Yes, the Pentagon did want to hit
Iran By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Three weeks after the
September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an
official military objective of not only removing
the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning
the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four
other countries in the Middle East, according to a
document quoted extensively in then-under
secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's
recently published account of the Iraq war
decisions.
Feith's account further
indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the
map of the Middle East by military force and the
threat of force was
supported explicitly by the country's top military
leaders.
Feith's book, War and
Decision, released last month, provides
excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President
George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for
the administration to focus not on taking down
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim
of establishing "new regimes" in a series of
states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves
of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes
that support terrorism".
In quoting from
that document, Feith deletes the names of all of
the states to be targeted except Afghanistan,
inserting the phrase "some other states" in
brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related
Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and
Saddam regimes are listed as "state regimes"
against which "plans and operations" might be
mounted, but the names of four other states are
blacked out "for security reasons".
General Wesley Clark, who commanded the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing
campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003
book Winning Modern Wars being told by a
friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the
list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary
of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down
included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and
Somalia.
Clark writes that the list also
included Lebanon. Feith reveals that Rumsfeld's
paper called for getting "Syria out of Lebanon" as
a major goal of US policy.
When this
writer asked Feith after a recent public
appearance which countries' names were deleted
from the documents, he cited security reasons for
the deletion. But when he was asked which of the
six regimes on the Clark list were included in the
Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."
Rumsfeld's paper was given to the White
House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US
military operation in Afghanistan directed against
bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that
decision, Rumsfeld's proposal called explicitly
for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the
use of ground forces in support of the
anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try to
catch bin Laden.
Instead, the Rumsfeld
paper argued that the US should target states that
had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah
and Hamas. It urged that the United States
"[c]apitalize on our strong suit, which is not
finding a few hundred terrorists in caves in
Afghanistan, but in the vastness of our military
and humanitarian resources, which can strengthen
the opposition forces in terrorist-supporting
states".
Feith describes the policy
outlined in the paper as consisting of "military
action against some of the state sponsors and
pressure - short of war - against others".
The Rumsfeld plan represented a Pentagon
consensus that included the uniformed military
leadership, according to Feith's account. He
writes that the process of drafting the paper
involved consultations with the outgoing chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry
Shelton, and the incoming chairman, General
Richard Myers.
Myers helped revise the
initial draft, Feith writes, and General John P
Abizaid, who was then director of the Joint Staff,
enthusiastically endorsed it in draft form. "This
is an exceptionally important memo," wrote
Abizaid, "which gives clear strategic vision." In
a message quoted by Feith, Abizaid recommended to
Myers that "you support this approach".
After the invasion and occupation of Iraq
in 2003, Abizaid was promoted to become chief of
United States Central Command (CENTCOM), with
military responsibility for the entire Middle
East.
Neither Myers nor Abizaid, both of
whom are now retired from the military, responded
to e-mails asking for their comments on Feith's
account of their role in the process of producing
the Rumsfeld strategy.
Rumsfeld's aides
had also drafted a second version of the paper, as
instructions to all military commanders in the
development of "campaign plans against terrorism".
That instructions document was a joint
effort by Feith's office and by the Strategic
Plans and Policy directorate of Abizaid's Joint
Staff. It followed the broad outlines of the paper
for Bush, arguing that the enemy was a "network"
that included states that support terrorism and
that the Defense Department should seek to
"convince or compel" those states to cut their
ties to terrorism.
The Pentagon guidance
document called for military commanders to assist
other government agencies "as directed" to
"encourage populations dominated by terrorist
organizations or their supporters to overthrow
that domination".
That language was
adopted because the campaign planning document was
issued as "Strategic Guidance for the Defense
Department" on October 3, 2001 - just three days
after the Rumsfeld strategy paper had gone to the
president.
Bush had not approved the
explicit aim of regime change in Iran, Syria and
four other countries proposed by Rumsfeld. Thus
Rumsfeld adopted the aggressive military plan
targeting multiple regimes in the Middle East for
regime change even though it was not White House
policy.
The Defense Department guidance
document made it clear that US military aims in
regard to those states would go well beyond any
ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense
Department would also seek to isolate and weaken
those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy"
their military capacities - not necessarily
limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The document included as a "strategic
objective" a requirement to "prevent further
attacks against the US or US interests". That
language, which extended the principle of
preemption far beyond the issue of WMD, was so
broad as to justify plans to use force against
virtually any state that was not a client of the
United States.
The military leadership's
strong preference for focusing on states as
enemies rather than on the threat from al-Qaeda
after September 11 continued a pattern of behavior
going back to the Bill Clinton administration
(1993-2001).
After the bombing of two US
embassies in East Africa by al-Qaeda operatives,
State Department counter-terrorism official
Michael Sheehan proposed supporting the
anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan
against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime.
However, senior US military leaders "refused to
consider it", according to a 2004 account by
Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at
Tufts University.
A senior officer on the
Joint Staff told State Department
counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard
terrorist strikes characterized more than once by
colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a
superpower".
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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