Posted on 01/18/2005 7:02:23 PM PST by Happy2BMe
Julian Borger in Washington and Ian Traynor
Tuesday January 18, 2005
The Guardian
President Bush's second inauguration on Thursday will provide the signal for an intense and urgent debate in Washington over whether or when to extend the "global war on terror" to Iran, according to officials and foreign policy analysts in Washington.
That debate is being driven by "neo-conservatives" at the Pentagon who emerged from the post-election Bush reshuffle unscathed, despite their involvement in collecting misleading intelligence on Iraq's weapons in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.
Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months.
Only the credible threat, and if necessary the use, of air and special operations attacks against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities will stop the ruling clerics in Tehran acquiring warheads, many in the administration argue.
Moderates, who are far fewer in the second Bush administration than the first, insist that if Iran does have a secret weapons programme, it is likely to be dispersed and buried in places almost certainly unknown to US intelligence. The potential for Iranian retaliation inside Iraq and elsewhere is so great, the argument runs, that there is in effect no military option.
A senior administration official involved in developing Iran policy rejected that argument. "It is not as simple as that," he told the Guardian at a recent foreign policy forum in Washington. "It is not a straightforward problem but at some point the costs of doing nothing may just become too high. In Iran you have the intersection of nuclear weapons and proven ties to terrorism. That is what we are looking at now."
The New Yorker reported this week that the Pentagon has already sent special operations teams into Iran to locate possible nuclear weapons sites. The report by Seymour Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist, was played down by the White House and the Pentagon, with comments that stopped short of an outright denial.
"The Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organisations is a global challenge that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides," Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday: "Mr Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed."
However, the Guardian has learned the Pentagon was recently contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border, to collect intelligence. The group, based at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, was under the protection of Saddam Hussein, and is under US guard while Washington decides on its strategy.
The MEK has been declared a terrorist group by the state department, but a former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee "MEK cross-border operations". He refused, and does not know if those operations have begun.
"They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran," the former officer said.
He said the policy discussion was being overseen by Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy who was one of the principal advocates of the Iraq war. The Pentagon did not return calls for comment on the issue yesterday. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Mr Feith's Office of Special Plans also used like-minded experts on contract from outside the government, to serve as consultants helping the Pentagon counter the more cautious positions of the state department and the CIA.
Crazy
"They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilise the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world's problems are solved. I think it's delusional," the former CIA officer said.
However, others believe that at a minimum military strikes could set back Iran's nuclear programme several years. Reuel Marc Gerecht, another former CIA officer who is now a leading neo-conservative voice on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said: "It would certainly delay [the programme] and it can be done again. It's not a one-time affair. I would be shocked if a military strike could not delay the programme." Mr Gerecht said the internal debate in the administration was only just beginning.
"This administration does not really have an Iran policy," he said. "Iraq has been a fairly consuming endeavour, but it's getting now towards the point where people are going to focus on [Iran] hard and have a great debate."
That debate could be brought to a head in the next few months. Diplomats and officials in Vienna following the Iranian nuclear saga at the International Atomic Energy Agency expect the Iran dispute to re-erupt by the middle of this year, predicting a breakdown of the diplomatic track the EU troika of Britain, Germany and France are pursuing with Tehran. The Iran-EU agreement, reached in November, was aimed at getting Iran to abandon the manufacture of nuclear fuel which can be further refined to bomb-grade.
Now the Iranians are feeding suspicion by continuing to process uranium concentrate into gaseous form, a breach "not of the letter but of the spirit of the agreement," said one European diplomat.
Opinions differ widely over how long it would take Iran to produce a deliverable nuclear warhead, and some analysts believe that Iranian scientists have encountered serious technical difficulties.
"The Israelis believe that by 2007, the Iranians could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Some of us believe it could be the end of this decade," said David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert at the Institute for Science and International Security. A recent war-game carried out by retired military officers, intelligence officials and diplomats for the Atlantic Monthly, came to the conclusion that there were no feasible military options and if negotiations and the threat of sanctions fail, the US might have to accept Iran as a nuclear power.
However, Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel who led the war-game, acknowledged that the Bush administration might not come to the same conclusion.
"Everything you hear about the planning for Iraq suggests logic may not be the basis for the decision," he said.
Mr Gerecht, who took part in the war-game but dissented from the conclusion, believes the Bush White House, still mired in Iraq, has yet to make up its mind.
"The bureaucracy will come down on the side of doing nothing. The real issue is: will the president and the vice president disagree with them? If I were a betting man, I'd bet the US will not use pre-emptive force. However, I would not want to bet a lot."
I don't think it will be a direct attack. It may even come from within the ranks of the Iranian people themselves. That's not too far-fetched at all, really.
Not too far fetched at all...IMO. I suspect that the security police in Iran might all be arabs, not Iranians, not Persians. The people of Iran are being held hostage.
We have unfinished business with Iran. And after the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq, we certainly don't need another "hearts and minds" war. When we deal with Iran, it only needs to be Shock & Awe until they see the error of their ways.
Love that 'priceless' pic! "Please kick our @sses." LOL.
Well, I obviously question the sourcing of this article.
However, if we do go into Iran, it dang well better not be until the elections, and we should not plan on a full-scale invasion, at least for awhile.
I would not support a move that would lead to a draft.
However, we do need to bomb the bastards into the stone age and send special ops to aid in aiding an internal rebellion.
Your suspicions are correct.
I read a similar article on the Scotsman this morning and was wondering where this is all coming from.
Thanks. I met a beautiful woman in Sydney several years ago, she told me she was Persian and would never go back until the country was restored to its rightful owners and was once again known as Persia. I often think of her, and how long she has waited. The arab yoke is a dreadful, evil thing. Long Live Zaroaster (sp?)
The OSP really gets their goat...
Thanks for the ping!
Yep, that's the one. Thanks.
If we really were Imperialist Conquerors, we would simply grab some Iraqi oil and sell it on the open market to fund our potential war with Iran. In reality, I think most of that revenue is actually being utilized to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure. So in the long run, a democratic Iraq with a booming economy will be able to take on Iran. This is why the iranian mullahs have dramatically increased their desire to acquire a nuclear deterent. Anyone who thinks there are 'no WMD plans within the iranian mullahs' is seriously delusional. As usual, American taxpayers will have to foot the bill to prevent another devastating regional conflict.
I doubt Arabs will ever be able to take on Iran in any terms!
THANKS piasa.
That's interesting.
:^D
Now it's Iran's turn to be terrorized when we liquidate their nuclear facilities. They thought they were the only ones who could reach out and f with people. Now they are going to be spanked, taught a lesson. They are going to be given something to wail about in the UN with the Muslim chorus.
These wily Ayatollahs have been running terrorist operations for years aimed at Israel and the USA. Israel has suffered from Iranian state sponsored terrorism in the form of Hizbuallah and other outfits. Iran has been sponsoring terrorism in Iraq and sponsored that shi'ite freak Al Sadr.
BTTT
"regime change is the only cure for Iran's nuke problem"
Yup. That's it.
Bob Baer was a case officer in CIA's Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997. His overseas assignments included stints in Northern Iraq, Dushanbe, Rabat, Paris, Beirut, Khartoum, New Delhi, and elsewhere, handling agents that infiltrated Hizballah, PFLP-GC, PSF, Libyan intelligence, Fatah-Hawari, and al Qaeda. Fluent in Arabic, Farsi, French, and German, he divides his time between Washington, D.C., and France.
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