George W. Bush (and his BFF Richard M. Cheney) really, really, really, really want to attack Iran. It has been on their wish list to Santa Claus for at least three years and perhaps longer. But there is this problem, you see; a nasty uniformed Grinch who keeps preventing Santa from delivering the shiny new war little Georgie and little Dickie want so badly. His name is Admiral William J. Fallon. Here is what he said recently when Santa Senate tried to give Georgie-Peorgie his Christmas War:
"This constant drum beat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful," Adm. William Fallon said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television, which made a partial transcript available Sunday.What a nasty, nasty, bad man! Shame on him! Let's spend a little time reviewing what he is talking about, and then examining where the Christmas War is likely to end up under current circumstances. Finally, we'll take a look at an exciting new way little Dickie (or maybe even little Georgie!) have found to keep nasty Mr. Fallon-Grinch from stopping them getting their shiny present. (After all, they have been very, very good little boys!)
"I expect that there will be no war and that is what we ought to be working for," said Fallon during the Friday interview at Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. "We should find ways through which we can bring countries to work together for the benefit of all .... It is not a good idea to be in a state of war. We ought to try and to do our utmost to create different conditions." (Boldface mine.)
The Iran War: Where We've Been
Okay, lets go all the way back to early January, 2005. Mr. Bush, with the help of "the architect", had just won a landslide victory over the "Democrat Party" and now had "political capital" that he intended to spend. According to Sy Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, some of that capital went into starting the plans for a war with Iran:
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.” (Boldface mine.)Ah, the heady days of 2005. Iraq was "just a few dead-enders", the insurgency was "winding down". And the military certainly had the capacity (on paper at least) to make such an attack. Yet it didn't happen. Why not? It took over two years for the reason to leak out; we can find the answer many places, but one of the more comprehensive ones is The Ward Report, which notes from CBS News and the Associated Press that General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pulled the plug on such planning in late 2006 based on the sheer inability of the U.S. military to do the job:
CJCOS Pace has sent a classified report to Congress via Sec Def Gates wherein he reports that the risks are "significant" that the US military would not be able to adequately respond to a third military Crisis. This report was prepared prior to the president's order of additional troops to Iraq.Other reports indicate that the CJCOS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff) flatly refused to support an attack on Iran as early as 2005 because the U.S. didn't have the troops, weapons, and money to support it. As noted above Iran is a rich nation with lots and lots of modern Soviet (Russian, sorry) air defense weapons and artillery and missiles and tanks and you name it. Any conventional ground attack (plans were apparently going along to make the attack from Azerbijan due to the impossibility of striking north across the mountainous border with Iraq) would meet with withering resistance even along the short route from the north into Tehran. This provided enough of a roadblock to slow the plan through 2005 and 2006, along with the sudden collapse of the Iraq situation. Then General Pace took over and issued the manifesto noted above, which killed the ground option on an Iran attack for good. (It also got General Pace fired, by the way.)
This report is important because General Pace's assessment of "significant risk" triggers a statutory obligation on the part of the Sec Def's office to provide a mitigation plan to Congress on steps being taken to ramp-up military preparedness.
The political ramifications of the report are obvious at a time when the president desires to attack Iran while increasing troops in Iraq.
More importantly, this report was leaked by "senior pentagon officials" and represents yet another very public push-back by the military on any WH plans for Iran.
How can the POTUS launch an offensive attack on a sovereign nation when the CJCOS has reported that the military is at "significant" risk of not being able to respond to a military crisis to such a military crisis?
And remember, Iran is not Iraq. They have more advanced rockets and weapons and the ability to fight back. Iran also has at least one advanced weapons supplier in Russia. (Boldface mine.)
