[Dialogue] Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran?

[Harry Wainwright]

AlterNet


Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran?


By Ray McGovern, AlterNet
Posted on September 3, 2007, Printed on September 3, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61328/


Why do I feel like the proverbial skunk at a Labor Day picnic? Sorry, but I
thought you might want to know that this time next year there will probably
be more skunks than we can handle. I fear our country is likely to be at war
with Iran -- and with the thousands of real terrorists Iran can field around
the globe.

It is going to happen, folks, unless we put our lawn chairs away on Tuesday,
take part in some serious grassroots organizing and take action to prevent a
wider war -- while we still can.

President George W. Bush's speech Tuesday lays out the Bush/Cheney plan to
attack Iran and how the intelligence is being "fixed around the policy," as
was the case before the attack on Iraq.

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 White House's felt need to create a casus belli by provoking
Iran in such a way as to "justify" armed retaliation, eventually including
air strikes on its nuclear-related facilities.

Bush's Aug. 28 speech to the American Legion comes 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; top officials can seldom find their voices. My hunch is that
Zinni regrets letting himself be guided by a misplaced 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 the "supreme international crime.")

Cheney: dean of pre-emption

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 No. 2 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 (and by now, the next five years) were devoted to selling a
new product -- war on Iraq. The actual decision to attack Iraq, we now know,
was made several months earlier but, as then-White House chief of staff Andy
Card explained, no sensible salesperson would launch a major new product
during the month of August, Cheney's preemptive strike notwithstanding. Yes,
that's what Card called the coming war: a "new product."

After assuring themselves that Tenet was a reliable salesman, Cheney and
then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld dispatched him and the pliant Powell
at State to play supporting roles in the advertising campaign: bogus
yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, and
mobile trailers for manufacturing biological warfare agent, the whole nine
yards. The objective was to scare or intimidate Congress into voting for
war, and, thanks largely to a robust cheering section in the
corporate-controlled media, Congress did so on Oct. 10 and 11, 2002.

This past week saw the president himself, with that same kind of support,
pushing a new product -- war with Iran. And in the process, he made clear
how intelligence is being fixed to "justify" war this time around. The case
is too clever by half, but it will be hard for Americans to understand that.
Indeed, the Bush/Cheney team expects that the product will sell easily --
the more so, since the administration has been able once again to enlist the
usual cheerleaders in the media to "catapult the propaganda," as Bush once
put it.

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 kept
predicting, 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, in a fit of caution, the drafters settled on the
words "early-to-mid next decade." On Feb. 27, 2007, at his confirmation
hearings to become director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell
repeated that formula verbatim.

A "final" draft of the follow-up NIE mentioned above had been completed in
Feb. 2007, and McConnell no doubt was briefed on its findings prior to his
testimony. The fact that this draft has been sent back for revision every
other month since February speaks volumes. Judging from McConnell's
testimony, the conclusions of the NIE draft of February are probably not
alarmist enough for Vice President Dick Cheney. (Shades of Iraq.)

According to one recent report, the target date for publication has now
slipped to late fall. How these endless delays can be tolerated is testimony
to the fecklessness of the "watchdog" intelligence committees in the House
and Senate.

As for Iran's motivation if it plans to go down the path of producing
nuclear weapons, newly appointed Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked
about that at his confirmation hearing in December. Just called from the
wings to replace Donald Rumsfeld, Gates apparently had not yet read the
relevant memo from Cheney's office. It is a safe bet that the avuncular
Cheney took Gates to the woodshed, after the nominee suggested that Iran's
motivation could be, "in the first instance, 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.

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 announced:

The agency has been able to verify the nondiversion 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 said the plan just agreed to by the IAEA and Iran
will enable the two to reach 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 U.N. inspections -- unprecedented
in their intrusiveness -- that were conducted in Iraq in early 2003 before
the United States abruptly warned the United Nations in mid-March to pull
out its inspectors, lest they find themselves among those to 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 was told that this
time he would have to take the lead in playing up various threats from Iran.
And they gave him new words.

The president's new formulation

As I watched the president speak on Aug. 28, I was struck by the care he
took in reading the exact words of a new, subjunctive-mood formulation
regarding Iran's nuclear intentions. He never looked up; this is what 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.

