WASHINGTON - Three years after the fall of
Baghdad, Washington is abuzz with new reports that
the administration of President George W Bush is
preparing to attack Iran, possibly with nuclear
weapons.
In just the past few days,
lengthy articles detailing planning for aerial
attacks on as many as 400 nuclear and military
targets have appeared in the Washington Post, the
London Sunday Times, The Forward, a prominent
weekly serving the US Jewish community, and The
New Yorker.
The New Yorker account,
written by legendary investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh, who two years ago was the first to
disclose US abuses of
detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was the
most spectacular, although it relied heavily on
unnamed sources outside the administration.
Among other assertions, Hersh's 6,300-word
article, "The Iran plans", asserted that US combat
forces had already entered Iran to collect target
data and make contact with "anti-government
ethnic-minority groups" - assertions that the Post
said it was unable to confirm. It also claimed
that efforts by senior military officials to get
the administration to eliminate contingency plans
for the use of tactical nuclear weapons against
specific hardened targets had been "shouted down"
by the Pentagon's civilian leadership.
Unlike other accounts that have argued
that any attack was unlikely to take place until
after the November mid-term elections at the
earliest, Hersh also suggested that it could come
at any time.
"The officials say that
President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian
regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program,
planned for this spring, to enrich uranium," Hersh
wrote, citing official sources. In an interview on
CNN on Monday, the journalist insisted that
planning for an attack had moved into an
"operational phase, beyond contingency planning".
Without denying any of Hersh's assertions,
Bush insisted on Monday that the latest reports
constituted "wild speculation" and that his
administration remained committed to diplomacy. At
the same time, White House spokesman Scott
McClellan insisted that military force remained an
option.
The sudden spate of detailed
stories has raised the question of whether the
administration really intends such an attack - if
not imminently, then before it leaves office, as
contended by the Sunday Times - or if it is
carrying out a psychological warfare campaign
designed to persuade the Iranians and Washington's
less warlike friends, especially in Europe, that
it will indeed take action unless Tehran agrees to
US demands to abandon its enrichment program.
There is no consensus To some
experts, the potential costs of such an attack -
from an Iranian-inspired Shi'ite uprising in Iraq
to missile attacks on Saudi oil fields and
skyrocketing energy prices (not to mention a rise
in anti-US sentiment in Europe and the Islamic
world) - so clearly outweigh the possible benefits
that Bush's top political aides would recognize
them as exorbitant.
"Although they may be
reckless with the security of the United States, I
think they are utterly cold-blooded realists when
it comes to political power," noted Gary Sick, an
Iran policy expert at Columbia University, who
sees the latest reports and threats by senior
administration officials as an effort to
intimidate Tehran.
"One of their strongest
negotiating tools is the widespread belief that
they are irrational and capable of the most
irresponsible actions. That is their record, so
they have no need to invent it. If they can use
that reputation to keep Iran - and everybody else
- off balance, so much the better," he said,
noting, however, that if that analysis was
correct, "there is always the huge danger of
miscalculation and accident".
Graham
Fuller,
a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer
and Middle East specialist at the RAND Corporation,
echoed this view. He told the Forward that
the recent articles "show the fine hand of US,
maybe also UK, disinformation and psychological
warfare against Iran ... [that] may
now be intensified, perhaps out of frustration
that the 'real thing' is not, in fact, on the
table any more."
Other analysts, however,
do not see the administration as bluffing.
"For months, I have told interviewers
that no senior political or military official
was seriously considering a military attack on
Iran," wrote Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear-proliferation
specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace last week.
"In the
last few weeks, I have changed my view," he said.
"In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues
with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive
branch who have convinced me that some senior
officials have already made up their minds: They
want to hit Iran."
Wayne White, the State
Department's top Middle East analyst until 2005,
told The Forward, "In recent months, I have grown
increasingly concerned that the administration has
been giving thought to a heavy dose of air strikes
against Iran's nuclear sector without giving
enough weight to the possible ramification of such
action."
Whether psychological warfare or
serious premeditation, leading the charge are
clearly the same aggressive nationalist and
pro-Israel elements within and outside the
administration who were behind the drive to war in
Iraq.
Thus the rhetoric of Vice President
Dick Cheney and UN Ambassador John Bolton - two of
the administration's most hawkish figures - has
been particularly threatening in recent weeks,
with Cheney vowing "meaningful consequences" and
Bolton "tangible and painful consequences" in
speeches last month to the American-Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) if Iran did not freeze
its nuclear program.
Similarly,
neo-conservatives closely associated with
right-wing sectors in Israel have been most
outspoken in arguing that the benefits of an
attack strongly outweigh the possible costs.
Hersh quoted Patrick Clawson, an Iran
expert at the AIPAC-created Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, as calling for war, if
covert action, including "industrial accidents",
was not sufficient to set back Iran's nuclear
ambitions. At the same time, the Sunday Times
quoted former Defense Policy Board chairman
Richard Perle as asserting that destroying the
program would be much easier than many
anticipated.
"The attack would be over
before anybody knew what had happened," said
Perle, who told the AIPAC conference last month
that a dozen B-2 bombers could handle the problem
overnight.
His colleague at the neo-conservative
American Enterprise Institute, Michael
Rubin, has also stressed that "the administration
is deadly serious ... and while
everyone recognizes the problems of any military
action, there is a real belief that the
consequences of Iran going nuclear would be
worse."
Indeed, as in Iraq, hardliners in
and outside the administration may be embarked on
their own psy-war campaign against more moderate
forces within the administration, either to
counter European pressure on Washington to engage
Iran in direct negotiations, to provoke Iran into
an overreaction that would offer a pretext for an
attack or to rhetorically box the administration
into a position where it would look unacceptably
weak if it did not take action.
"A sudden
unexplained explosion at a US embassy, a clash
with militias in Basra, or a thousand other things
could call the administration's bluff," according
to Sick. "There are certainly individuals in and
around the administration who would not hesitate
for a second to recommend a bombing attack on
Iran."
