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Do We Have
the Courage to Stop War With Iran?
By Ray McGovern
09/02/07 "ICH"
-- - Why do I feel like the proverbial skunk at a Labor
Day picnic? Sorry; but I thought you might want to know that
this time next year there will probably be more skunks than
we can handle. I fear our country is likely to be at war
with Iran - and with the thousands of real terrorists Iran
can field around the globe.
It is going to happen, folks, unless we put our lawn chairs
away on Tuesday, take part in some serious grass-roots
organizing, and take action to prevent a wider war - while
we still can.
President George W. Bush's speech Tuesday lays out the
Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran and how the intelligence is
being "fixed around the policy," as was the case before the
attack on Iraq.
It's not about putative Iranian "weapons of mass
destruction" - not even ostensibly. It is about the
requirement for a scapegoat for US reverses in Iraq, and the
White House's felt need to create a casus belli by provoking
Iran in such a way as to "justify" armed retaliation -
eventually including air strikes on its nuclear-related
facilities.
Bush's August 28 speech to the American Legion comes five
years after a very similar presentation by Vice President
Dick Cheney. Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars on
August 26, 2002, Cheney set the meretricious terms of
reference for war on Iraq.
Sitting on the same stage that evening was former CENTCOM
commander Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was being honored
at the VFW convention. Zinni later said he was shocked to
hear a depiction of intelligence (Iraq has WMD and is
amassing them to use against us) that did not square with
what he knew. Although Zinni had retired two years before,
his role as consultant had enabled him to stay up to date on
key intelligence findings.
"There was no solid proof that Saddam had WMD.... I heard a
case being made to go to war," Zinni told "Meet the Press"
three and a half years later.
(Zinni is a straight shooter with considerable courage, and
so the question lingers: why did he not go public? It is all
too familiar a conundrum at senior levels; top officials can
seldom find their voices. My hunch is that Zinni regrets
letting himself be guided by a misplaced professional
courtesy and/or slavish adherence to classification
restrictions, when he might have prevented our country from
starting the kind of war of aggression branded at Nuremberg
the "supreme international crime.")
Cheney: Dean of Preemption
Zinni was not the only one taken aback by Cheney's words.
Then-CIA Director George Tenet says Cheney's speech took him
completely by surprise. In his memoir, Tenet wrote, "I had
the impression that the president wasn't any more aware than
we were of what his No. 2 was going to say to the VFW until
he said it."
Yet, it could have been anticipated. Just five weeks before,
Tenet himself had told his British counterpart that the
president had decided to make war on Iraq for regime change
and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy."
When Bush's senior advisers came back to town after Labor
Day, 2002, the next five weeks (and by now, the next five
years) were devoted to selling a new product - war on Iraq.
The actual decision to attack Iraq, we now know, was made
several months earlier, but, as then-White House Chief of
Staff Andy Card explained, no sensible salesperson would
launch a major new product during the month of August -
Cheney's preemptive strike notwithstanding. Yes, that's what
Card called the coming war: a "new product."
After assuring themselves that Tenet was a reliable
salesman, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
dispatched him and the pliant Powell at State to play
supporting roles in the advertising campaign: bogus
yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for uranium
enrichment, and mobile trailers for manufacturing biological
warfare agents - the whole nine yards. The objective was to
scare or intimidate Congress into voting for war, and,
thanks largely to a robust cheering section in the
corporate-controlled media, Congress did so on October 10
and 11, 2002.
This past week saw the president himself, with that same
kind of support, pushing a new product - war with Iran. And
in the process, he made clear how intelligence is being
fixed to "justify" war this time around. The case is too
clever by half, but it will be hard for Americans to
understand that. Indeed, the Bush/Cheney team expects that
the product will sell easily - the more so, since the
administration has been able once again to enlist the usual
cheerleaders in the media to "catapult the propaganda," as
Bush once put it.
Iran's Nuclear Plans
It has been like waiting for Godot ... the endless wait for
the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear
plans. That NIE turns out to be the quintessential dog that
didn't bark. The most recent published NIE on the subject
was issued two and a half years ago and concluded that Iran
could not have a nuclear weapon until "early-to-mid-next
decade." That estimate followed a string of NIEs dating back
to 1995, which kept predicting, with embarrassing
consistency, that Iran was "within five years" of having a
nuclear weapon.
The most recent NIE, published in early 2005, extended the
timeline and provided still more margin for error.
Basically, the timeline was moved 10 years out to 2015 but,
in a fit of caution, the drafters settled on the words
"early-to-mid next decade." On February 27, 2007, at his
confirmation hearings to be director of national
intelligence, Michael McConnell repeated that formula
verbatim.
