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It sounds crazy, but
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By Ray McGovern
"This notion that the United States
is getting ready to attack Iran is simply
ridiculous."
(Short pause)
"And having
said that, all options are on the table."
Even the White House stenographers felt
obliged to note the result: laughter.
-
The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin on President
George W Bush's February 22 press conference
For a host of good reasons - the huge
and draining commitment of US forces to Iraq and
Iran's ability to stir the Iraqi pot to boiling,
for starters - the notion that the Bush
administration would mount a "preemptive" air
attack on Iran seems insane. And still more insane
if the objective includes overthrowing Iran's
government again, as in 1953 - this time under the
rubric of "regime change".
But Bush
administration policy toward the Middle East is
being run by men - yes, only men - who were
routinely referred to in high circles in
Washington during the 1980s as the "crazies". I
can attest to that personally, but one need not
take my word for it.
According to James
Naughtie, author of The Accidental American:
Tony Blair and the Presidency, former
secretary of state Colin Powell added an old
soldier's adjective to the "crazies" sobriquet in
referring to the same officials. Powell, who was
military aide to defense secretary Casper
Weinberger in the early 1980s, was overheard
calling them "the f---ing crazies" during a phone
call with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
before the war in Iraq.
At the time,
Powell was reportedly deeply concerned over their
determination to attack - with or without United
Nations approval. Small wonder that they got rid
of Powell after the election, as soon as they had
no more use for him.
If further proof of
insanity were needed, one could simply look at the
unnecessary carnage in Iraq since the invasion in
March 2003. That unprovoked attack was, in my
view, the most fateful foreign policy blunder in
our nation's history ... so far.
It can
get worse
"The crazies" are not finished.
And we do well not to let their ultimate folly
obscure their current ambition, and the further
trouble that ambition is bound to bring in the
four years ahead. In an immediate sense, with US
military power unrivaled, they can be seen as
"crazy like a fox", with a value system in which
"might makes right". Operating out of that value
system, and now sporting the more respectable
misnomer/moniker neo-conservative, they are
convinced that they know exactly what they are
doing. They have a clear ideology and a
geopolitical strategy, which leap from papers they
have put out at the Project for the New American
Century in recent years.
The very same men
who, acting out of that paradigm, brought us the
war in Iraq, are now focusing on Iran, which they
view as the only remaining obstacle to American
domination of the entire oil-rich Middle East.
They calculate that, with a docile,
corporate-owned press, a co-opted mainstream
church, and a still-trusting populace, the US
and/or the Israelis can launch a successful air
offensive to disrupt any Iranian nuclear weapons
programs - with the added bonus of possibly
causing the regime in power in Iran to crumble.
But why now? After all, the director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency has just told
Congress that Iran is not likely to have a nuclear
weapon until "early in the next decade?" The
answer, according to some defense experts, is that
several of the Iranian facilities are still under
construction and there is only a narrow "window of
opportunity" to destroy them without causing huge
environmental problems. That window, they say,
will begin to close this year.
Other
analysts attribute the sense of urgency to worry
in Washington that the Iranians may have secretly
gained access to technology that would facilitate
a leap forward into the nuclear club much sooner
than now anticipated. And it is, of course,
neo-conservative doctrine that it is best to nip -
the word in current fashion is "preempt" - any
conceivable threats in the bud.
One reason
the Israelis are pressing hard for early action
may simply be out of a desire to ensure that Bush
will have a few more years as president after an
attack on Iran, so that they will have him to
stand with Israel when bedlam breaks out in the
Middle East.
What about post-attack "day
two?" Not to worry. Well-briefed pundits are
telling us about a wellspring of Western-oriented
moderates in Iran who, with a little help from the
US, could seize power in Tehran. I find myself
thinking: Right; just like all those Iraqis who
welcomed invading American and British troops with
open arms and cut flowers.
For me, this
evokes a painful flashback to the early 1980s when
"intelligence", pointing to "moderates" within the
Iranian leadership, was conjured up to help
justify the imaginative but illegal
arms-for-hostages-and-proceeds-to-Nicaraguan-Contras
caper. The fact that the conjurer-in-chief of that
spurious "evidence" on Iranian "moderates", former
chief Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst,
later director, Robert Gates, was recently offered
the newly created position of director of national
intelligence, makes the flashback more eerie - and
alarming.
