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2 The writing's on the wall for
Iran By Leon Hadar
Rejecting the notion that the United
States was planning to attack Iran and Syria,
White House spokesman Tony Snow called it a myth
or an "urban legend".
"I want to address
[a] kind of a rumor, an urban legend that's going
around," Snow told reporters at a White House
briefing two days after President George W Bush
vowed to go after Iranian terrorist networks
involved in Iraq violence. "What the president
talked about in his speech on Iraq strategy is
defending American
forces
within Iraq," Snow insisted.
In his
January 11 televised speech on US policy in Iraq,
Bush had accused Tehran and Damascus of fueling
the insurgency in Iraq and expressed disagreement
with proposals, including from the Iraq Study
Group (ISG), to negotiate with both countries as
part of an effort to reach peace and stability in
Iraq. He said: "We will disrupt the attacks on our
forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from
Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy
the networks providing advanced weaponry and
training to our enemies in Iraq." Bush also
announced that he would dispatch another
aircraft-carrier battle group and deploy Patriot
anti-missile batteries in the Persian Gulf.
Generally speaking, an urban legend is a
widely circulated, folklorish story - often based
on exaggerated or distorted fact - that is
believed to be true by many who repeat it.
So let's see. Many reports circulated in
Washington and elsewhere in 2002 and early 2003
that, notwithstanding Bush's stated commitment to
deal with Iraq's alleged weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) through diplomatic means, the
White House was already considering plans to oust
Saddam Hussein militarily. It seems that Bush et
al would characterize such "pre-invasion
preparation" speculation as urban legend. After
all, Bush and his advisers denied the reports -
much in the same way they are challenging the
current reports on the possibility of US
preparations to attack Iran.
I suppose
that when it comes to Washington, something that
is urban legend-esque ceases to be a legend only
after we read one of Bob Woodward's post mortems
in which we end up discovering that those who had
been accused of "spreading rumors" were actually
telling the truth. We might then learn that the
press secretary who had dismissed these facts as
nothing more than "rumors" was probably just out
of the loop. ("Out of the loop" is what "insiders"
call a government official who doesn't have access
to information about what the Decider and his Vice
are really planning.)
As a journalist who
covered Washington in the months leading up to the
US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I recall the
many "urban legends" that were circulating at that
time. These included rumors about how Vice
President Dick Cheney and then-secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld were pushing for a war
with Iraq; about how their aides were pressuring
the intelligence agencies to come up with
"estimates" to help exaggerate the Iraqi WMD
threat and Baghdad's alleged ties to al-Qaeda;
about how the Americans and the British were
secretly drawing up a strategy for a military
confrontation with Iraq while pledging to continue
to pursue diplomacy; and about how some of the
leading Iraqi exiles lobbying for the "liberation"
of Iraq, such as Ahmad Chalabi, were untrustworthy
characters.
I read some of these reports
in the press; others reached me through the
grapevine. They were all immediately denied by the
White House press officer. Yet after the war had
been raging, most of these "rumors" proved to be
based on fact. In a way, any political analyst
familiar with the way Washington works and the way
decisions are made there - who could read between
the lines of media reports and official
statements, and who would deconstruct the modus
operandi and body language of Bush and his aides -
had no choice but to conclude that war with Iraq
was inevitable. In that case, the conventional
wisdom got it right.
So it's not
surprising that journalists and pundits who
continue to follow their professional instincts
are experiencing a certain sense of deja vu as
they begin to wonder these days whether Bush and
his aides are planning to expand the current war
in Iraq to Iran (and Syria). The initial source of
this "urban legend" was Bush's infamous "axis of
evil" speech, in which he lumped Iran together
with Iraq and North Korea as deserving US
punishment.
The speech was followed by
various pledges, including public statements,
press leaks and even the commitment of US
financial resources to "export" democracy to Iran.
And in the aftermath of ousting Saddam from power
in Baghdad, there were even a few hints here and
there about "regime change" in Tehran.
Interestingly, the Bush administration denied
press reports about Iranian attempts to negotiate
a diplomatic deal with Washington over Iraq,
Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine.
Finally, at
the center of the US anti-Iran campaign was the
effort to end Iranian plans to develop nuclear
weapons - allegations based on questionable
intelligence estimates from Washington and
Jerusalem - either through diplomatic means or,
the efforts implied, otherwise.
For a
while, the conventional wisdom in Washington was
that against the backdrop of the ensuing mess in
Iraq, the neo-conservatives were losing influence,
the "realists" were gaining power, and that the
Bush administration was going to move toward some
sort of diplomatic "engagement" with the Iranians
along the lines proposed by the ISG, other
respected foreign-policy experts and leading
Democrats.
But after Bush and Cheney
politely rejected the ISG recommendations, and
after signs that Bush and Cheney were getting
ready to "do something" about Iran, the
conventional wisdom concluded that the White House
had now embraced further military escalation in
the Persian Gulf.
The Israelis, led by
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have been playing into
the hands of US warriors by suggesting that an
Iranian nuclear bomb would pose an "existential"
threat akin to the European Holocaust and that if
US diplomatic and/or military power failed, Israel
would have no choice but to "take care of the
problem". The warnings were buttressed through a
series of public statements, including a visit by
Olmert to Washington, and leaks to the press,
including a recent British newspaper report that
Israel could use tactical nuclear weapons to
destroy Iran's nuclear military sites.
At
the same time, the Saudis have been warning that a
nuclear Iran would help transform Tehran into a
hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf and provide it
with an opportunity to lead an alliance of Shi'ite
Mideast factions, from Iran to Israel/Palestine
through Lebanon, in a way that would threaten
Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab-Sunni regimes.
The sense of alarm perpetuated by the
Saudis was reinforced through press leaks
suggesting that the members of the hawkish wing of
the Saudi royal family, led by former ambassador
to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan, were
gaining strength, and
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