I think it is too late now for the ‘bomb Iran’ networks that are deeply dug into various portions of the US political elite to launch an ‘October surprise,’ i.e. a military action against Iran designed to escalate tensions in the Gulf region– and also, crucially, toincrease the climate of fear within the US in a way that would push voters to rally round John McCain.
However, it is not too late for an ‘inter-regnum surprise’, that is, a military attack against Iran designed to escalate tensions in the Gulf region to the point that that region and the whole world system become a chaotic stew of catastrophe that would then be handed to President-elect Barack Obama to deal with, come January..
I am relying mainly on Defense Secretary Bob Gates to prevent that from occurring, even if some of the dark forces in the Vice-President’s office– or their close friends in Israel– might be tempted to push toward it. But at this point I’d have to say that the ‘inter-regnum surprise’ looks unlikely, too.
But the pathologically Iranophobic forces in the US elite remain busy looking for ever-new ways to whip up tensions against Iran and to prepare US opinion for the launching of a war against it. Last May, Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of WINEP published their little study trying to claim– quite counter-factually– that a war against Iran would not after all be terribly damaging to the US forces so widely deployed in the region.
And today, a new group called the Bipartisan Policy Center has come out with a report urging the new administration to step up all forms of pressure on Iran, including preparations for a military attack against it (pp.xiii and xiv):
- There are two aspects to the military option: boosting our diplomatic leverage leading up to and during negotiations, and preparing for kinetic action [the fancy new term for ‘combat’]. For either objective, the United States will need to augment its military presence in the region. This should commence the first day the new President enters office, especially as the Islamic Republic and its proxies might seek to test the new administration…
While current deployments are placing a strain on U.S. military assets, the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan offers distinct advantages in any possible confrontation with Iran…
If all other approaches—diplomatic, economic, financial, non-kinetic—fail to produce the desired objective, the new President will have to weigh the risks of failure to set back Iran’s nuclear program sufficiently against the risks of a military strike. We believe a military strike is a feasible option and must remain a last resort to retard Iran’s nuclear development, even if it is unlikely to solve all our challenges and will certainly create new ones… No matter how much the next president may wish a military strike not be necessary, it is prudent that he begin augmenting the military lever, including continuing the contingency planning that we have to assume is already happening, from his first day in office.
The new study is significant as much for the line-up of people standing behind it as for its bullying, hawkish content. The study is issued “in the name of” a task force whose eleven members include Dennis Ross, the perennially pro-Israeli eminence grise in US politics who notably succeeded during eight years as Pres. Clinton’s chief adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs in winning eight more years for Israel’s pro-settlement activists to continue their work. (He did this by systematically blocking all signs of movement on the Palestinian-Israeli negotiating track.)
Dennis has greasily been positioning himself for high office in a future Democratic administration. After being a strong Hillary backer, as soon as her campaign folded he signed on with Obama’s campaign, where he’s been hard at work elbowing aside anyone else who might compete with him for the candidate’s ear.
The “task force” was co-chaired by former Senators Chuck Robb (Dem) and Dan Coats (GOP), who also published this linked op-ed in the WaPo today. Another member was Steve Rademaker, spouse of the ardently pro-Likud Danielle Pletka.
So what kind of bird, you might ask, is this new “Bipartisan Policy Center”? It seems to have been cobbled together earlier this year. Its founder and president is listed as Jason S. Grumet, who must surely be the same Jason Grumet who’s been a leading adviser to Obama on climate and energy matters for some time now. Since 2002, Grumet has been the Executive Director of the non-governmental and determinedly bipartisan “National Commission on Energy Policy”, whose office is right next to that of the BPC on Washington’s I Street. Actually, the two organizations seem incestuously linked in a number of ways.
To me, it looks as though Grumet, who may or may not understand a whole lot about Middle east policy and strategic affairs, may have gotten bamboozled by Dennis Ross or others into running this “task force” with its determinedly alarmist and hawkish findings. The “findings” of the task force were, in fact, most likely determined not by the eleven former high-level officials who were task force “members”, but by the people put in to staff and support the task force in its work. These included “consultants” Kenneth Katzmann and Michael Rubin (who actually wrote the whole report) and “project director” Michael Makovsky. Jim Lobe gives us some background about these individuals here.
I hope that despite the involvement of Grumet and Ross in the work of this task force, Barack Obama is also listening to a much broader spectrum of views on what to do about Iran. Just going along with these bullying and escalatory recommendations would rapidly lead him to a dangerous dead end.