A "final" draft of the follow-up NIE mentioned above had
been completed in February 2007 and McConnell no doubt was
briefed on its findings prior to his testimony. The fact
that this draft has been sent back for revision every other
month since February speaks volumes. Judging from
McConnell's testimony, the conclusions of the NIE draft of
February are probably not alarmist enough for Vice President
Dick Cheney. (Shades of Iraq.)
According to one recent report, the target date for
publication has now slipped to late fall. How these endless
delays can be tolerated is testimony to the fecklessness of
the "watchdog" intelligence committees in House and Senate.
As for Iran's motivation if it plans to go down the path of
producing nuclear weapons, newly appointed Defense Secretary
Robert Gates was asked about that at his confirmation
hearing in December. Just called from the wings to replace
Donald Rumsfeld, Gates apparently had not yet read the
relevant memo from Cheney's office. It is a safe bet that
the avuncular Cheney took Gates to the woodshed after the
nominee suggested that Iran's motivation could be
deterrence:
"While they [the Iranians] are certainly pressing, in my
opinion, for a nuclear capability, I think they would see it
in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by
powers with nuclear weapons - Pakistan to the east, the
Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west, and us in
the Persian Gulf."
Unwelcome News (to the White House)
There they go again - those bureaucrats at the International
Atomic Energy Agency. On August 28, the very day Bush was
playing up the dangers from Iran, the IAEA released a note
of understanding between the IAEA and Iran on the key issue
of inspection. The IAEA announced:
"The agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of the
declared nuclear materials at the enrichment facilities in
Iran and has therefore concluded that it remains in peaceful
use."
The IAEA deputy director said the plan just agreed to by the
IAEA and Iran will enable the two to reach closure by
December on the nuclear issues that the IAEA began
investigating in 2003. Other IAEA officials now express
confidence that they will be able to detect any military
diversion or any uranium enrichment above a low grade, as
long as the Iran-IAEA safeguard agreement remains intact.
Shades of the preliminary findings of the UN inspections -
unprecedented in their intrusiveness - that were conducted
in Iraq in early 2003 before the US abruptly warned the UN
in mid-March to pull out its inspectors, lest they find
themselves among those to be shocked-and-awed.
Vice President Cheney can claim, as he did three days before
the attack on Iraq, that the IAEA is simply "wrong." But
Cheney's credibility has sunk to prehistoric levels; witness
the fact that the president was told that this time he would
have to take the lead in playing up various threats from
Iran. And they gave him new words.
The President's New Formulation
As I watched the president speak on August 28, I was struck
by the care he took in reading the exact words of a new,
subjunctive-mood formulation regarding Iran's nuclear
intentions. He never looked up; this is what he said:
"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to
nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for
instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear
holocaust."
The cautious wording suggests to me that the White House
finally has concluded that the "nuclear threat" from Iran is
"a dog that won't hunt," as Lyndon Johnson would have put
it. While initial press reporting focused on the "nuclear
holocaust" rhetorical flourish, the earlier part of the
sentence is more significant, in my view. It is quite
different from earlier Bush rhetoric charging categorically
that Iran is "pursuing nuclear weapons," including the
following (erroneous) comment at a joint press conference
with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in early August:
"This [Iran] is a government that has proclaimed its desire
to build a nuclear weapon."
The latest news from the IAEA is, for the White House, an
unwelcome extra hurdle. And the president's advisers
presumably were aware of it well before Bush's speech was
finalized; it will be hard to spin. Administration officials
would also worry about the possibility that some patriotic
truth teller might make the press aware of the key judgments
of the languishing draft of the latest NIE on Iran's nuclear
capability - or that a courageous officer or official of
Gen. Anthony Zinni's stature might feel conscience bound to
try to head off another unnecessary war, by providing a more
accurate, less alarmist assessment of the nuclear threat
from Iran.
It is just too much of a stretch to suggest that Iran could
be a nuclear threat to the United States within the next 17
months, and that's all the time Bush and Cheney have got to
honor their open pledge to our "ally" Israel to eliminate
Iran's nuclear potential. Besides, some American Jewish
groups have become increasingly concerned over the
likelihood of serious backlash if young Americans are seen
to be fighting and dying to eliminate perceived threats to
Israel (but not to the US). Some of these groups have been
quietly urging the White House to back off the
nuclear-threat rationale for war on Iran.