Now let's move forward to 2006, just after the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary Of Defense. Joe Klein of Time magazine provides a doubly-documented synopsis of a meeting in the secure conference center at the Pentagon (The Tank) concerning a possible attack on Iran on his blog:
Last December, as Rumsfeld was leaving, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in "The Tank," the secure room in the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs discuss classified matters of national security. Bush asked the Chiefs about the wisdom of a troop "surge" in Iraq. They were unanimously opposed. Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran's nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran's government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were--once again--unanimously opposed to taking that course of action. (Boldface mine.)Note that we are now focussed on a possible air-only campaign against the Iranians, and again the JCOS gives it the Fickle Finger of Are You CRAZY? So now the Air Force, for strictly military reasons, refuses to deliver the shiny new war little Dickie and Little Georgie crave. How rude!
Well, the Army and the Air Force have crapped out on us, dagnabbit! Georgie and Dickie are holding their breath until they turn blue if they don't get their nice war by Christmas! The neocons searched frantically for a way to use the Navy to Git-R-Done, and found their go-to guy in Admiral William J. Fallon. He was put in charge of all combat operations in the Middle East (CENTCOM), and given plenty of aircraft carrier battle groups to play with. He played along happily, got the job, and went to work. Everybody was pleased; Georgie and Dickie started breathing again (they look really ugly when blue). The only problem that surfaced was this:
That rat bastard! How dare he talk back like that! Let's fire him! Oh wait, he has enough credentials to sink a carrier all by himself, and no fear of speaking out. Okay, let's leave him in place and work around him! For make no mistake, Admiral Fallon has been the roadblock that has prevented an Iran war up until today.But Fallon, who was scheduled to become the CENTCOM chief Mar. 16, responded to the proposed plan by sending a strongly-worded message to the Defence Department in mid-February opposing any further U.S. naval buildup in the Persian Gulf as unwarranted.
“He asked why another aircraft carrier was needed in the Gulf and insisted there was no military requirement for it,” says the source, who obtained the gist of Fallon’s message from a Pentagon official who had read it.
Fallon’s refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it. A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch”.
Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional.” Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, “There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.” (Boldface mine.)
The Iran War: Where We're At Now
The current situation can best be summed up as "waiting for the other shoe to drop". Steve Clemons' Salon.com piece contains this fascinating Beltway Cocktail Weenie tidbit:
During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush's team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.
The 18 people at the party, including former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, then voted with a show of hands for either Brzezinski's or Scowcroft's position. Scowcroft got only two votes, including his own. Everyone else at the table shared Brzezinski's fear that a U.S. strike against Iran is around the corner. (Boldface mine.)
(For those not in the know, Scowcroft is one of the Bush family's most valued assets, right up there with James Baker III. Many, including myself, feel that he was the conduit of much of the information used to bring down Nixon via Mark Felt ("Deep Throat"); for years we referred joking to Scowcroft as "DT" even though we all knew someone else carried to dirty laundry to Woodward. Shorter Spook: Scowcroft is the smartest guy in the room about military matters and the Bush Family's long term intentions. Bet on him before anyone else.)
The problem presented by the probable development of a working nuclear weapon by Iran within the next few years is not lost on the military and political leaders of the one nation that is almost certain to be on the target list for that weapon, namely Israel. Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball, writing at Newsweek, present this bleak assessment of the situation from Israel's point of view:
The question may not be whether America is ready to attack, but whether Israel is. The Jewish state has cause for worry. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows regularly to destroy the country; former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered a moderate, warned in 2001 that Tehran could do away with Israel with just one nuclear bomb. In Tel Aviv last week, former deputy Defense minister Ephraim Sneh concurred. Sneh, a dovish member of Israel's Parliament and a retired brigadier general, took a NEWSWEEK reporter to the observation deck atop the 50-story Azrieli Center. "There is Haifa just over the horizon, Ben-Gurion airport over there, the Defense Ministry down below," he said, to show how small the country is. "You can see in this space the majority of our intellectual, economic, political assets are concentrated. One nuclear bomb is enough to wipe out Israel." (Boldface mine.)It is important to remember that the speaker is one of the leading "doves" in Israeli politics. And yet even faced with such a danger, Israel's ability to pre-emptively attack the Iranian nuclear program is, well, questionable at best, as the Newsweek piece goes further to explain:
But can the Israelis destroy Iran's nuclear program? Gardiner, the war-gamer, says they would not only need to hit a dozen nuclear sites and scores of antiaircraft batteries; to prevent a devastating retaliation, they would have to knock out possibly hundreds of long-range missiles that can carry chemical warheads. Just getting to distant Iran will be tricky for Israel's squadrons of American-made F-15s and F-16s. Danny Yatom, who headed Mossad in the 1990s, says the planes would have to operate over Iran for days or weeks. Giora Eiland, Israel's former national-security adviser, now with Tel Aviv's Institute of National Security Studies, ticked off the drawbacks: "Effectiveness, doubtful. Danger of regional war. Hizbullah will immediately attack [from Lebanon], maybe even Syria." Yet Israelis across the political spectrum, including Eiland and Yatom, believe the risk incurred by inaction is far greater. "The military option is not the worst option," Yatom says. "The worst option is a nuclear Iran." (Boldface mine.)This is sometimes known as being between a rock and a hard place. No wonder Israel is not eager to start such a conflict given its doubtful outcome.