George H W Bush saw through
the 'crazies'
During his term in office,
George H W Bush, with the practical advice of his
national security adviser General Brent Scowcroft
and secretary of state James Baker, was able to
keep the "crazies" at arms length, preventing them
from getting the country into serious trouble.
They were kept well below the level of "principal"
- that is, below the level of secretary of state
or defense.
Even so, heady in the
afterglow of victory in the Gulf War of 1991, the
"crazies" stirred up considerable controversy when
they articulated their radical views. Their
vision, for instance, became the centerpiece of
the draft "Defense Planning Guidance" that Paul
Wolfowitz, de facto dean of the neo-conservatives,
prepared in 1992 for then-defense secretary Dick
Cheney. It dismissed deterrence as an outdated
relic of the Cold War and argued that the US must
maintain military strength beyond conceivable
challenge - and use it in preemptive ways in
dealing with those who might acquire "weapons of
mass destruction". Sound familiar?
Aghast
at this radical imperial strategy for the
post-Cold War world, someone with access to the
draft leaked it to the New York Times, forcing
Bush Snr either to endorse or disavow it. Disavow
it he did - and quickly, on the cooler-head
recommendations of Scowcroft and Baker, who proved
themselves a bulwark against the hubris and
megalomania of the "crazies". Unfortunately, their
vision did not die. No less unfortunately, there
is method to their madness - even if it threatens
to spell eventual disaster for our country.
Empires always overreach and fall.
The
return of the neo-cons
In 2001, the new
Bush brought the neo-cons back and put them in top
policymaking positions. Even former assistant
secretary of state Elliot Abrams, convicted in
October 1991 of lying to Congress and then
pardoned by George H W Bush, was called back and
put in charge of Middle East policy in the White
House. In January, he was promoted to the
influential post (once occupied by Robert Gates)
of deputy assistant to the president for national
security affairs. From that senior position Abrams
will once again be dealing closely with John
Negroponte, an old colleague from rogue-elephant
Contra War days, who has now been picked to be the
first director of national intelligence.
Those of us who - like Powell - had
front-row seats during the 1980s are far too
concerned to dismiss the re-emergence of the
neo-cons as a simple case of deja vu. They are
much more dangerous now. Unlike in the 1980s, they
are the ones crafting the adventurous policies our
sons and daughters are being called on to
implement.
Why dwell on this? Because it
is second in importance only to the portentous
reality that the earth is running out of readily
accessible oil - something of which they are all
too aware. Not surprisingly then, disguised
beneath the weapons of mass destruction
smokescreen they laid down as they prepared to
invade Iraq lay an unspoken but bedrock reason for
the war - oil. In any case, the neo-cons seem to
believe that, in the wake of the November
election, they now have a carte-blanche "mandate".
And with the president's new "capital to spend"
they appear determined to spend it, sooner rather
than later.
Next stop, Iran
When a Special Forces platoon leader just back
from Iraq matter-of-factly tells a close friend of
mine, as happened last week, that he and his unit
are now training their sights (literally) on Iran,
we need to take that seriously. It provides us
with a glimpse of reality as seen at ground level.
For me, it brought to mind an unsolicited email I
received from the father of a young soldier
training at Fort Benning in the spring of 2002,
soon after I wrote an op-ed discussing the timing
of Bush's decision to make war on Iraq. The father
informed me that, during the spring of 2002, his
son kept writing home saying his unit was training
to go into Iraq. No, said the father; you mean
Afghanistan ... that's where the war is, not Iraq.
In his next email, the son said, "No, Dad, they
keep saying Iraq. I asked them and that's what
they mean."
Now, apparently, they keep
saying Iran; and that appears to be what they
mean.
Anecdotal evidence like this is
hardly conclusive. Put it together with
administration rhetoric and a preponderance of
other "dots", though, and everything points in the
direction of an air attack on Iran, possibly also
involving some ground forces.