The (Very) Bad News
Bush and Cheney have clearly decided to use alleged Iranian
interference in Iraq as the preferred casus belli. And the
charges, whether they have merit or not, have become much
more bellicose. Thus, Bush on August 28:
"Iran's leaders ... cannot escape responsibility for aiding
attacks against coalition forces.... The Iranian regime must
halt these actions. And until it does, I will take actions
necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized our
military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous
activities."
How convenient: two birds with one stone. Someone to blame
for US reverses in Iraq, and "justification" to confront the
ostensible source of the problem - "deadeners" having been
changed to Iran. Vice President Cheney has reportedly been
pushing for military retaliation against Iran if the US
finds hard evidence of Iranian complicity in supporting the
"insurgents" in Iraq.
President Bush obliged on August 28:
"Recently, coalition forces seized 240-millimeter rockets
that had been manufactured in Iran this year and that had
been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents.
The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied
munitions have increased in the last few months ..."
QED
Recent US actions, such as arresting Iranian officials in
Iraq - eight were abruptly kidnapped and held briefly in
Baghdad on August 28, the day Bush addressed the American
Legion - suggest an intention to provoke Iran into some kind
of action that would justify US "retaliation." The evolving
rhetoric suggests that the most likely immediate targets at
this point would be training facilities inside Iran - some
twenty targets that are within range of US cruise missiles
already in place.
Iranian retaliation would be inevitable, and escalation very
likely. It strikes me as shamelessly ironic that the likes
of our current ambassador at the UN, Zalmay Khalilizad, one
of the architects of US policy toward the area, are now
warning publicly that the current upheaval in the Middle
East could bring another world war.
The Public Buildup
Col. Pat Lang (USA, retired), as usual, puts it succinctly:
"Careful attention to the content of the chatter on the 24/7
news channels reveals a willingness to accept the idea that
it is not possible to resolve differences with Iran through
diplomacy. Network anchors are increasingly accepting or
voicing such views. Are we supposed to believe that this is
serendipitous?"
And not only that. It is as if Scooter Libby were back
writing lead editorials for The Washington Post, the Pravda
of this administration. The Post's lead editorial on August
21 regurgitated the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary
Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a
growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;" that it is
"waging war against the United States and trying to kill as
many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran a
"specially designated global terrorist" organization, said
the Post, "seems to be the least the United States should be
doing, given the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb
attacks in Iraq."
As for the news side of the Post, which is widely perceived
as a bit freer from White House influence, its writers are
hardly immune. For example, they know how many times the
draft National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear
program has been sent back for redrafting ... and they know
why. Have they been told not to write the story?
For good measure, the indomitable arch-neocon James Woolsey
has again entered the fray. He was trotted out on August 14
to tell Lou Dobbs that the US may have no choice but to bomb
Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. Woolsey,
who has described himself as the "anchor of the Presbyterian
wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,"
knows what will scare. To Dobbs: "I'm afraid within, well,
at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [Iran]
could have the bomb."
As for what Bush is telling his counterparts among our
allies, reports on his recent meeting with French President
Nicolas Sarkozy are disquieting, to say the least. Those
circulating in European foreign ministries indicate that
Sarkozy came away convinced that Bush "is serious about
bombing Iran's secret nuclear facilities," according to
well-connected journalist Arnauld De Borchgrave.
It Is Up to Us
Air strikes on Iran seem inevitable, unless grass-roots
America can arrange a backbone transplant for Congress. The
House needs to begin impeachment proceedings without delay.
Why? Well, there's the Constitution of the United States,
for one thing. For another, the initiation of impeachment
proceedings might well give our senior military leaders
pause. Do they really want to precipitate a wider war and
risk destroying much of what is left of our armed forces for
the likes of Bush and Cheney? Is another star on the
shoulder worth THAT?
The deterioration of the US position in Iraq; the perceived
need for a scapegoat; the knee-jerk deference given to
Israel's myopic and ultimately self-defeating security
policy; and the fact that time is running out for the
Bush/Cheney administration to end Iran's nuclear program -
together make for a very volatile mix.
So, on Tuesday let's put away the lawn chairs and roll up
our sleeves. Let's remember all that has already happened
since Labor Day five years ago.
There is very little time to exercise our rights as citizens
and stop this madness. At a similarly critical juncture, Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was typically direct. I find his
words a challenge to us today:
"There is such a thing as being too late.... Life often
leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost
opportunity.... Over the bleached bones of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'"
Ray McGovern, a member of the American Legion, was an Army
infantry/intelligence officer in the sixties. He then served
for 27 years as an analyst with the CIA and is now on the
Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity. He currently works with Tell the Word, the
publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in
Washington, DC.
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