Covert ops and disinformation aimed
at Iran By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Recent reports in the Turkish
and German media of the US asking the Turkish
government to support a possible attack on Iran
and alerting allied countries of preparations for
such an attack appear to be part of a strategy to
pressure the Iranian regime rather than the result
of a new policy to strike the country.
The
stories appeared in Turkish and German newspapers
after a December 12 meeting between US Central
Intelligence Agency director Porter Goss and his
Turkish counterpart. The Turkish center-left
newspaper Cumhuryet reported that Goss had warned
the
Turkish government to be ready for possible US use
of air power against both Iran and Syria. On
December 23, the German news agency DDP quoted
"Western security sources" as saying that Goss had
asked the Turkish prime minister to support a
possible strike against Iranian
nuclear and military facilities. And the Berlin
daily Der Tagesspiegal cited North
Atlantic Treaty Organization intelligence sources as
saying the US had informed NATO allies that it was
studying the military option against Iran.
The reports, which have not been widely
picked up by US news media, seemed to suggest that the
administration of President George W Bush was now closer
to war against Iran. But the circumstantial
evidence points to strategic disinformation planted by
the administration - perhaps with help from
friendly officials in NATO - to ratchet up the pressure
on Iran over its position on nuclear-fuel enrichment.
The reports are unlikely to be effective
in getting Iran to be more forthcoming, however.
None of the stories suggested that the military
option was anything more than a possibility. That
would not represent anything new, because the
administration's public posture since August had
been that the "military option" was on the table.
The media reports do refer to possible air
attacks on Iran, but since autumn 2004, Bush
administration planning for possible military
action against Iranian nuclear facilities appears
to have focused on commando operations to sabotage
them rather than on air attacks.
Jushua
Kurlantzick of The New Republic wrote in
Gentleman's Quarterly in May that top officials
had adopted a new strategy of "deterrence and
disruption" toward Iran in the autumn of 2004 that
was aimed ultimately at covert operations by
special forces to damage nuclear sites, according
to a government official.
Kurlantzick's
source confirmed, in effect, an earlier report by
Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that the
administration had approved conducting covert
probes by reconnaissance missions in Iran to
identify potential nuclear sites as targets for
later military strikes. But it suggested any such
strikes would be by commando teams rather than
from the air.
"You'll start seeing reports
of an 'accidental gas leak' at Natanz," an Iranian
nuclear facility, the official was quoted as
saying.
The choice of covert operations instead
of air strikes in administration planning
reflected the serious downside associated with an
overt attack on Iran. Administration policymakers
were concerned about the likelihood of Iranian
retaliation - in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere in
the Middle East - for an open military air attack
against Iranian targets.
Nor did they
regard Israeli air strikes as any more likely to
avoid Iranian retaliation against the US, since
they would require US support. In a book recently
published by the National Defense University's
Institute of Strategic Studies, Thomas Donnelly, a
stalwart defender of administration policy at the
American Enterprise Institute, noted that if
Israeli planes stuck Iranian nuclear targets, "The
Iranians would surely hold us responsible and
target US interests in retaliation."
Administration policymakers apparently
hoped that the US and Israel could deny
responsibility for a covert operation, thus
reducing the likelihood or intensity of Iranian
responses to the strikes, as well as opposition
from allies around the world.
Patrick
Clawson, deputy director of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, which is close to
both Bush administration and Israeli policymakers,
suggested in an interview with Hersh in late 2004
that if military action was to be carried out
against Iran, it would be "much more in Israel's
interest - and Washington's - to take covert
action".
The US military option remained
in the background as the second Bush
administration began a year ago. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice told a London news
conference in early February that an attack on
Iran over its nuclear program was "not on the
agenda at this point".
But after Iran
indicated its intention to go ahead with uranium
enrichment in August, the administration reversed
that declaratory policy. On August 11, Bush
declared in a news conference that "all options
are on the table".
From then the "military
option" was an integral part of the US strategy of
diplomatic pressure on Iran. But that policy
decision sharpened a conflict between the Bush
administration and its European allies -
especially the British, French and Germans - over
the issue of the use of military force against
Iran.
It took German chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder only a few hours to respond to Bush's
move to put the military option ostentatiously on
the table by declaring that the alliance should
"take the military option off the table".
In September, however, Schroeder's
Social Democrats were defeated by the
opposition Christian Democrats, as the administration
had hoped, and by early October, Angela Merkel was
on her way to forming a new government.
Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns was then
dispatched to meet with representatives of
Britain, France and Germany to "begin discussing
ways to ratchet up the pressure on Tehran",
according to a report by the Wall Street Journal's
Carla Anne Robbins on October 6.
Burns'
top priority was certainly to get the European
allies to integrate the idea that the military
option is "on the table" into its negotiating
stance on Iran's nuclear policy. Subsequently, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair began to echo Bush's position
on the military option, presumably at US
insistence, but Merkel and French President
Jacques Chirac avoided any endorsement of that
posture.
Having failed to get agreement by
the EU-3 to exploit the military option in
the diplomatic maneuvering with Iran, the Bush
administration apparently felt that it needed to
take other steps to increase the pressure on
Tehran, including arranging for sensational
newspaper articles to appear in the Turkish and
German press.
It would not have been the
first time a US administration had used such leaks
about a possible military action as part of a
campaign to put pressure on foes to make
diplomatic concessions.
President Dwight
Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster
Dulles feinted toward a military intervention in
Indochina at the time of the 1954 Dienbienphu
crisis and the start of the Geneva Conference on a
settlement of the war.
Privately, however,
both men opposed US intervention in Indochina and
hinted that the suggestions of intervention were a
bluff to influence Soviet and Chinese diplomacy at
Geneva.
The ruse worked in 1954, inducing
the Soviets and Chinese to put pressure on their
Vietnamese allies to make far-reaching concessions
in negotiating the Geneva accords. It is far less
likely that such tactics will succeed with Iran,
which is being asked to sacrifice its own central
security interests rather than those of an ally.
Gareth Porter is a
historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
