Saturday, February 10, 2007

U.S. To Attack Iran In Spring?

God, I hope the Guardian is right about this:


US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.

The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision. The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: "I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."

Mr Cannistraro, who worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, stressed that no decision had been made.

Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.

In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.

The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.

"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."

One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president's office, is the AEI, headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan "axis of evil" that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader. But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department, Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?

Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.

"I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself." But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon "is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force."

Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.

Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air."

Other neo-cons elsewhere in Washington are opposed to an air strike but advocate a different form of military action, supporting Iranian armed groups, in particular the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), even though the state department has branded it a terrorist organisation.

Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. "I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel."
Another neo-conservative, Meyrav Wurmser, director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, also favours supporting Iranian opposition groups. She is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq. "There is not enough political will for a strike. There seems to be various notions of what the policy should be."

In spite of the president's veto on negotiation with Tehran, the state department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department dismissed it within hours of its arrival.

Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: "To argue diplomacy has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away."
He is worried about "a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war".

The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi militants' weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western counterparts since last year.

If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to America" as its official slogan.
"We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he said.
War of words

"If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly"
George Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio

"The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point"
Robert Gates

"I think it's been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters"
Dick Cheney

"It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux"
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq

"US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran. They are facing a nation"Iranian supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Get on with it! Or, to borrow the lefts' much mocked new protest slogan, "just poop"!

livfreerdie said...

"informed sources in Washington." Isn't that an oxymoron?


Tom

dontdrinkthetaqiyya said...

Pastorius,

ADMIN question for you -

Posted videos in weblog entries at ibloga frequently display for me as empty whitespace. [I'm on Safari 1.3.1] This does not happen for me at other Blogger weblog sites, I don't think. What could be the problem? Have other readers mentioned this at their end?

Pastorius said...

DDTT,
No one else has mentioned that. However, when I was on the road this past week, I took my wife's Mac with me and it has Safari. I was having the same problem a good deal of the time.

Interestingly enough, it does not happen all the time, just sometimes, right?

I have got to change this website. The template is, I am told, very quirky, but I don't have anyone who will do the work. I'm stuck.

You know, it has to be someone I can trust. How many people is that?

Reliapundit said...

pasto, i have posted a few times that if it's going to happen that it was going to happen between this spring and the next inaugural for a year.

ypou shouold read my blog.

;-)

Demosthenes said...

The problem I have with this is that if the Guardian is right about this, then we would have to admit the leftist parts of media are right some of the time. I'm not willing to grant any legitimacy to the Guardian beyond their book reviews of non-political novels.

Pastorius said...

I do read your blog, everyday. In fact, you may have noticed, I even post stuff there occasionally.

Anonymous said...

President Ahmadinejad's real views are summarized on this website: ahmadinejadquotes.blogspot.com

Always On Watch said...

The Iranian New Year is in March.

Yankee Doodle said...

FrontPageMag.com had an interesting article pointing out that a Navy Admiral with aviator background took charge at CENTCOM, the only command in the US with actual war going on -- not just one, but two, both ground wars. Why a "naval aviator"? A strike at Iran would be an airstrike, followed by a naval war of containment to defend oil rigs and shipping, possibly a blockade. Hence, you put a flyboy admiral in charge, not of your two ground wars, but of your future naval & air war.

Dear Kim in DPRK was on the "Axis of Evil" list, too. He declared himself a nuclear power. Nobody's messing with him, now. Iran may see the need to do likewise.

Also, President Whateverhisnameis in Iran (called there "the monkey") is neither popular nor respected. But, if attacked, many Iranians, out of national pride, may side with him, since he's their "monkey".

Either a declared nuclear capability or an American attack might just solve domestic problems for "the monkey", as he either gains prestige or people rally around the flag.

Personally, I wonder if Iran might not be vulnerable to a charm offensive. There are a great many people there tired of the stonings, the religious police, the foreign religion (Islam comes from Arabia), the rise in AIDS, drug addiction and prostitution -- all caused by failed policies of Iran's idiotic regimes.

It's kind of like if you had President Hillary Clinton in charge, and America gets attacked. People like Hillary are to blame for many of the problems here, but wouldn't we defend America?

Besides all that, not one of the 9/11 hijackers was an Iranian. 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Bali, Beslan, Kashmir.... it all gets traced back to Medina and the universities of hatred there, hatred funded and spread around by the Saudi royal family, our knife-in-the-back friends. Riyadh is the criminal hideout here, not Tehran. They could clamp down on those preachers of hatred, they could stop funding new mosques around the world, they could stop training mullahs in radicalized Islam and sending them to those new mosques, exactly the same way they DO prevent Christianity from "staining" their sorry-ass desert kingdom -- but, they don't. They're the ones we need to get by the private parts and hold accountable.

Iran isn't ready to go umpteen rounds in the ring with America, and "the monkey" knows it. Besides which, one nuke does not a power make. You still have to deliver it. We can shoot down their planes and missiles. That leaves terrorists. Bin Laden already has small nukes since 1996, and he's been able to maintain them. Just another argument that we should be all over Bin Laden like "ugly" on "the monkey's" face.

I think we're barking up the wrong tree.

Pastorius said...

Yankee Doodle,
With all due respect, (because clearly you have studied these issues, you are not an ignoramus), I think you don't understand that there isn't just one tree up which to bark.

There is a Sunni tree and there is a Shiite tree. In my opinion, the Iranians are just as dangerous as the Sauds. And, what's more, we know they will work together. Iran is funding you Hamas and Hizbollah, and you MUST know that, my friend, since you have studied the issue so much.

And, I am surprised at how many learned people, like you, who study these issues, don't seem to look at a map.

There is clearly a broad strategy to our war. We attacked Afghanistan and Iraq first, because we had legal justification to do so, no matter what the UN said. We now have bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we have our naval forces stationed in the Persian Gulf.

WE HAVE IRAN SURROUNDED.

Since you have studied these issues so deeply, you ought to know that America did not buy oil from Iran since 1979, and we didn't buy oil from Iraq until we got rid of Hussein.

Now, what does that tell you? It ought to tell you that we are dependent on Saudi Arabia.

Now, think a little further. If we now buy oil from Iraq and we have Iran surrounded, then what does that say to Saudi Arabia?

It says, their days are numbered.

Now, I am not saying that we will follow through on this strategy, but I am quite sure this was the strategy we started out with. It seems that someone, Lord knows who, has cut Bush's balls off.

John Bolton insists that Bush is going to go through with this, and if there is anyone within the inner circle whom I trust, it is Bolton.

Strike up the band, Yankee Doodle, because in my opinion, the fireworks show is about to start, no matter how you feel about it.