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."
MEK (MKO) is a marxist islamist group. they are very dangerous to the US national security!
It's good to keep the mullah-queers guessing. I was very pleased with Bush stating he would not take military action off the table to deal with Iran's nukes. I'm glad Colin Powell is gone, so we don't have to hear him pussyfoot around it.
They are soooo 20th century!
Any article, especially one from the Guardian, that presents the argument as one being posed between "neo-conservatives" and "ex-CIA agents" is not what most Freepers would call "fair and balanced."
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"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."
You're quick. Was just getting ready to ping U.
Memo on news from Europe: Trust none of it - notta - nothing.
But we sure as heck aren't going to wait until after we're attacked. Pre-emption is still the modus operandi.
When you have to shoot...shoot
dont ponder
Although I liked the interpretation that saw Hersh as an unwitting stooge of hawks desiring to pressure the mullahs indirectly.
That is it in a nutshell. On the one hand, the sort of nuclear weapons capable of production by a nascent program such as Iran's tend to be large, crude, and difficult of concealment. On the other hand, they aren't impossible to conceal and deliver; in fact, smuggling may be Iran's best bet to deliver them given the nascency of its missile programs as well. If the target is the U.S. then it's the only way.
The more immediate purpose of such weapons would be to inoculate the theocracy against overt invasion, but the necessity to use terrorist means to make the threat credible means that one threshold at least will be crossed the moment they successfully test a device. That is precisely the sort of threshold beyond which the Iranian government is convinced it will be invulnerable but in fact will necessitate action against it.
But the notion of using the Mujahideen Khalq is one that has been bruited before. These are not really our friends at all, despite being the enemies of our enemy, and using them will present the same sort of disadvantage a similar use of Saddam Hussein in the 80's presented. But if it does turn into a covert war they'll play. It may already have started.
More third hand speculation, what if anything can go right with these upcoming elections 80% of Iraq is islamic, they will favor Islamic government hence another terror state!
While destroying Irans infrastructure and reactors sounds like a great idea, there is no end game, there is no endgame for Iraq either. I would like to see a huge portion of Iraqs population disabled as in made eunuchs or something to guarntee their future cooperation not just a slide into more Islamic hornet nests. Im sorry but it would be wise not to leave any potential suicide bomber standing in the Arab world, they are the enemy we can kill them now
or let them kill us later.
It's the mullahs.
Even if we managed the blast every nuke site, how long would it be before the programs were restarted, with the deliberate aim of revenge against the US?
We would be better off locating all of their homes and hitting the top 200 mullahs all at one in one huge raid at 04:00 local time.
In the end, regime change is the only cure for Iran's nuke problem.
Fascinating. I thought I was listening to Dr. Kissinger there for a moment.
But I thought the neo-conservatives were run out of town by the searing intellectual criticism of Barbara (no WMD in my pants) Boxer ?
No, no... not whether. Just when. ;^)
Actually, a strike against Iran a couple days before the elections in Iraq might be just the thing to draw off foreign terrorists and send them scurrying back to Iran to fight for the home turf.
Agreed!
Regime Change is a solution to Iran and Iranians' problems.
But without BLOODSHED for sure!
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