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Once more, the heat's on
Iran
By Ehsan Ahrari
Is
Iran the next US target for regime change? That is
the bombshell of a question that investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh has raised in the latest
issue of New Yorker magazine. The White House's
response: Hersh's essay is "riddled with
inaccuracies".
Hersh claims that US
special forces are operating from bases in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, conducting
reconnaissance missions in Iran for the past six
months. Their potential objective includes
"identifying target information for three dozen or
more suspected nuclear, chemical and missile
sites" in that country. The special forces are
reportedly leaving behind remote detection devices
called "sniffers" that have the technical
capability to test for radioactive emissions in
the atmosphere. One US government official told
Hersh, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go
into Iran and destroy as much of the military
infrastructure as possible."
The alleged
use of special forces in such an operation,
according to Hersh, is evidence that President
George W Bush will continue to downgrade the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). What is also
alarming, if true, is his claim that Bush has
"signed a series of top-secret findings and
executive orders authorizing secret commando
groups and other special forces units to conduct
covert operations against suspected terrorist
targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle
East and South Asia." By depicting such operations
as military rather than intelligence, writes
Hersh, "will enable the administration to evade
legal restrictions imposed on the CIA's covert
activities overseas".
What is in it for
Pakistan? According to Hersh, Pakistan has made a
devilish bargain with the US. In exchange for
allowing US special forces to operate from its
territory, Washington will not demand that
Islamabad hand over Pakistan's top nuclear
scientist, A Q Khan, for interrogation about his
role in nuclear proliferation. In addition, the
special forces are reportedly working closely with
a group of Pakistani scientists who had cooperated
with their counterparts in Iran. Needless to say,
Pakistan has promptly denied such collaboration as
"far fetched".
The question now is what
are the chances that Hersh's story is right? The
story may be right in the sense that the US is
badly in need for evidence of Iran's nuclear
intentions. There is little doubt that the Bush
administration suffers from a serious credibility
gap about making future claims regarding Iran's
aspirations to develop nuclear weapons without
hard evidence. The necessity of hard evidence
might be driving any alleged penetration of
special forces into Iran, rather than the
objective of another regime change. Once such
evidence is at hand, Bush may be able to go to the
world community and demand that sanctions be
placed on Iran.
It is also possible that
the US is of the view that Iran might be closer to
developing nuclear weapons than anyone - including
the nuclear watchdog entity, the International
Atomic Energy Agency, has anticipated or
speculated. Thus, it does not want to encounter
another terrible surprise, as was the case when
India and Pakistan brought their nuclear programs
out of the closet, or when North Korea made some
bold claims about its own nuclear weapons
development capabilities.
What are chances
that Pakistan is cooperating with the US? It is
possible that Pakistan is busy making the best out
of the worst situation related to Khan's
involvement in nuclear proliferation. More to the
point, considering the fact that there is ample
suspicion in Washington that Khan might not have
acted as a loose canon on his own, and that the
government of Pakistan might have tacitly approved
his activities at least in the case of North
Korea, Musharraf cannot afford to become a target
of US sanctions in the future.
Besides,
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's unilateral
decision to take a "tell-all" approach regarding
his own nuclear aspirations has shaken up
Pakistan's own nostalgic and starry-eyed
perspectives regarding Islamic solidarity. So,
establishing a clear distance between itself and
Iran might have been just a Machiavellian approach
of Pakistan to save its own hide.
If the
US really wanted to seek hard evidence about
Iran's nuclear intentions, one wonders how much
damage Hersh's story has done. Considering that
its platter is currently full with the problems
related to Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush
administration might not want to create another
unmanageable mess by destabilizing Iran. There is
also an outside chance that Hersh might have been
given this story as a larger campaign of the US to
forewarn Iran about the consequences of developing
nuclear weapons.
Ehsan Ahrari,
PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based
independent strategic analyst.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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