Dave Lindorff has just posted an article on The Nation website about the Navy’s recent issuance of “Prepare to Deploy orders” to a number of ships including the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier whose home-port is Norfolk, Virginia.
He writes:
- According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received recent orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.
Lindorff quotes Col. Sam Gardiner, an air force officer who previously taught strategy at the Natinal War College, as saying, “You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It’s a very significant order, and it’s not done as a training exercise.”
Lindorff continues:
- “I think the plan’s been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran,” says Gardiner. “It’s a terrible idea, it’s against US law and it’s against international law, but I think they’ve decided to do it.” Gardiner says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, “the Iranians have many more options than we do: They can activate Hezbollah; they can organize riots all over the Islamic world, including Pakistan, which could bring down the Musharraf government, putting nuclear weapons into terrorist hands; they can encourage the Shia militias in Iraq to attack US troops; they can blow up oil pipelines and shut the Persian Gulf.” Most of the major oil-producing states in the Middle East have substantial Shiite populations, which has long been a concern of their own Sunni leaders and of Washington policy-makers, given the sometimes close connection of Shiite populations to Iran’s religious rulers.
Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian antiship weapons, against which the Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush MO to date.
I should note that I largely disagree with the “Bush is not bluffing” thrust of that second para there. (And I would also describe the list of counter-moves that Iran could be predicted to undertake a little differently.) It is true that the increasingly deranged-seeming Dick Cheney may well favor attacking Iran; but I think that, significantly, Rumsfeld seems not to be acting in total lockstep with Cheney these days (where is he, anyway? seems to have dropped off the map?); and Condi Rice isn’t in lockstep with Cheney either. Therefore there is a good chance at this point that the counsels of wisdom will prevail inside the White House.
In addition, I honestly believe that the military brass will be much more vigilant than they proved able to be back in 2002-2003, about not getting themselves dragged into a disastrous, quite unwinnable military adventure… Perhaps some military planners may have once hoped that airpower alone could win the American war goals in Iran and that they could regain their glory that way? If so, the outcome of Dan Halutz’s stunningly counter-productive air assault against Lebanon should certainly have given them pause.
As, too, the fact that– as explored at some length over at Pat Lang’s blog– it seems clear that during that war at least some of the Israelis’ communications as well as their air force’s ability to deploy many planes in “stealth” mode had been hacked into by Hizbullah and its Iranian backers. (We can assume, here, too, that Iran’s military intelligence would have learned at least as much if not more from the course of the battles during the war as the Israelis and their US military colleagues were able to learn… )
That blog post over at Pat Lang’s place cited this recent Newsday article, which said, “Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month’s battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults.” It even quoted an unnamed Hizbullah commander boasting about that ability. However, just yesterday I heard some very reliable observers who were in Beirut during the war noting that Hizbullah seemed to have an uncanny ability to “predict” IAF strikes against targets in South Beirut, as well, since a number of buildings there that the IAF bombed had been cleared of their inhabitants just shortly beforehand.
Interesting, huh?
… All this just really confirms the judgment I made here back on August 14 (ceasefire day, as it happened) when in response to the famous Sy Hersh piece about the broader implications of the 33-day war, I wrote that, if the Olmert/Halutz Blitz against Lebanon had indeed been intended as a “field test” for a possible future US assault against Iran,
- then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds.
There still remains, of course, the distinct possibility that the Bushites might be eager to do a bit of militaristic bluff ‘n’ blustering in the lead-up to our election day, November 7… Whatever their ultinmate intentions, though, I think it would be great if Virginians could find a way to get over to Norfolk to protest this latest deployment of these machines of death.
Losers
Stephen Colbert has a word
The “Iraq Scenario” in Iran
By Georg Mascolo in Washington
“Is Iran secretly building an atomic bomb? The International Atomic Energy Agency wants to shed light on the core issue behind Tehran’s nuclear dispute with the West. While the United States doubts the IAEA’s efficacy, the UN inspectors fear hawks are trying to make them irrelevant — just like before the Iraq war.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,438210,00.html
Helena
Jim Lobe commnents on the confusion about intentions toward Iran.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HI22Aa01.html
Who exactly is running things in Washington?
Helena,
In 2004 the timing of the assault on Fallujah was clearly determined by the election, and here we are again…
A thought I haven’t seen elsewhere is that Bush’s intentions could be contingent on how the polls look: if the R’s are cruising toward victory, don’t rock the boat, but otherwise turn the board over and hope for the best.