And the United States' options in a conventional attack are equally limited. Steve Clemons refers to this in his Salon.com piece:
Bush knows that the American military is stretched and that bombing Iran would not be a casual exercise. Reprisals in the Gulf toward U.S. forces and Iran's ability to cut off supply lines to the 160,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq could seriously endanger the entire American military.That is not a good list of options. No wonder General Scowcroft voted against there being a war with Iran!
Bush can also see China and Russia waiting in the wings, not to promote conflict but to take advantage of self-destructive missteps that the United States takes that would give them more leverage over and control of global energy flows. Iran has the third-largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world and the second-largest undeveloped natural gas reserves.
Bush also knows that Iran controls "the temperature" of the terror networks it runs. Bombing Iran would blow the control gauge off, and Iran's terror networks could mobilize throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and even the United States. (Boldface mine.)
The Iran War: Where We're Going
The schizophrenia continues into the future on Iran, as evidenced by this piece from Rupert Murdoch's Times of London:
THE United States Air Force has set up a highly confidential strategic planning group tasked with “fighting the next war” as tensions rise with Iran.
Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June.
It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Checkmate’s freethinking mission is “to provide planning inputs to warfighters that are strategically, operationally and tactically sound, logistically supportable and politically feasible”. Its remit is not specific to one country, according to defence sources, but its forward planning is thought relevant to any future air war against Iranian nuclear and military sites. It is also looking at possible threats from China and North Korea. (Boldface mine.)Wow! Right out of Tom Clancy! Since we have the time on our hands and our military is so robust, let's plan for war with China too! (Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Sublime. We passed Ridiculous some time back. Please remove all carry on luggage except those containing nuclear devices, as those will be handled by the usual Barksdale baggage people. Thank you for flying Checkmate Insanity Airways!)
Yet at the end of the day, the "reactivation" of Checkmate signals just how dead set against the Iran war the U.S. military has become, as noted in the Times piece:
The US president faces strong opposition to military action, however, within his own joint chiefs of staff. “None of them think it is a good idea, but they will do it if they are told to,” said a senior defence source.
General John Abizaid, the former Centcom commander, said last week: “Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed Iran.” (Boldface mine.)
And while the old "do it if you're told" bit is stock Murdoch-spin, anyone who has ever dealt with the reality of the Pentagon-Congress-White House relationship ecology knows better than that. Any "do it now" order of this type would be leaked immediately, and if necessary a mass resignation of the JCOS would be more than enough to bring Congress in at a gallop. So even this schizophrenic situation isn't leading directly to war. Yet. (The Telegraph in Britain has a similar piece up as well.)
The neocon hawks pushing for the Iran war have their supporters in Congress as well. For example, just today the Lieberman-Kyl ammendment (note: PDF link) was under discussion in the United States Senate; it effectively legitimizes a full scale war with Iran. (Think Progress has taken the lead in publicizing this little bit of legislative bait and switch.) At the end of the day, however, this is nothing more than saber rattling to Mr. Bush political cover if he wants it. So far, there is little sign that he does.