Indeed, from
the New Yorker reports of Seymour Hersh to
Washington Post articles, accounts of small-scale
American intrusions on the ground as well as into
Iranian airspace are appearing with increasing
frequency.
In a speech given on February
18, former UN arms inspector and Marine officer
Scott Ritter (who was totally on target before the
Iraq war on that country's lack of weapons of mass
destruction) claimed that the president has
already "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June
in order to destroy its alleged nuclear weapons
program and eventually bring about "regime
change". This does not necessarily mean an
automatic green light for a large attack in June,
but it may signal the president's seriousness
about this option.
So, again, against the
background of what we have witnessed over the past
four years, and the troubling fact that the circle
of second-term presidential advisers has become
even tighter, we do well to inject a strong note
of urgency into any discussion of the "Iranian
option".
Why would Iran want nukes?
So, why would Iran think it has to acquire
nuclear weapons? Senator Richard Lugar, chair of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked
this on a Sunday talk show a few months ago.
Apparently having a senior moment, he failed to
give the normal answer. Instead, he replied,
"Well, you know, Israel has ..." At that point, he
caught himself and abruptly stopped.
Recovering quickly and realizing that he
could not just leave the word "Israel" hanging
there, Lugar began again: "Well, Israel is alleged
to have a nuclear capability."
Is alleged
to have? Lugar is chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and yet he doesn't know that
Israel has, by most estimates, a major nuclear
arsenal, consisting of several hundred nuclear
weapons. (Mainstream newspapers are allergic to
dwelling on this topic, but it is mentioned every
now and then, usually buried in obscurity on an
inside page.)
Just imagine how the
Iranians and Syrians would react to Lugar's
disingenuousness. Small wonder our highest
officials and lawmakers - and Lugar, remember, is
one of the most decent among them - are widely
seen abroad as hypocritical. Our media, of course,
ignore the hypocrisy. This is standard operating
procedure when the word "Israel" is spoken in this
or other unflattering contexts. And the objections
of those appealing for a more balanced approach
are quashed.
If the truth be told, Iran
fears Israel at least as much as Israel fears the
internal security threat posed by the thugs
supported by Tehran. Iran's apprehension is partly
fear that Israel (with at least tacit support from
the Bush administration) will send its aircraft to
bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, just as
American-built Israeli bombers destroyed the Iraqi
nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981.
As part
of the current war of nerves, recent statements by
the president and vice president can be read as
giving a green light to Israel to do just that;
while Israeli air force commander Major General
Eliezer Shakedi told reporters on February 21 that
Israel must be prepared for an air strike on Iran
"in light of its nuclear activity".
US-Israel nexus
The Iranians
also remember how Israel was able to acquire and
keep its nuclear technology. Much of it was stolen
from the US by spies for Israel. As early as the
late-1950s, Washington knew Israel was building
the bomb and could have aborted the project.
Instead, American officials decided to turn a
blind eye and let the Israelis go ahead. Now
Israel's nuclear capability is truly formidable.
Still, it is a fact of strategic life that a
formidable nuclear arsenal can be deterred by a
far more modest one, if an adversary has the means
to deliver it. (Look at North Korea's success
with, at best, a few nuclear weapons and
questionable means of delivery in deterring the
"sole remaining superpower in the world".) And
Iran already has missiles with the range to hit
Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon has for some time appeared eager to enlist
Washington's support for an early "pre-emptive"
strike on Iran. Indeed, American defense officials
have told reporters that visiting Israeli
officials have been pressing the issue for the
past year and a half. And the Israelis are now
claiming publicly that Iran could have a nuclear
weapon within six months - years earlier than the
Defense Intelligence Agency estimate mentioned
above.
In the past, Bush has chosen to
dismiss unwelcome intelligence estimates as
"guesses" - especially when they threatened to
complicate decisions to implement the
neo-conservative agenda. It is worth noting that
several of the leading neo-cons - Richard Perle,
chair of the Defense Policy Board (2001-03);
Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy; and David Wurmser, Middle East adviser to
Vice President Dick Cheney - actually wrote policy
papers for the Israeli government during the
1990s. They have consistently had great difficulty
distinguishing between the strategic interests of
Israel and those of the US - at least as they
imagine them.
