later Executive Director of the 9/11 commission), 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 and actually has been since 1990 -
it's the threat against 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.

    More recently, in the case of Iran, President Bush has been unabashed in
naming Israel as the most probable target of any Iranian nuclear weapons. He
has also created a rhetorical lash-up of the US and Israel, referring three
times in the past two weeks to Israel as an "ally" of the US, as if to
condition Americans to the notion that the US is required to join Israel in
any confrontation with Iran. For example, on February 1 the president told
the press, "Israel is a solid ally of the United States; we will rise to
Israel's defense if need be." Asked if he meant the US would rise to
Israel's defense militarily, Bush replied with a startlingly open-ended
commitment, "You bet, we'll defend Israel."

    In repeatedly labeling Israel our "ally," Bush is following his own
corollary to the dictum of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that if
you repeat something often enough, most people will believe it. In an
unusual moment of candor in a discussion of domestic affairs last May, Bush
noted:

    That's the third time I've said that. I'll probably say it three more
times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and
over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

    Why No Treaty?

    The trouble is that, strictly speaking, allies are not picked by
presidential whim - or by smart staffers like the top Bush aide who bragged
that he and his colleagues are "history's actors ... creating new
realities." Bush's speech writers are acting as though the "new realities"
they create can include defense treaties. But unless they've changed the
Constitution, in our system nations become allies via treaty; and treaties
have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

    There is no treaty of alliance with Israel.

    But why? Earlier, I had had the impression that it must be because of US
reluctance - despite widespread sympathy for Israel - to get entangled in
the complexities of the Middle East and gratuitously antagonize Arab
countries. Comparing notes with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS) colleagues with more experience in the Middle East, however, I
learned that the Israelis themselves have shown strong resistance to a
US-Israel defense treaty - for reasons quite sound from their perspective,
and quite instructive from ours.

    The possibility of a bilateral treaty was broached after the 1973 Yom
Kippur war as a way to reduce chances of armed conflict between Israel and
its Arab neighbors. But before the US could commit to defending Israel, its
boundaries would have had to be defined, and the Israelis wanted no part of
that. Moreover, the Israelis feared that a defense pact would curb their
freedom of action - as would signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were
aware that in a crisis situation, the US would almost certainly discourage
them from resorting to their familiar policy of massive - often
disproportionate - retaliation against the Arabs. It became quite clear that
the Israelis did not want the US to have any say over when they would use
force, against whom, and what (US or non-US) equipment might be employed.

    Aside from all that, the Israelis were, and are, confident that their
influence in Washington is such as to ensure US support, no matter what.
And, as President Bush's rhetoric demonstrates, they are correct in thinking
they can, in effect, have their cake and eat it too - a commitment
equivalent to a defense treaty, with no binding undertakings on Israel's
part.

    That is a very volatile admixture. Congress would do well to wake up to
its Constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities in this key area -
particularly now that the juggernaut to war has begun to roll.

    Preparing the Public

    One major task is to convince the public and, as far as possible, our
allies that the Iran-nuclear problem is critical. This would be an uphill
task, were it not for the success of our domesticated media in suppressing
the considered judgment of the US intelligence community that Iran is
nowhere near a nuclear weapon.

    Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer, to her credit, drew on several
inside sources to report on August 2, 2005, that the latest NIE concludes
Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a
nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with general consensus
among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest. That
important information was ignored in other media and quickly dropped off the
radar screen.

    In the Washington of today there is no need to bother with unwelcome
intelligence that does not support the case you wish to make. Polls show
that hyped-up public statements on the threat from Iran are having some
effect, and indiscriminately hawkish pronouncements by usual suspects like
senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain are icing on the cake. Ahmed
Chalabi-type Iranian "dissidents" have surfaced to tell us of secret tunnels
for nuclear weapons research, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps
reminding the world that Iran is the "world's leading state sponsor of
terrorism." Administration spokespeople keep warning of Iranian interference
on the Iraqi side of their long mutual border - themes readily replayed in
FOX channel news and the Washington Times. This morning's Chicago Tribune
editorial put it this way:

    There will likely be an economic confrontation with Iran, or a military
confrontation, or both. Though diplomatic efforts have succeeded in
convincing most of the world that this matter is grave, diplomatic efforts
are highly unlikely to sway Iran.

    On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that Congress
has the political will to use military force against Iran, if necessary,
repeating the mantra " We cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear nation."
Even Richard Perle has come out of the woodwork to add a convoluted new
wrinkle regarding the lessons of the attack on Iraq. Since one cannot depend
on good intelligence, says Perle, it is a matter of "take action now or lose
the option of taking action." One of the most influential intellectual
authors of the war on Iraq, Perle and his "neo-conservative" colleagues see
themselves as men of biblical stature. Just before the attack on Iraq, Perle
prophesized:

    If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it
entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage
a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

    Those songs have turned out to be funeral dirges for over 2,250 US
troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

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    Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is
now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).