Plan B (for 'bombs') after Iran
fantasy fails By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney
and his neo-conservative allies in the George W
Bush administration only began agitating for the
use of military force against Iran once they had
finally given up the illusion that regime change
in Iran would happen without it.
And they
did not give up the illusion until late 2005,
according to a former high-level Foreign Service
officer who participated in United
States discussions with Iran
from 2001 until late 2005.
Hillary Mann,
who was the director for Persian Gulf and
Afghanistan Affairs on the National Security
Council (NSC) staff in 2003 and later on the State
Department's Policy Planning staff, observes that
the key to neo-conservative policy views on Iran
until 2006 was the firm belief that one of the
consequences of a successful display of US
military force in Iraq would be to shake the
foundations of the Iranian regime.
That
central belief was conveyed to conservative
columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington
Times in April 2002 by prominent neo-con figures
who told him the Bush administration "had decided
to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle
East".
The Bush doctrine of pre-emption,
they said, "had become the vehicle for driving
axis of evil practitioners out of power". The
removal of Saddam Hussein, according to the
neo-con scenario, would bring a democratic Iraq
that would then spread through the region,
"bringing democracy from Syria to Egypt and to the
sheikhdoms, emirates and monarchies of the Gulf".
Under the influence of this central myth,
after the September 11, 2001, attacks, some of
Cheney's allies in the Pentagon conceived the
objective of removing every regime in the Middle
East that was hostile to the US and Israel.
In November 2001, General Wesley Clark,
who had recently retired from his post as head of
the US Southern Command, learned from a general he
knew in the Pentagon that a memo had just come
down from the office of the secretary of defense
outlining the objective of the "take down" of
seven Middle Eastern regimes over five years.
The plan would start with the invasion of
Iraq, and then go after Syria, Lebanon, Libya,
Somalia and Sudan, according to an account in
Clark's 2003 book, Winning Modern Wars. The
memo indicated the plan was to "come back and get
Iran in five years".
The neo-cons were
very serious about going after Syria. In the weeks
following the initial US blow at Saddam, Paul
Wolfowitz, the chief neo-conservative architect of
the Iraq invasion, argued unsuccessfully for
taking advantage of the presumed military triumph
there to overthrow the Syrian regime of President
Bashar al-Assad, according to the right-leaning
Insight magazine.
Contrary to the popular
notion that the neo-cons believed that "real men
go to Tehran", no one was yet proposing that Iran
should be the next military target.
In
September 2003, Cheney brought in David Wurmser, a
close friend and protege of Richard Perle and one
of the architects of the neo-conservative plan for
regime change in Iraq, as his adviser on the
Middle East. Wurmser had previously articulated
very specific ideas about how taking down Saddam
by force would help destabilize the Iranian
regime.
In a 1999 book, Wurmser had laid
out a plan for using the Iraqi Shi'ite majority
and their conservative clerics as US allies in the
"regional rollback of Shi'ite fundamentalism" -
meaning the Islamic regime in Iran.
But
Wurmser also believed that the Ba'athist regime in
Syria was an obstacle to regime change in Iran.
Beginning with the "Clean Break" memo to incoming
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which
he had co-authored with Perle and Douglas Feith in
1996, he had argued that once Saddam was removed,
the next step was to take down the Assad regime in
Syria.
In a September 2007 interview with
the London Telegraph, after he had left Cheney's
office, Wurmser confirmed his belief that regime
change in Syria - by force, if necessary - would
directly affect the stability of the Tehran
regime. If Iran were seen to be unable to do
anything to prevent the overthrow of the regime in
Syria, he suggested, it would seriously undermine
the Islamic regime's prestige at home.
From 2003 to 2005, Wurmser and the
neo-cons were in denial about the increasingly
obvious reality that the US occupation of Iraq was
actually boosting Iranian influence there rather
than shaking the regime's power at home, according
to former NSC specialist Mann.
She was
well acquainted with the neo-conservatives'
thinking from her associations with the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy in the 1990s, and
she told Inter Press Service in a recent interview
that she was "astounded" to hear neo-cons in the
administration suggest as late as 2005 that the
situation in Iraq was on track to help destabilize
the Iranian regime.
The neo-cons had long
viewed the Iranian reformists, led by president
Mohammed Khatami, as the primary obstacle to the
popular revolution against the mullahs for which
they were working. As French Iran specialist
Frederic Tellier noted in an early 2006 essay,
they believed the electoral defeats of the
reformists in 2003 and 2004 would also help open
the way to a revolutionary political upheaval in
Tehran.
In an appearance on the Don Imus
radio talk show on January 21, 2005, Cheney said
the Israelis might attack Iran's nuclear sites if
they became convinced the Iranians had a
"significant nuclear capability". That remark
underlined the fact that he was not thinking
seriously about a US strike against Iran.
By the end of 2005, however, the neo-cons
had finally accepted the reality of the failure of
the Bush administration's military intervention in
Iraq, according to Mann. She also notes that the
electoral victory of Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
representing a new breed of nationalist
conservative with a base of popular support, in
the June 2005 presidential election, spelled the
"death knell" for neo-con optimism about regime
change in Iran.
Mann observes that the
neo-cons had never given up the idea of using
force against Iran, but they had argued that less
force would be needed in Iran than had been used
in Iraq. By early 2006, however, that assumption
was being discarded by prominent
neo-conservatives.
Former Central
Intelligence Agency analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht of
the American Enterprise Institute - writing under
the pseudonym Edward Shirley - had been more
aggressive than anyone else in arguing that Iraq's
Shi'ites, liberated by US military power, would
help subvert the Iranian regime. But in April
2006, he called, in a Weekly Standard article, for
continued bombing of Iran's nuclear sites until
the Iranians stopped rebuilding them.
Within the administration, meanwhile,
Wurmser was looking for the opportunity to propose
a military option against Iran. In his September
2007 interview with the Telegraph shortly after
leaving Cheney's office, he insisted that the
United States must be willing to "escalate as far
as we need to go to topple the [Iranian] regime if
necessary".
That opportunity seemed to
present itself in the aftermath of Israel's failed
attempt to deal a major blow to Hezbollah in
southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
Neo-conservatives aligned with Cheney
argued that Iran was now threatening US dominance
in the region, through its proxies in Lebanon,
Iraq and the Palestinian territory and its nuclear
program. They insisted that the administration had
to push back by targeting Iran's Quds Force
personnel in Iraq, increasing the naval presence
in the Gulf and accusing Iran of supporting the
killing of US troops.
Although the
ostensible rationale was to pressure Iran to back
down on the nuclear issue, in light of the
previous views, it appears that they were hoping
to use military power against Iran to accomplish
their original goal of regime change.
Gareth Porter is an 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.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