As for Bush, over the past
four years he has amply demonstrated his
preference for the counsel of Sharon who, as
Scowcroft said publicly, has the president
"wrapped around his little finger". (As chairman
of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board until he was unceremoniously removed at the
turn of the year, Scowcroft was in a position to
know.) If Scowcroft is correct in also saying that
the president has been "mesmerized" by Sharon, it
seems possible that the Israelis already have
successfully argued for an attack on Iran.
When regime change meant overthrow for
oil
To remember why the US is no favorite
in Tehran, one needs to go back at least to 1953
when the US and Great Britain overthrew Iran's
democratically elected premier Mohammad Mossadeq
as part of a plan to ensure access to Iranian oil.
They then emplaced the young Shah in power who,
with his notorious secret police, proved second to
none in cruelty. The Shah ruled from 1953 to 1979.
Much resentment can build up over a whole
generation. His regime fell like a house of cards
when supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
rose up to do some regime change of their own.
Iranians also remember Washington's strong
support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq after it decided
to make war on Iran in 1980. US support for Iraq
(which included crucial intelligence support for
the war and an implicit condoning of Saddam's use
of chemical weapons) was perhaps the crucial
factor in staving off an Iranian victory. Imagine
then, the threat Iranians see, should the Bush
administration succeed in establishing up to 14
permanent military bases in neighboring Iraq.
Any Iranian can look at a map of the
Middle East (including occupied Iraq) and conclude
that this administration might indeed be willing
to pay the necessary price in blood and treasure
to influence what happens to the black gold under
Iranian as well as Iraqi sands. And with four more
years to play with, a lot can be done along those
lines. The obvious question is: how to deter it?
Well, once again, Iran can hardly be blind to the
fact that a small nation like North Korea has so
far deterred US action by producing, or at least
claiming to have produced, nuclear weapons.
Nuclear is the nub
The nuclear
issue is indeed paramount, and we would do well to
imagine and craft fresh approaches to the nub of
the problem. As a start, I'll bet if you made a
survey, only 20% of Americans would answer "yes"
to the question "Does Israel have nuclear
weapons?" That is key, it seems to me, because at
their core Americans are still fair-minded people.
On the other hand, I'll bet that 95% of
the Iranian population would answer, "Of course
Israel has nuclear weapons; that's why we Iranians
need them" - which was, of course, the
unmentionable calculation that Lugar almost
conceded. "And we also need them," many Iranians
would probably say, "in order to deter the
'crazies' in Washington. It seems to be working
for the North Koreans, who, after all, are the
other remaining point on President Bush's 'axis of
evil'."
The ideal approach would, of
course, be to destroy all nuclear weapons in the
world and ban them for the future, with a very
intrusive global inspection regime to verify
compliance. A total ban is worth holding up as an
ideal, and I think we must. But this approach
seems unlikely to bear fruit over the next four
years. So what then?
A nuclear-free
Middle East
How about a nuclear-free
Middle East? Could the US make that happen? We
could if we had moral clarity - the underpinning
necessary to bring it about. Each time this
proposal is raised, the Syrians, for example, clap
their hands in feigned joyful anticipation,
saying, "Of course such a pact would include
Israel, right?" The issue is then dropped from all
discussion by US policymakers. Required: not only
moral clarity but also what Thomas Aquinas labeled
the precondition for all virtue, courage. In this
context, courage would include a refusal to be
intimidated by inevitable charges of
anti-Semitism.
The reality is that, except
for Israel, the Middle East is nuclear free. But
the discussion cannot stop there. It is not
difficult to understand why the first leaders of
Israel, with the Holocaust experience written
indelibly on their hearts and minds, and feeling
surrounded by perceived threats to the fledgling
state's existence, wanted the bomb. And so, before
the Syrians or Iranians, for example, get carried
away with self-serving applause for the
nuclear-free Middle East proposal, they will have
to understand that for any such negotiation to
succeed it must have as a concomitant aim the
guarantee of an Israel able to live in peace and
protect itself behind secure borders. That
guarantee has got to be part of the deal.