Regarding what President Obama (or any other American president) should or should not “do” about Iran — yet another foreign country that has never attacked or threatened to attack America — I would hope that former President Eisenhower’s wise words of admonition to panic-stricken pseudo-imperialist meddlers everywhere would carry the day, namely:
“Don’t just ‘do’ something! Stand there!”
With bovine credulity itself exhausted foolishly allowing reactionary-ideologue Republicans into the national government for the past eight years, I can only hope that Winston Churchill had it right when he said: “You can count on the Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” Having tried Republicans (for who knows what earthly masochistic reason), Americans might even find themselves willing to experiment with reality and sanity for a change.
Iran and America will both fare much better, I suspect, if America finally does something to clean up its own dysfunctional messes while allowing the Iranians to do likewise.
The biggest problem is that neocons have taken control of the narrative. The conventional wisdom is that “Iran is intent on developing a nuke.”
The best judgement of US intelligence agencies and IAEA say otherwise. But the corporate media continue to aid and abet neocons in their propagation of drivel. Where is the push back?
It’s time for honorable people in the foreign policy establishment to support the intelligence community who went out on a limb politically to make their research public. So far the silence of honorable foreign policy experts has been deafening.
IMHO, Iran is not developing a nuke because they don’t need one. They are not threatened regionally. They are only threatened by Israel and USA, who wants to dictate the disposition of Iran’s enormous energy assets. Honorable foreign policy experts could do the world a huge service by clearly stating US ambitions vis-a-vis Iran.
Honorable foreign policy experts, if there are any in Washington, could also explain that Iran’s deterrence comes not from having a nuke, but from its proximity to Persian Gulf oil infrastructure and its ability to attack and cripple it. Iran did just that to Saddam’s oil infrastructure in the 19880’s. There is no reason to believe that they could not do the same thing to the only thing that matters to the US in that part of the world. From Tehran’s point of view, nukes are not needed for deterence.
Why is it that honorable, credible people are so willing to buy into the neocon narrative and so unwilling to trumpet the absence of a nuclear program and tell peopl why Iran doesn’t need nukes?
Why is it that honorable, credible people are so willing to buy into the neocon narrative and so unwilling to trumpet the absence of a nuclear program and tell people why Iran doesn’t need nukes?
seems to me there’s a criteria right there for who is “honorable” and who should be “credible” at this point. not to mention who is actually living in the ‘evidence-based’ world, not in a strange reactionary fantasy-land.
more to the point, i think is the opposite question: why so many of us who already live in the world of reality persist in taking seriously any of the folks who keep pumping out this garbage…
Helena,
While your concerns about Iran and US relations, let not forgot here Cuba for last 50 years US sanctions this country and US foreign policy did not changed against this country.
Let look to all those successive US administrations through past 50 years did any administration really though in reality and come of to talk or negotiate with this small country in all accounts comparing to US?
We are in our own illusions keep talking about Iran and what the future might bring us with “unknown” Evil sit in “White House” despite its Blue of Red all we know from the history there were no dramatic changes that we as common normal people think, its beyond our dreams.
The question of “why so many of us who already live in the world of reality persist in taking seriously any of the folks who keep pumping out this garbage” should be accompanied by the question of why so many who should know better (pundits and think tankers) persist in pumping out the garbage or are silently complicit with those who dwell in fantasy land.
It seems that knowledge insiders, who silently complied with the impending Iraq fiasco, have learned nothing. When I confronted a well known foreign affairs blogger on his adamant refusal to discuss America’s real ambitions in Iraq (and Iran)–energy–he responded that he “finds the subject matter predictable, an obvious issue, and boring.” Evidently each of these “experts” has his own favorite rationalization for not confronting the neocon mythology with evidence based reality.
And it is the silent complicity of foreign policy elites, who should know better by now, that will get the country into the next disastrous war, sooner than we expect.
Obviously the project for a new American century is bipartisan and won’t die with the neocons out of power — there are plenty of neolibs who understand that Israel has to act preemptively in self-defense, just as the US does.
news report, Sep 15, 2008
The U.S. Defense Department notified Congress last week that it would sell the GBU-39 “bunker buster” bombs, which are highly accurate GPS-guided devices, to Israel in a $77-million deal. Congress has 30 days to reject the deal.
“It is vital to the U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement.
