[NYTr] Bush gang's plan to attack Iran undercut by NIE report

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Dec 20, 2007 issue
http://www.workers.org/2007/us/nie-1220

Two strategies against Iran

Bush gang's plan to attack undercut by NIE report

By Joyce Chediac

A bitter dispute within the Bush administration became a public fight
on Dec. 3 when all 16 U.S. spy agencies jointly announced, in a
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report, that Iran had neither a
nuclear program nor nuclear weapons.

This intelligence about-face was not the result of new spy data or a
better spying technique. It was a political move taken by the U.S.
military itself to stop the clique headed by President George W. Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney from the dangerous adventure of bombing
Iranian nuclear installations when the Pentagon is already hopelessly
bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This victory for Iran reflects the strength of the national liberation
struggles in the Middle East, which have not been stopped by Pentagon
threats or bombings. It also is a result of anti-war sentiment in the
U.S., as even the Pentagon owns up to difficulties recruiting soldiers
to fight in the Middle East.

The NIE report removed the linchpin holding up the Bush-Cheney argument
for aggression against Iran: the nuclear weapons myth. Immediately
after the report’s release, the attempt by the White House to corral
the U.N. Security Council for a third round of sanctions against Iran
fell apart.

Who is behind the report? “The secretaries of state and defense and the
leaders of the uniformed military had decided that diplomacy was the
best way to deal with an admittedly hostile and dangerous force in
Tehran.” (Time, Dec. 17)

Tehran ‘has no nuclear weapons’

The NIE report represented all 16 U.S. spy agencies, eight of them
directly linked to the military. Its conclusions are available online.
It assessed with “high confidence” that “in 2003 Tehran halted its
nuclear weapons program,” had not restarted it, and today “has no
nuclear weapons.” While Iran continues to enrich uranium as part of its
civilian nuclear energy program, the report finds it likely that Iran
would not have enough plutonium for a nuclear weapon until 2015.

The NIE contradicted its own earlier findings, made in 2005, that Iran
was secretly building nuclear weapons. The NIE issued this bombshell
five years after a 2002 report in which U.S. spies claimed that Iraq
had “weapons of mass destruction.” This blatantly false statement gave
the Bush gang its rationale for launching what many in the military now
see as their debacle in Iraq.

While Bush and Cheney were trying to construct a similar pretext for
bombing Iran, the Pentagon spy agencies undercut the pretext.

A year ago “Bush asked the [Joint Chiefs of Staff] about attacking
Iran. He was told that a bombing campaign could do severe damage to
Iran’s military and nuclear facilities, but the Chiefs said they were
opposed to such a strike because of the probable ‘blowback.’ The
Iranians, Bush was told, could make life very difficult for the U.S.
troops on the ground in Iraq. They could shut off the flow of oil
through the Strait of Hormuz, thereby creating a global economic
crisis.” (Time)

In truth, U.S. generals have reasons to avoid a war at this time
against a country of 71 million whose population is militantly
anti-imperialist and showed what they could do just 30 years ago, when
they staged a fierce and mass revolutionary struggle that ousted a U.S.
puppet, the hated shah of Iran.

But Bush was moving ahead anyway, so the military pulled the rug out
from under him. “The truth about Iran appeared to shatter the last
shreds of credibility of the White House’s bomb-Iran brigade, and
especially that of Vice President Dick Cheney,” wrote Time magazine.

A victory for Iran

This is why Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “This report
tries to extract America from its impasse, but it also is a declaration
of victory for the Iranian people against the great
powers.” (aljazeera.net, Dec. 5) This view is held by the Iranian
people as well, according to Al Jazeera’s reporter in Tehran.

While U.S. spies have exposed one lie, it does not mean that what they
are saying now is the whole truth. Iran says it has never sought to
produce atomic weapons. “Ali Lariyane, delegate of the Supreme Leader
of the National Higher Security Council, said if the U.S. government
has any evidence of this, it should hand it over to Mohammad El
Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.” (Prensa
Latina, Dec. 7)

Iran, an oppressed country, has every right to develop nuclear weapons
as a deterrent against the U.S. and Israel, which are bent on Iran’s
destruction and pose the real threat in the Middle East. Israel has 75
to 200 nuclear warheads, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists. The U.S., with more than 9,000 nuclear warheads, has a
string of bases in the Middle East, three aircraft carrier groups in
the Arabian/Persian Gulf with guns pointed at Iran, and troops on two
of Iran’s borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Want to subvert Iran

The main movers in the report are National Intelligence Director Adm.
Mike McConnell and Thomas Fingar, chair of the National Intelligence
Council. McConnell, who came out of retirement to take on this study,
was the chief security advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and during the first Gulf War. Fingar
has a long intelligence history with the State Department and was part
of John Negroponte’s inner circle.

Members of Congress had requested the NIE report. Among elected
officials mentioned in the New York Times in conjunction with the
report is Republican Sen. Charles Hagel of Nebraska.

In a recent speech at the Center for Strategic and International
Relations on U.S.-Iran relations, Hagel gave more details on the view
of the departments of State and Defense and of the Joint Chiefs on how
to approach Iran.

“Loose talk of World War III, intimidation, threats, bellicose speeches
only heighten the dangers we face in the world. ... What confidence
should we have in a strategy that, to date, has nothing to show for
it ... that has achieved no tangible changes to Iran’s nuclear program
and actually has seen the Middle East become more dangerous and Iran
more defiant? Is the U.S. pursuing a policy that could very well
produce a self-fulfilling prophecy of the president’s warning of World
War III?

“By refusing to engage Iran in direct, unconditional and comprehensive
talks, we are perpetuating dangerous geo-political unpredictabilities.
Our refusal to recognize Iran’s influence does not decrease its
influence, but rather increases it.

“Our strategy must be one focused on direct engagement and
diplomacy ... backed by the leverage of international pressure,
military options, isolation and containment ... not unlike the
strategies that the United States pursued during the Cold War against
the Soviet Union.”

‘Talks’ as cover for destabilization

Hagel continued, “Inside Iran, there are social strains and serious
differences of opinion. ... There are political divides in Tehran. ...
Our strategy should exploit these differences. ... The United States
must be wise enough ... and patient enough ... not to follow the same
destructive path on Iran that we did on Iraq.”

The forces backing the NIE report are just as hostile towards Iran as
Bush and Cheney. They merely think other tactics would be more
successful in bringing down Iran. For example, at a conference on
regional security in Bahrain on Dec. 8, Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates called Iran “a grave threat to regional security even without
nuclear weapons.” (New York Times, Dec. 9)

If Bush doesn’t bomb Iran in the next year, it doesn’t mean that the
next administration won’t. Norman Podhoretz, a senior neoconservative
and a cheerleader for bombing Iran, is foreign policy advisor to
Rudolph Giuliani’s presidential campaign. And neither of the Democratic
Party frontrunners, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, has pulled back
from shrill and aggressive positions on Iran.

Mass struggle made Pentagon blink

This is a falling out among thieves on how best to bring Iran down and
how to stop the struggle in the Middle East. The NIE benignly describes
itself as “the intelligence community.” It is really a collection of
assassins, liars, mass murderers and destabilizers of progressive
governments. The Bush-Cheney forces are no different. Both sides are
hired guns for a U.S. ruling class determined to control Middle Eastern
oil.

It is the strength of the mass liberation struggles—from Iran to Iraq
to Afghanistan to Lebanon to Palestine—which made the biggest military
colossus in the world blink. The spy report is an admission that
Pentagon bombs cannot stop the mass struggle and often drive it
forward. It is this struggle that will determine the fate of the Middle
East.

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