That the obstacles to any such agreement
are formidable is no excuse not trying. But the
approach would have to be new and everything would
have to be on the table. Persisting in a state of
denial about Israel's nuclear weapons is
dangerously shortsighted; it does nothing but
aggravate fears among the Arabs and create further
incentive for them to acquire nuclear weapons of
their own.
A sensible approach would also
have to include a willingness to engage the
Iranians directly, attempt to understand their
perspective, and discern what the US and Israel
could do to alleviate their concerns.
Preaching to Iran and others about not
acquiring nuclear weapons is, indeed, like the
village drunk preaching sobriety - the more so as
our government keeps developing new genres of
nuclear weapons and keeps looking the other way as
Israel enhances its own nuclear arsenal. Not a
pretty moral picture, that. Indeed, it reminds me
of the scripture passage about taking the plank
out of your own eye before insisting that the
speck be removed from another's.
Lessons from the past ... like mutual
deterrence
Has everyone forgotten that
deterrence worked for some 40 years, while for
most of those years the US and the USSR had not by
any means lost their lust for ever-enhanced
nuclear weapons? The point is simply that, while
engaging the Iranians bilaterally and searching
for more imaginative nuclear-free proposals, the
US might adopt a more patient interim attitude
regarding the striving of other nation states to
acquire nuclear weapons - bearing in mind that the
Bush administration's policies of "preemption" and
"regime change" themselves create powerful
incentives for exactly such striving.
As
was the case with Iraq two years ago, there is no
imminent Iranian strategic threat to Americans -
or, in reality, to anyone. Even if Iran acquired a
nuclear capability, there is no reason to believe
that it would risk a suicidal first strike on
Israel. That, after all, is what mutual deterrence
is all about; it works both ways.
It is
nonetheless clear that the Israelis' sense of
insecurity - however exaggerated it may seem to
those of us thousands of miles away - is not
synthetic but real. The Sharon government appears
to regard its nuclear monopoly in the region as
the only effective "deterrence insurance" it can
buy. It is determined to prevent its neighbors
from acquiring the kind of capability that could
infringe on the freedom it now enjoys to carry out
military and other actions in the area. Government
officials have said that Israel will not let Iran
acquire a nuclear weapon; it would be folly to
dismiss this as bravado. The Israelis have laid
down a marker and mean to follow through - unless
the Bush administration assumes the attitude that
"preemption" is an acceptable course for the US
but not for Israel. It seems unlikely that the
neo-conservatives would take that line. Rather ...
"Israel is our ally."
Or so said our
president before the cameras on February 17. But I
didn't think we had a treaty of alliance with
Israel; I don't remember the Senate approving one.
Did I miss something?
Clearly, the
longstanding US-Israeli friendship and the ideals
we share dictate continuing support for Israel's
defense and security. It is quite another thing,
though, to suggest the existence of formal treaty
obligations that our country does not have. To all
intents and purposes, our policymakers - from the
president on down - seem to speak and behave on
the assumption that we do have such obligations
toward Israel. A former colleague CIA analyst,
Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris,
has put it this way: "The Israelis have succeeded
in lacing tight the ropes binding the American
Gulliver to Israel and its policies."
An
earlier American warned:
A passionate attachment of one
nation for another produces a variety of evils.
Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the
illusion of an imaginary common interest in
cases where no real common interest exists,
infuses into one the enmities of the other, and
betrays the former into participation in the
quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate
inducement or justification ... It also gives to
ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens, who
devote themselves to the favorite nation,
facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of
their own country.
- George Washington,
Farewell Address, 1796 In my view, our
first president's words apply only too aptly to
this administration's lash-up with the Sharon
government. As responsible citizens we need to
overcome our timidity about addressing this issue,
lest our fellow Americans continue to be denied
important information neglected or distorted in
our domesticated media.
Ray
McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years
- from the administration of John F Kennedy to
that of George H W Bush. During the early 1980s,
he was one of the writers/editors of the
President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one
to the president's most senior advisers. He also
chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In
January 2003, he and four former colleagues
founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
This article is reposted
here by permission of Tomdispatch.com.
(Copyright 2005 Ray
McGovern) |
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