The Pentagon plays war games
with Iran By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Two weeks ago, Pentagon
officials discussed a strategy to escalate US
pressure on Iran with the intention of creating
the impression that the United States is ready to
go to war, according to an account by one of the
participants.
A meeting at the Pentagon in
mid-February was said by a participant to have
revolved around a plan to ratchet up US rhetoric
about an Iranian threat and make further military
preparations for war in a way that would be
reminiscent of what happened prior to the US
invasion of Iraq in 2003. The account
was
described by a source outside the Pentagon who
obtained it directly from the participant.
The description of Pentagon thinking
suggests a strategy that is much more aggressive
than the line represented by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's announcement on Tuesday that
the United States would participate in direct
talks with Iran in the context of a conference to
be convened by the Iraqi government.
According to the account provided by the
participant, the US administration's decision last
month to increase military strength in Iraq by at
least 22,000 troops is related more to a strategy
of increased pressure on Iran than to stabilizing
the situation in Baghdad. The troop decision was
described as putting the US military in a better
position to respond to attacks by Shi'ite forces
on US troops in retaliation against a possible
strike against Iran.
That description is
consistent with other indications that President
George W Bush's decision on the troop "surge" was
made primarily in the context of its strategy
toward Iran. Immediately after Bush's January 10
speech announcing the additional troops, the
National Broadcasting Co's Tim Russert reported
that Bush and his top advisers had told a small
group of journalists that the United States would
not sit down with Iran until the US had gained
"leverage".
That was the most direct
indication from Bush administration officials that
they believed the US could negotiate successfully
with Iran once the administration had altered the
bargaining relationship with Tehran.
In
that same briefing for reporters, according to
Russert, the officials indicated that one of the
administration objectives was to achieve a
situation in which Washington would not have to
"go to Syria and Iran" and "ask for anything".
That was an indirect reference to the bargaining
leverage that Iran was believed to have derived
from the widely shared belief that the US would
need Iran's help to stabilize the situation in
Iraq.
Bush was apparently convinced that
the troop increase would convince Iran that the US
would not have to rely on Iranian influence in
Iraq to deal with Shi'ite opposition to the
occupation.
But the troop-surge decision
was also linked to another aspect of the US-Iran
bargaining relationship. It had been widely
speculated that the vulnerability of the US to
retaliatory attacks in Iraq added to Tehran's
leverage by restraining the Bush administration
from waging a preemptive war against Iran.
The briefing before Bush's January 10
speech also provided a key piece of evidence that
the Bush strategy would involve increasing
pressure on Iran by framing the issue of US policy
in terms of new military threats from Iran toward
US and allied interests in the Middle East.
Russert reported that administration officials had
tipped off journalists that Iran would soon be
raised as a major issue in what Russert called "a
very acute way".
The January speech was
followed by a carefully orchestrated campaign of
administration statements and leaks alleging
official Iranian involvement in providing
armor-penetrating weapons to Shi'ite militias in
Iraq. The administration admitted in a briefing in
Baghdad aimed at bolstering that charge that it
was based on "inference" rather than actual
evidence.
To increase the sense of
heightened tension with Iran and suggest momentum
toward a military confrontation, the
administration had already moved an additional
aircraft-carrier task force into the Persian Gulf.
Another move in the increased pressure on
Iran, according to the same source, is that
refueling assets are now being flown into the US
base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. "You
can't launch air strikes against Iran without
refueling assets being there," the source
observed.
High administration officials
have used carefully chosen words in recent weeks
to suggest that they are planning for war against
Iran even as press leaks about a possible attack
multiplied. On February 15, Defense Secretary
Robert Gates said, "We are not looking for an
excuse to go to war with Iran ...We are not
planning a war with Iran."
Meanwhile,
however, the administration maintains the position
that the option of a military strike against Iran
remains as its last resort if Iran does not agree
to US terms for negotiations.
After the
administration failed to produce evidence of
Iranian government involvement in exporting
weapons to the Shi'ites in a Baghdad press
conference on February 11, it introduced a new
line on an alleged Iranian threat.
Vice
Admiral Patrick Walsh, who is leaving his position
as commander of Naval Forces Central Command, told
reporters on February 19 that the Iranian military
conducts exercises in the Strait of Hormuz,
suggesting that it could use mines to close the
narrow strait linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf
of Oman and, thence, the Indian Ocean. Walsh
called mines "an offensive terrorist type of
weapon".
Iranian officials have always
placed their threats to close the Strait of Hormuz
explicitly in the context of retaliation for a
strike by the US against Iran.
"The
question is not what the Americans are planning,"
Walsh said, "but what the Iranians are planning."
That statement indicates that the US is designing
a new campaign to portray Iran's military posture
as threatening to US allies and security in the
Middle East.
The participant's account of
the Pentagon meeting did not indicate any
timetable for the sequence of steps or what the
climactic move in the campaign would be. Nor did
it suggest that a decision had been made by the
White House to launch air strikes against Iran.
However, the moves now planned would increase the
likelihood of war in the event that Washington's
escalatory moves fail to sway Iran's leaders.
A former assistant secretary of defense in
the administration of US president Bill Clinton,
Charles Freeman, who was also ambassador to Saudi
Arabia, calls Bush's escalation of military
pressure "brinkmanship" - a term recalling the
practice by president Dwight D Eisenhower and his
secretary of state John Foster Dulles of
threatening war against China over Korea and the
Taiwan Strait.
"By deploying forces to add
credibility to the threat," Freeman told Inter
Press Service. "You increase the risk of military
conflict, which is [in] fact what is intended."
Gareth Porter is an
investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national-security policy. His
latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of
Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in June 2005.
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