The cautious wording suggests to me that the White House finally has
concluded that the "nuclear threat" from Iran is "a dog that won't hunt," as
Lyndon Johnson would have put it. While initial press reporting focused on
the "nuclear holocaust" rhetorical flourish, the earlier part of the
sentence is more significant, in my view. It is quite different from earlier
Bush rhetoric charging categorically that Iran is "pursuing nuclear
weapons," including the following (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 latest news from the IAEA is, for the White House, an unwelcome extra
hurdle. And the president's advisers presumably were aware of it well before
Bush's speech was finalized; it will be hard to spin. Administration
officials would also worry about the possibility that some patriotic truth
teller might make the press aware of the key judgments of the languishing
draft of the latest NIE on Iran's nuclear capability -- or that a courageous
officer or official of Gen. Anthony Zinni's stature might feel
conscience-bound to try to head off another unnecessary war, by providing a
more accurate, less alarmist assessment of the nuclear threat from Iran.

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 our "ally"
Israel to eliminate Iran's nuclear potential. Besides, some American Jewish
groups have become increasingly concerned over the likelihood of serious
backlash if young Americans are seen to be fighting and dying to eliminate
perceived threats to Israel (but not to the United States). Some of these
groups have been quietly urging the White House to back off the
nuclear-threat rationale for war on Iran.

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 U.S. reverses
in Iraq and "justification" to confront the ostensible source of the problem
-- "deadeners" having been changed to Iran. Vice President Cheney has
reportedly been pushing for military retaliation against Iran if the United
States finds hard evidence of Iranian complicity in supporting the
"insurgents" in Iraq.

President Bush obliged 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 U.S. "retaliation." The evolving
rhetoric suggests that the most likely immediate 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 very likely. It
strikes me as shamelessly ironic that the likes of our current ambassador at
the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the architects of U.S. policy
toward the area, are now warning publicly that the current upheaval in the
Middle East could bring another world war.

The public buildup

Col. Pat Lang (U.S.A., ret.), as usual, puts it succinctly:

Careful attention to the content of the chatter on the 24/7 news channels
reveals a willingness to accept the idea that it is not possible to resolve
differences with Iran through diplomacy. Network anchors are increasingly
accepting or voicing such views. Are we supposed to believe that this is
serendipitous?

And not only that. It is as if Scooter Libby were back writing lead
editorials for the Washington Post, the Pravda of this administration. The
Post's lead editorial on Aug. 21 regurgitated the allegations that Iran's
Revolutionary Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a
growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;" that it is "waging war against
the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible."
Designating Iran a "specially designated global terrorist" organization,
said the Post, "seems to be the least the United States should be doing,
giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq."

As for the news side of the Post, which is widely perceived as a bit freer
from White House influence, its writers are hardly immune. For example, they
know how many times the draft National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's
nuclear program has been sent back for redrafting . and they know why. Have
they been told not to write the story?

For good measure, the indomitable arch-neocon James Woolsey has again
entered the fray. He was trotted out on Aug. 14 to tell Lou Dobbs that the
United States may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its
nuclear weapons program. Woolsey, who has described himself as the "anchor
of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs," knows what will scare. To Dobbs: "I'm afraid within, well, at
worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [Iran] could have the bomb."

As for what Bush is telling his counterparts among our allies, reporting on
his recent meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy are disquieting, to
say the least. Reports circulating in European foreign ministries indicate
that Sarkozy came away convinced that Bush "is serious about bombing Iran's
secret nuclear facilities," according to well-connected journalist Arnauld
De Borchgrave.

It is up to U.S.

Air strikes on Iran seem inevitable, unless grassroots America can arrange a
backbone transplant for Congress. The House needs to begin impeachment
proceedings without delay. Why? Well, there's the Constitution of the United
States, for one thing. For another, the initiation of impeachment
proceedings might well give our senior military leaders pause. Do they
really want to precipitate a wider war and risk destroying much of what is
left of our armed forces for the likes of Bush and Cheney? Is another star
on the shoulder worth THAT?

The deterioration of the U.S. position in Iraq, the perceived need for a
scapegoat, the knee-jerk deference given to Israel's myopic and ultimately
self-defeating security policy, and the fact that time is running out for
the Bush/Cheney administration to end Iran's nuclear program together make
for a very volatile mix.

So, on Tuesday let's put away the lawn chairs and roll up our sleeves. Let's
remember all that has already happened since Labor Day five years ago.

There is very little time to exercise our rights as citizens and stop this
madness. At a similarly critical juncture, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was
typically direct. I find his words a challenge to us today:

There is such a thing as being too late. ... Life often leaves us standing
bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity. ... Over the bleached bones
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity. 

C 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/61328/

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