Indeed, Mr. Bush's current blame sponge and sock puppet General Petraeus has gone so far as to suggest Iran's support for Iraqi insurgents is winding down. The Guardian in Britain notes this in the following article:
Hopes that a new war could still be avoided have also been boosted by Gen Petraeus's claim that Iran's covert Quds force alleged to be supporting Shia attacks on coalition forces had been pulled out of Iraq. If true, it could be that in the stand-off between the US and Iran, Iran has blinked first. (Boldface mine.)The overall article is a rather shrill warning that war with Iran is imminent and must be avoided at all costs. But the fact that General Petraeus has gone on record with the above comment is noteworthy of just how reluctant the Pentagon continues to be in regards to an Iran war.
NB: Petraeus is the name of a classical centaur, famed for betraying their allies. Hmmmm.
Speaking of betraying your allies, anyone remember this war-drums-to-Iran piece by Alex Debat, well known military analyst and intellectual? Well, it turns out that Mr. Debat isn't any of those things at all. Oopsie!
Steve Clemons, writing at Salon.com, offers the most worrisome assessment of how a war with Iran could start despite all the forces working to stop it:
We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An "accidental war" would escalate quickly and "end run," as Wurmser put it, the president's diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict -- Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Boldface mine.)And this leads us, gentle and questioning readers, to the deadly possibility that this "engineered provocation" has already been attempted not once, but twice, and has failed to happen only by what some call happenstance. I call this The Back Channel Option.
The Iran War: The Back Channel
There have been two disquieting incidents within the last month involving strange behaviors of military forces in the United States and in Israel. Each has its own Ratiocinations post or posts; let's examine a precis of each below and try to see how they may apply to the Vanishing Attack On Iran conundrum.
Before we go any further, let's review why the Army, Air Force, and Navy have all said HELL NO to an attack on Iran. The reasons are simple: the conventional weapons of the United States military are insufficient to destroy the ability of the Iranians to retaliate against both the U.S. and Israel, and possibly Iraq and Saudi Arabia as well.
Nobody said anything about nuclear weapons. Oh, wait a minute, yes they did, except it was Israel. From the venerable (well it used to be) Times of January 7, 2007:
ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.(This was one of the sources for my previous post here about The Strange Case Of The Israeli Attack On Syria That Did Or Didn't Happen.) Bottom line, the contingency plans exist in Israel, and also in the United States as well, as noted in this London Times piece:
Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.
The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. [NB: approximately one thousand tons of TNT] (Boldface mine.)
The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias. (Boldface mine.)So the nuclear card is in the hand but not on the table. Not yet. And there is good reason to think that if the military is opposed to a conventional strike, they would be utterly opposed to a nuclear strike. (Please see the upcoming post here The Strange Case Of The Vanishing Middle Eastern Country for reasons why they would be so adamantly opposed to any use of nuclear weapons in the region.)
But let's go a little further. The situation we may face is illustrated by a quote from Thomas De Quincey in his estimable Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts, to wit:
“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination”The take home message here is that once you are willing to break one law, breaking the next one gets easier and easier, until laws have no meaning for one at all. It is terrifyingly possible, given their track record, that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are now in this position. If so, they might be willing to go around the normal checks and balances of the U.S. military and attempt a military strike using nuclear weapons on their own authority alone.
One such attempt may have already been made. See the post here entitled The Strange Case Of The Six Misplaced Nuclear Weapons and its First and Second Updates. This is an ongoing story, please keep tuned to this feed for more details.
Also, it is possible that having been blocked at Barksdale, Mr. Cheney may have attempted to begin the festivities using an unauthorized nuclear attack on Iran via Israel. See this post, The Strange Case of The Israeli Attack On Syria That Did Or Didn't Happen for details.
We live in dangerous times, my most esteemed readers. We must navigate them with extreme care. I hope to make my humble contribution by perhaps pointing out a few rocks in the waters and maybe spotting the spray from the waterfall before we go over it.
Good night and good luck.
