[Mb-civic] Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed for Iran

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

  Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed for Iran
    By Ray McGovern
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020606A.shtml
    Monday 06 February 2006

    What President George W. Bush, FOX news, and the Washington 
Times were saying about Iraq three years ago they are now saying 
about Iran. After Saturday's vote by the International Atomic Energy 
Agency (IAEA) to report Iran's suspicious nuclear activities to the UN 
Security Council, the president wasted no time in warning, "The world 
will not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons."

    The next IAEA milestone will be reached on March 6, when its 
director, Mohamed ElBaradei, makes a formal report to the Security 
Council regarding what steps Iran needs to take to allay growing 
suspicions. The Bush administration, however, has already mounted a 
full-court press to indict and convict the Iranian leaders, and the key 
question is why.

    Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that 
the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for 
peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, 
as she did last month, "There is simply no peaceful rationale for the 
Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment," she is being, well, 
disingenuous again.

    If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 
President Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense 
secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a 
nuclear program to meet future energy requirements. This is what 
Iranian officials are saying today, and they are supported by energy 
experts who point out that oil extraction in Iran is already at or near 
peak and that the country will need alternatives to oil in coming 
decades.

    Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the 
reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear 
reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for 
US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project 
fell through when the Shah was ousted three years later.

    It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have 
a nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their 
nuclear program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be 
fools not to. Iran is one of three countries earning the "axis-of-evil" 
sobriquet from President Bush and it has watched what happened to 
Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons, as well as what did not happen to 
North Korea, which does have them. And Iran's rival Israel, which has 
not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty but somehow escapes 
widespread opprobrium, has a formidable nuclear arsenal cum delivery 
systems.

    Israeli threats to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities simply provide 
additional incentive to Tehran to bury and harden them against the 
kind of Israeli air attack that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear facility at 
Osirak in 1981. Although the US (together with every other UN Security 
Council member) condemned that attack, Dick Cheney and other 
senior officials do not disguise their view that it was just what the 
doctor ordered at the time ... and that the same prescription might take 
care of Iran.

    Who Is Threatened by Iranian Nukes?

    The same country that felt threatened by putative nuclear weapons 
in the hands of Iraq. With at least 200 nuclear weapons and various 
modes of delivery at their disposal, the Israelis have a powerful 
deterrent. They appear determined to put that deterrent into play early 
to pre-empt any nuclear weapons capability in Iran, rather than have to 
deal with one after it has been put in place. Israeli leaders seem 
allergic to the thought that other countries in the region might be able 
to break its nuclear monopoly and they react neuralgically to proposals 
for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Bending over backwards to 
such sensitivities, the US delegation to the IAEA delayed the 
proceedings for a day in a futile attempt to delete from Sunday's report 
language calling for such a zone. The final report called for a "Middle 
East free of weapons of mass destruction." This is the first time a link 
has been made, however implicitly, between the Iranian and Israeli 
nuclear programs.

    The argument that the US is also threatened directly by nuclear 
weapons in Iranian hands is as far-fetched as was the case before the 
war in Iraq, when co-opted intelligence analysts were strongly 
encouraged to stretch their imaginations - to include, for example the 
specter that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be delivered by 
unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) launched from ships off the US coast. 
No, I'm not kidding. They even included this in the infamous National 
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 1, 2002.

    That canard was held up to ridicule by the US Air Force, which was 
permitted to take a footnote in the NIE. The scare story nonetheless 
provided grist for the president's key speech in Cincinnati on October 
7, 2002 - three days before Congress voted to authorize war. That was 
also the speech in which he also warned, "Facing clear evidence of 
peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could 
come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

    While Congress was voting for war on October 10, more candid 
observations came in highly unusual remarks from a source with 
excellent access to high-level thinking at the White House. Philip 
Zelikow, at the time a member of the prestigious President's Foreign 
Intelligence Advisory Board and confidant of then-national security 
adviser Condoleezza Rice (and later Executive Director of the 9/11 
commission), said this to a crowd at the University of Virginia:

    Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? 
I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 
1990 - it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not 
speak its name ... the American government doesn't want to lean too 
hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

    More recently, in the case of Iran, President Bush has been 
unabashed in naming Israel as the most probable target of any Iranian 
nuclear weapons. He has also created a rhetorical lash-up of the US 
and Israel, referring three times in the past two weeks to Israel as an 
"ally" of the US, as if to condition Americans to the notion that the US 
is required to join Israel in any confrontation with Iran. For example, on 
February 1 the president told the press, "Israel is a solid ally of the 
United States; we will rise to Israel's defense if need be." Asked if he 
meant the US would rise to Israel's defense militarily, Bush replied with 
a startlingly open-ended commitment, "You bet, we'll defend Israel."

