[NYTr] Bush Puts Iran in Crosshairs

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Aug 30, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/083007b.html


Bush Puts Iran in Crosshairs

By Ray McGovern

Not another warning about war with Iran! Well, suck it up. President
George W. Bush’s speech Tuesday makes clear his plan to attack Iran,
and how the intelligence, as was the case before the attack on Iraq, is
being “fixed around the policy.”

It’s not about putative Iranian “weapons of mass destruction” — not
even ostensibly. It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for U.S.
reverses in Iraq, and the felt need to create a casus belli by
provoking Iran in such a way as to “justify” armed retaliation —
perhaps extending to an attempt to destroy its nuclear-related
facilities.

Bush’s Aug. 28 speech to the American Legion came five years after a
very similar presentation by Vice President Dick Cheney. Addressing the
Veterans of Foreign Wars on Aug. 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 and, almost always, the result comes out
badly. It is a safe bet he regrets letting himself be guided by a
misguided 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 as the
“supreme international crime.”)

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 number-two 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 were devoted to selling the war, a major “new
product” of the kind that, as then-White House chief of staff Andy Card
explained, no one would introduce in the month of August.

After assuring themselves that Tenet was a reliable salesman, Cheney
and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed him to play a
supporting role in advertising bogus yellowcake uranium from Niger,
aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, and mobile trailers for
manufacturing biological warfare agents, in order to scare Congress
into voting for war. It did on Oct. 10 and 11, 2002.

Well, this week, aware or not, it was the president himself who mouthed
the “new product”—war with Iran—and, in the process, made clear how
“fixed” intelligence is being arrayed to “justify” it.

The case is too clever by half, but the Bush/Cheney team is clearly
hoping the product will sell.

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
predicted, 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 a fit of caution yielded the words
“early-to-mid next decade.”

On Feb. 27, 2007, at his confirmation hearings to be Director of
National Intelligence, Michael McConnell repeated that formulation
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 that this draft has been sent back for revision every
other month since February speaks volumes. Judging from McConnell’s
testimony based on the NIE draft of February, its judgments are
probably not alarmist enough for Vice President Dick Cheney. (Shades of
Iraq.)

It is also a safe bet that last December the newly confirmed defense
secretary, Robert Gates, was taken to the woodshed by the avuncular
Cheney, when Gates suggested to Congress that Iran’s motivation in
seeking a nuclear weapon would 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.”

Apparently, the newly minted secretary of defense hadn’t gotten
Cheney’s memo.

Unwelcome News (to the White House)

There they go again—those bureaucrats at the International Atomic
Energy Agency.  On Aug. 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 declared:

“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 announced that the plan just agreed to by the
IAEA and Iran will enable 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 very intrusive U.N.
inspections conducted in Iraq in early 2003 before the U.S. warned the
U.N. in mid-March to withdraw its inspectors, lest they 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 himself
was enlisted to address the Iranian nuclear threat this time around.
And he did it with new words.

President’s New Formulation

Did you notice the care that President Bush took to read the exact
words of the new formulation on Iran’s nuclear intentions? Not only did
he pronounce “nuclear” correctly, he faithfully articulated an altered
formula (see below).

The wording suggests to me that the White House has concluded that the
“nuclear threat” from Iran is “a dog that won’t hunt,” as Lyndon
Johnson might have put it.

The latest news from the IAEA is, for the White House, an extra hurdle.
And there is always the possibility that some patriotic truth-teller
will make available to the press the judgments of the latest draft NIE
on Iran’s nuclear capability.

Or a new Gen. Zinni-type figure might decide to speak out from the
Pentagon to head off another unnecessary war.

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 Israel to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential.

Besides, some American Jewish groups, increasingly concerned over a
backlash if young Americans are seen to have been asked to fight and
die to eliminate perceived threats to Israel (but not to the U.S.),
have been urging the White House to back off the nuclear-threat
rationale for war on Iran.

This is how the president put it on Aug. 28:

“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.”

Press reporting has focused on the rhetorical flourish “under the
shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” But, in my view, it is the earlier part
of the sentence that is most significant.

It is quite a different formulation from earlier Bush rhetoric charging
categorically that Iran is “pursuing nuclear weapons,” including this
(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 (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 Aug. 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 our
losses in Iraq, and “justification” to confront the ostensible source
of the problem.

Vice President Cheney has reportedly been pushing for military
retaliation against Iran if the U.S. finds hard evidence of Iranian
complicity in supporting the “insurgents” in Iraq.

Again, President Bush on Aug. 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 U.S. actions, like arresting Iranian officials in Iraq—eight
were abruptly kidnapped and held briefly in Baghdad on Aug. 28, the day
Bush addressed the American Legion—suggest an intention to provoke Iran
into some kind of action that would justify “coalition” retaliation.

The evolving rhetoric suggests that the most likely targets at this
point would be training facilities inside Iran—some 20 targets that are
within range of U.S. cruise missiles already in place.

Iranian retaliation would be inevitable, and escalation likely.

It strikes me as shamelessly ironic that the likes of our current
ambassador at the U.N., Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the architects of
U.S. policy toward the area, is now warning publicly that the current
upheaval in the Middle East could bring another world war.

Bottom Line

In my view, air strikes on Iran are inevitable, unless grassroots
America can arrange a backbone transplant for Congress.

The House needs to begin impeachment proceedings without delay. These,
in turn, could possibly give our senior military leaders second
thoughts about unleashing the dogs of wider war.

Rabies shots recommended: for this time those dogs can, and will, come
back and bite us.

Yes, some of us have been saying that for many months. The
deterioration of the U.S. position in Iraq; the perceived need for a
scapegoat; the continuing deference given to perceived Israeli security
concerns; and the fact that time is running out for the Bush/Cheney
administration to end Iran’s nuclear program together make a volatile
mix.


[Ray McGovern, a member of the American Legion, was an Army
infantry/intelligence officer in the sixties. He then served as an
analyst with 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, D.C. His e-mail is RRMcGovern at aol.com. ]