22 septembre 2006
The Bushites wouldn’t attack Iran if they were reasonnable and rational. But they aren’t, or they won’t have attacked Iraq, neither would they have allowed Israel to attack Lebanon. So with Iran, everything is possible and the whole smells like the spin they distilled against Iraq and Saddam before invading Iraq.
There is the characterisation of Iran as Evil, there is the play with the IAEA just like with Iraq. The IAEA has recently denied that the Iranians were working on a military nuclear plan. But that doesn’t prevent Bush to repeat its insinuations.
Also, the problem with bluff is that you may put the finger in an engrenage and once you have uttered a threat you may have to follow up or you’ll look weak, which the actual US government can’t accept.
Helena,
This has the look of (another) set-up deal. The October 1 sailing date of the “Ike Strike” group given in Lindorff’s article would come after Congress has adjourned for its month of electioneering. The Senate should not adjourn without clarifying the already much-abused 2002 resolution sanctioning the use of force in the open-ended “war on terror” to exclude Iran.
It is all very rational!
The GOP campaign ads will benefit from fresh footage of a gallant carrier fleet any nifty flight exercises. Candidates will want to have their pictures taken on the deck next to uniformed constituents and kin. Voters will shun the candidate who fails to cheer.
Bush must be able to bluff or have no means to persuade Iran to desist from uranium enrichment. Russia is unlikely to support UN sanctions. The religious Right http://www.jhm.org/ insists on some sort of righteous action against Muslim seizure of Jerusalem. The Kristol, AEI, Krauthammer, and Heritage Foundation lobbies also insist there is an “existential threat” to Israel. If Ahmadinejad blinks, fine. The bet is that he may agree to let any enrichment of uranium be handled by Russians, rather than risk destruction of all reactor projects, plus collateral death and damage. Were Bush to fail to make this threat, his base will cry a furry. Elements in the Air Force will probably be convinced that the downside risks are less than the alternatives. The hazard that Iran might sponsor mob or terror violence is probably far less than the obstruction of oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz. US, Saudi, and UAE planes might control the skies, but the Rumsfeldian unknown here is what people don’t know about Iran’s cruise missile, balistic missile, torpedo, or other means to block or obliterate Persian Gulf oil production and shipping. Oil at $200 / BBL would hurt.
besides the doubling or tripling of oil prices and explosion of jihad terror cells around the world. this won’t do anything even if they pulled it off. Iran wasn’t on another planet during the osirik bombing. they’ve built their nuclear program around such an attack.
as far as regime change: who are they gonna put in power? they could do ten regime changes, there is no one in Iran who is both pro israel and has any legitamacy. look at the demoicratic elections around the middle east. hamas hezbollah, muslim brotherhood all winners. Iraq too.
The military buildup is not something to ignore, remember when troops were deployed around Iraq before the war? It’s not cheap to do either.
However, unless Bush plans on pulling all American troops out of Iraqi cities while he attacks Iran, the US will be decimated by reprisals by angry Iraqis. (I’m not cynical enough to suggest that Bush doesn’t care what happens to the troops if he’s not among them.)
“I’m not cynical enough to suggest that Bush doesn’t care what happens to the troops if he’s not among them.”
I am. If Bush cared about the troops, we wouldn’t be where we are today in Iraq. Nothing in Bush’s history, from his days of not showing up for National Guard duty while his classmates were getting waxed in Vietnam, to his efforts to cut benefits for veterans, to his sacrifice of the Army, Marines and National Guard for political face-saving in his war on terror, suggests that he gives a rat’s ass for the troops.
Now this is a really telling bit of market data: Noam Chomsky’s book ““Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” hits No. 1 on Amazon’s best seller list following a recommendation by Hugo Chavez in his speech to the UN.
Just think how mad that must make Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/books/23chomsky.html?ei=5094&en=607733f05cceebfa&hp=&ex=1158984000&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1158980501-yAPDjZMkuNpq3/zw60gWig
If we must insist on regime change, to be sure we should finish regime change in one country before we start on another. The Karzai government (the putative Mayor of Kabul) is very unsteady in Afghanistan and who knows how many more regime changes it will take in Iraq before we hit on just the right one (Little Red Riding Hood School of Governance and Control of Foreign Lands)? Then, the government in Lebanon is very shakey and very well need changing since our buddies the Israelis shook things up there. With so much changing needed, can the US really afford to take on yet another case of changing?
At this point, our government fails as a competent babysitter, much less the administrator of a vast US hegemony.