    In repeatedly labeling Israel our "ally," Bush is following his own 
corollary to the dictum of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels 
that if you repeat something often enough, most people will believe it. 
In an unusual moment of candor in a discussion of domestic affairs 
last May, Bush noted:

    That's the third time I've said that. I'll probably say it three more 
times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over 
and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the 
propaganda.

    Why No Treaty?

    The trouble is that, strictly speaking, allies are not picked by 
presidential whim - or by smart staffers like the top Bush aide who 
bragged that he and his colleagues are "history's actors ... creating 
new realities." Bush's speech writers are acting as though the "new 
realities" they create can include defense treaties. But unless they've 
changed the Constitution, in our system nations become allies via 
treaty; and treaties have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the 
Senate.

    There is no treaty of alliance with Israel.

    But why? Earlier, I had had the impression that it must be because 
of US reluctance - despite widespread sympathy for Israel - to get 
entangled in the complexities of the Middle East and gratuitously 
antagonize Arab countries. Comparing notes with Veteran Intelligence 
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues with more experience in the 
Middle East, however, I learned that the Israelis themselves have 
shown strong resistance to a US-Israel defense treaty - for reasons 
quite sound from their perspective, and quite instructive from ours.

    The possibility of a bilateral treaty was broached after the 1973 Yom 
Kippur war as a way to reduce chances of armed conflict between 
Israel and its Arab neighbors. But before the US could commit to 
defending Israel, its boundaries would have had to be defined, and the 
Israelis wanted no part of that. Moreover, the Israelis feared that a 
defense pact would curb their freedom of action - as would signing the 
Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were aware that in a crisis situation, the 
US would almost certainly discourage them from resorting to their 
familiar policy of massive - often disproportionate - retaliation against 
the Arabs. It became quite clear that the Israelis did not want the US to 
have any say over when they would use force, against whom, and 
what (US or non-US) equipment might be employed.

    Aside from all that, the Israelis were, and are, confident that their 
influence in Washington is such as to ensure US support, no matter 
what. And, as President Bush's rhetoric demonstrates, they are correct 
in thinking they can, in effect, have their cake and eat it too - a 
commitment equivalent to a defense treaty, with no binding 
undertakings on Israel's part.

    That is a very volatile admixture. Congress would do well to wake up 
to its Constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities in this key area - 
particularly now that the juggernaut to war has begun to roll.

    Preparing the Public

    One major task is to convince the public and, as far as possible, our 
allies that the Iran-nuclear problem is critical. This would be an uphill 
task, were it not for the success of our domesticated media in 
suppressing the considered judgment of the US intelligence 
community that Iran is nowhere near a nuclear weapon.

    Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer, to her credit, drew on 
several inside sources to report on August 2, 2005, that the latest NIE 
concludes Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched 
uranium for a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with 
general consensus among intelligence analysts that 2015 would 
actually be the earliest. That important information was ignored in 
other media and quickly dropped off the radar screen.

    In the Washington of today there is no need to bother with 
unwelcome intelligence that does not support the case you wish to 
make. Polls show that hyped-up public statements on the threat from 
Iran are having some effect, and indiscriminately hawkish 
pronouncements by usual suspects like senators Joseph Lieberman 
and John McCain are icing on the cake. Ahmed Chalabi-type Iranian 
"dissidents" have surfaced to tell us of secret tunnels for nuclear 
weapons research, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps 
reminding the world that Iran is the "world's leading state sponsor of 
terrorism." Administration spokespeople keep warning of Iranian 
interference on the Iraqi side of their long mutual border - themes 
readily replayed in FOX channel news and the Washington Times. 
This morning's Chicago Tribune editorial put it this way:

    There will likely be an economic confrontation with Iran, or a military 
confrontation, or both. Though diplomatic efforts have succeeded in 
convincing most of the world that this matter is grave, diplomatic 
efforts are highly unlikely to sway Iran.

    On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that 
Congress has the political will to use military force against Iran, if 
necessary, repeating the mantra " We cannot allow Iran to become a 
nuclear nation." Even Richard Perle has come out of the woodwork to 
add a convoluted new wrinkle regarding the lessons of the attack on 
Iraq. Since one cannot depend on good intelligence, says Perle, it is a 
matter of "take action now or lose the option of taking action." One of 
the most influential intellectual authors of the war on Iraq, Perle and his 
"neo-conservative" colleagues see themselves as men of biblical 
stature. Just before the attack on Iraq, Perle prophesized:

    If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it 
entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just 
wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years 
from now.

    Those songs have turned out to be funeral dirges for over 2,250 US 
troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

    --------

    Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the 
ecumenical Church of the Saviour. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years 
and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals 
for Sanity (VIPS).

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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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