[NYTr] A September rollout for Iran war?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Dave Muller (southnews) 

UPI - Sep 5, 2007

Outside View: 

A Sept. rollout for Iran war

By DAVID ISENBERG
UPI Outside View Commentator

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card
once famously said of the administrations 2002 campaign to get support
for the invasion of Iraq, ''From a marketing point of view, you don't 
introduce new products in August.''

Now August is behind us, and -- right on schedule -- marketers both in 
the White House and among their supporters outside are rolling out
their newest product, a public relations blitz urging a U.S. military 
adventure in Iran.

Consider the recent speech by President Bush to the American Legion. In 
it he said, 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.

Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is 
why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world
to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions.

We will confront this danger before it is too late, he concluded.

Of course, President Bushs speech, not for the first time, stood in 180 
degree contrast to reality.

The day before, while making public the recently completed agreement 
with Iran regarding its nuclear program, Olli Heinonen, deputy director 
of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said, "We have in front of
us an agreed work plan. We agreed on modalities on how to implement it.
We have a timeline for the implementation."

But however distorted their relationship to reality, Bushs words have 
impact.

"I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's 
murderous activities," he said. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. military
in Iraq arrested and detained eight Iranian energy experts meeting in 
Baghdad with the Iraqi government, handcuffing, blindfolding and 
interrogating them.

They were only released when the Iraqi government protested.

On Sept. 10 the American Enterprise Institute, a sort of
neoconservative administration-in-waiting, will debut the newest book
by its Freedom Scholar Michael Ledeen, one of the foremost proponents
of the military adventure in Iraq.

Titled The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots Quest for 
Destruction, it is a rehash of neocon arguments for regime change -- 
by military force, if necessary -- in Tehran. Although he calls for 
supporting and funding the regimes domestic opposition, Ledeen 
concludes that this administration or the next will likely face a 
terrible choice: appease a nuclear Iran, or bomb it before their atomic 
weapons are ready to go.

Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service 
renowned for his coverage of the neoconservative influence in the Bush 
administration, notes that the rollout of Ledeens book comes just four 
days after AEI will launch its Sept. 6 All or Nothing campaign to 
save the surge in Iraq. He wrote:

The chronological juxtaposition of the Surge panel Sept. 6 and the 
rollout of Ledeens book Sept. 10 underlines the balance that AEI and 
other hawks (including the vice presidents office) are trying to 
achieve between their two top priorities at the moment -- sustaining
the surge well into next year and rallying Congress and the public
behind an attack on Iran before the end of Bushs term, if by then
diplomacy does not achieve the desired results of 1) freezing its
nuclear program and/or 2) halting Tehrans support for its Shia allies
(including the al-Maliki government) in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Kimberly Kagan, who directs the Institute for the Study of 
War, has written a lengthy report titled "Iran's Proxy War Against the 
United States and the Iraqi Government" that was posted on the Web site 
of neoconservative organ the Weekly Standard.

Kagan is the wife of Frederick Kagan, an AEI scholar and one of the 
intellectual architects of the Iraq surge. She is also listed as one of 
the participants in her husband's research team that came up with the 
idea for the surge in the first place.

Of course, there are also exceptions to the dont do rollouts until 
after Labor Day strategy.

One was at the end of July, when the State Department unveiled a series 
of arms sales in the region to contain Iran. In her July 30
announcement of the potential sale of $20 billion in arms to Saudi
Arabia and the other five members of the Gulf Cooperation Council,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the arms will "support a
broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al-Qaida,
Hezbollah, Syria and Iran."

However, the exact nature of the Iranian threat or how these U.S. 
weapons transfers will counter it was never spelled out.

The other was in August when the Senate unanimously passed a resolution 
sponsored by Sen. Lieberman, I-Conn., accusing Iran of acts of war 
against the United States -- a resolution with no purpose other than to 
strengthen the case for war against Tehran.

A third was the White House decision to designate at least elements of 
Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization, using
the presidents authority under a September 2001 executive order. Robert 
Baer, a former high-ranking CIA field officer in the Middle East, wrote 
recently in Time Magazine that:

Reports that the Bush administration will put Iran's Islamic 
Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of 
two ways: It's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a
strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the
IRGC, maybe within the next six months.

[David Isenberg is a senior analyst with the British American Security 
Information Council. He is also a member of the Coalition for a 
Realistic Foreign Policy, an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, 
contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project, a research fellow at 
the Independent Institute, and a U.S. Navy veteran. The views expressed 
are his own.]


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