An admiral takes on the White
House By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A new article on CENTCOM
commander Admiral William Fallon confirms that his
public statements last autumn ruling out war
against Iran were not coordinated with the White
House and landed him in trouble more than once
with President George W Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney.
In an admiring article on
Fallon in Esquire, former Pentagon official Thomas
P M Barnett writes that Fallon angered the White
House by "brazenly challenging" Bush on his
aggressive threat of war against Tehran. Barnett
also cites "well-placed observers" as saying Bush
may soon replace Fallon with a "more pliable"
commander.
Barnett's account, which quotes
conversations with Fallon during the CENTCOM
commander's trips to the Middle East, shows that
Fallon privately justified his statements
contradicting the Bush
policy
of keeping the "option" of an unprovoked attack on
Iran "on the table" as necessary to calm the fears
of Egypt and other friendly Arab regimes of a
US-Iran war.
Barnett recalls that when
Fallon was in Cairo in November, the lead story in
that day's edition of the English-language daily
Egyptian Gazette carried the headline "US rules
out strike against Iran" over a picture of Fallon
meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.
That
story, published on November 19 and not picked up
by any US news media, reported that Fallon had
"ruled out a possible strike against Iran and said
Washington was mulling non-military options
instead".
Later that day, according to
Barnett, Fallon told him during a coffee break in
a military meeting, "I'm in hot water again," and
then confirmed that his problems were directly
with the White House.
That was the second
time in less than a week and the third time in
seven weeks that Fallon had publicly declared that
there would be no war against Iran. In an
interview with al-Jazeera television in September,
which Fallon himself had requested, according to a
source at al-Jazeera, he had said, "This constant
drum beat of conflict is what strikes me as not
helpful and not useful."
And only a week
before the trip to Egypt, in an interview with the
Financial Times of London, Fallon had said a
military strike was not "in the offing", adding,
"Another war is just not where we want to go."
These statements represented an
extraordinary exercise of power by a combat
commander, because it contradicted a central
feature of the Bush-Cheney strategy on Iran.
High-ranking Bush administration officials had
been routinely repeating the administration's line
that no option had been taken "off the table"
since early 2005.
At an October 17 news
conference, Bush said he had "told people that if
you're interested in avoiding World War III, it
seems like you ought to be interested in
preventing them from having the knowledge
necessary to make a nuclear weapon".
Fallon's public statements explicitly
ruling out an attack on Iran thus undermined the
Bush administration's threat against Iran.
The willingness of the top commander in
the Middle East to take the military option "off
the table" was in part a reflection of the
determination of uniformed military leaders to
prevent what they regarded as a disastrous course.
The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who replaced General
Peter Pace in June, was even more candid about his
opposition to the use of force against Iran than
Pace had been, according to a Congressional
staffer who had participated in private meetings
with both. Pace declared publicly in late October,
"We have to be mindful of the risks that would [be
spawned] by engaging in a third conflict" in the
region.
Mullen added, however, that
military options "cannot be taken off the table".
But Fallon, as the commander responsible
for the entire Middle East, was concerned about
more than the consequences of actually exercising
the military option. He was prompted to enunciate
a "no-war" line on Iran by the panicky reactions
of Arab states to what they thought were
indications of the warlike intentions of the Bush
administration.
In the latter half of
2007, friendly Arab regimes were upset by the
possibility of a US-Iran war, which they feared
would destabilize the entire region. Fallon is
quoted as telling Barnett, "[I]t's all anyone
wants to talk about right now. People here hear
what I'm saying and understand. I don't want to
get them too spun up."
Fallon told Barnett
that his ruling out of military action against
Iran was necessary to calm the very regimes the
Bush administration was hoping to enlist to
support its anti-Iran line. "Washington interprets
this as all aimed at them," Fallon said in Cairo,
according to Barnett. "Instead, it's aimed at
governments and media in this region. I'm not
talking about the White House."
Fallon was
arguing, in effect, that it makes no sense to make
the possibility of an unprovoked attack part of
your declaratory policy if it merely induces
confusion and panic among friendly governments
without influencing the target of the threat.
Barnett quotes Fallon as complaining that
"they" - meaning White House officials were asking
him, "Why are you even meeting with Mubarak?" But
Fallon strongly defended the diplomatic role he
was playing in relations with Mubarak and other
Middle Eastern leaders. "This is my center of
gravity," Fallon told him. "This is my job."
Fallon's sensitivity to the
political-diplomatic consequences of a declaratory
policy that explicitly keeps open the threat of an
aggressive war as a potential option set him apart
not only from the White House but from the
consensus among national security specialists in
both parties. In early 2007, all three of the top
three Democratic contenders for the presidential
nomination publicly declared their support for
keeping "all options on the table".
Fallon
is not the first CENTCOM commander to rein in
aggressive White House policy toward the Middle
East. In late 1997, according to Dana Priest's
book, The Mission, the Bill Clinton White
House wanted CENTCOM commander General Anthony
Zinni to order his pilots to provoke a military
confrontation with Iraq in the no-fly zone by
deliberately drawing fire from Iraqi planes.
The request for such a provocation was
conveyed to Zinni by the vice chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Ralston. But
Zinni, who believed that it could lead to an
unwanted war with Iraq, insisted that a formal
request from the White House would have to be
sent, and the plan was dropped.
The
unhappiness of the Bush administration with
Fallon's role as well as the unflattering picture
of administration policy revealed by the article
was evident last Thursday from the failure of
either the White House or the Pentagon to issue
the usual reassuring statements in response to the
article.
The White House declined to
comment, although, according to the Washington
Post's Thomas Ricks, the article "was being
discussed there". Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell
said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates "has read
the profile on Admiral Fallon but chooses not to
comment on it or other press accounts".
Gareth Porter is an
historian and national security policy analyst.
The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam, was published in
2006.
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