The GBU-39 is a small, 250-pound class smart bomb that has the same penetration capabilities as a 2,000-pound BLU-109, which was developed to penetrate the most secured targets. The GBU-39 can penetrate more than six feet of reinforced concrete. The advantage of the smaller bombs is that aircraft can carry more of them, to strike more targets.
The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that the bombs “would likely be used in the event of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
Methinks someone hath an ulterior motive. Are oil prices perhaps too low?
A former Iranian president on Friday expressed his astonishment on media blackout to using forbidden weapons by the U.S. army forces against Iraqi civilians in 1991.
“The news of using a U.S. bomb was covered up even when an Italian TV shot pieces of its footage,” Hashemi Rafsanjani, chief of Iran’s State Expediency Council, told worshippers in Tehran.
“Using the bomb by the U.S. against Iraqis caused a number of various cancer cases,” he noted.
“It was pointless using such weapons by the U.S. against defunct government ”,the Iranian official exclaimed.
The U.S. led an international coalition to drive the former regime of Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. Saddam’s regime invaded Kuwait in August 1991 after rows with the Gulf country over debts and disputed border oilfields
AM(S)
The Head of Iran’s Leadership Experts Assembly elsewhere in his sermon referred to a news item aired by an Italian state TV channel on United States usage of a small nuclear bomb in Iraq during that country’s 1991 invasion against Kuwait, adding that if the news is authentic, it is very horrendous, when coupled with other related news.
http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/line-17/0810244283195612.htm
Re: ulterior motives. It could be that oil prices are getting too low. Threatening a strike on Iran could address that. Of course, actually conducting a strike would quickly suck up any spare production capacity, though Iranian retaliation could eliminate a lot more production than just spare capacity.
It could also be the case that the merchants of death have become alarmed at the urgent calls for butter, not guns, reversing the security driven atmosphere of the last 7 years. Their welfare is definitely threatened by this economic environment, and they may be conducting a preemptive strike to make sure that their welfare checks continue.
Here’s their real problems with Iran, as spelled out by Coats & Robb in their WaPo article:
“Simply obtaining the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent and drastically multiply its influence in Iraq and the region.”
The US can’t allow Iran to have a deterrent against US attack, or have more influence in Iraq and the Middle East, so Iran must be attacked. Let’s defeat them now while we’re undeterred, says this bipartisan brain trust.
This Iraq after 6 years of freedom and democracy and US flag still put on fire by Iraqis!!
What massage Washington like to hear and see from Iraqis?
The “Combatting Terrorism Center” at West Point has published a paper on Iranian Strategy in Iraq. Some findings:
Iran has achieved much:
Iran has achieved three major accomplishments in Iraq. First, the unstable security situation and political opposition means the U.S. is not in a position to use Iraq as a platform for targeting Iran. Second, Iran’s political allies have secured high-ranking positions in the Iraqi government. Third, the Iraqi constitution calls for a highly federalized state. Iran values a decentralized Iraq because it will be less capable of projecting power, and because Iran is primarily concerned with Iraq’s southern, oil-rich, Shi’a-dominated provinces.
Iran has a strong influence on Iraq:
Iran has a robust program to exert influence in Iraq in order to limit American power-projection capability in the Middle East, ensure the Iraqi government does not pose a threat to Iran, and build a reliable platform for projecting influence further abroad.
http://ctc.usma.edu/Iran_Iraq/CTC_Iran_Iraq_Final.pdf
It appears that “victory” in Iraq belongs to Iran. Another reason to “Bomb, bomb Iran?”
The “Combating Terrorism Center” at West Point has published a paper on Iranian Strategy in Iraq. Some findings:
Iran has achieved much:
Iran has achieved three major accomplishments in Iraq. First, the unstable security situation and political opposition means the U.S. is not in a position to use Iraq as a platform for targeting Iran. Second, Iran’s political allies have secured high-ranking positions in the Iraqi government. Third, the Iraqi constitution calls for a highly federalized state. Iran values a decentralized Iraq because it will be less capable of projecting power, and because Iran is primarily concerned with Iraq’s southern, oil-rich, Shi’a-dominated provinces.
Iran has a strong influence on Iraq:
Iran has a robust program to exert influence in Iraq in order to limit American power-projection capability in the Middle East, ensure the Iraqi government does not pose a threat to Iran, and build a reliable platform for projecting influence further abroad.
It appears that “victory” in Iraq belongs to Iran. Another reason to “Bomb, bomb Iran?”