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Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Now U.S. Ponders Attack on Iran

"Everything you hear about the planning for Iraq suggests logic may not be the basis for the decision," he said.

Hardliners in Pentagon ready to neutralize 'nuclear threat' posed by Tehran.
President Bush's second inauguration on Thursday will provide the signal for an intense and urgent debate in Washington over whether or when to extend the "global war on terror" to Iran, according to officials and foreign policy analysts in Washington.

That debate is being driven by "neo-conservatives" at the Pentagon who emerged from the post-election Bush reshuffle unscathed, despite their involvement in collecting misleading intelligence on Iraq's weapons in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months.

Only the credible threat, and if necessary the use, of air and special operations attacks against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities will stop the ruling clerics in Tehran acquiring warheads, many in the administration argue.

Moderates, who are far fewer in the second Bush administration than the first, insist that if Iran does have a secret weapons programme, it is likely to be dispersed and buried in places almost certainly unknown to US intelligence. The potential for Iranian retaliation inside Iraq and elsewhere is so great, the argument runs, that there is in effect no military option.

A senior administration official involved in developing Iran policy rejected that argument. "It is not as simple as that," he told the Guardian at a recent foreign policy forum in Washington. "It is not a straightforward problem but at some point the costs of doing nothing may just become too high. In Iran you have the intersection of nuclear weapons and proven ties to terrorism. That is what we are looking at now."

The New Yorker reported this week that the Pentagon has already sent special operations teams into Iran to locate possible nuclear weapons sites. The report by Seymour Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist, was played down by the White House and the Pentagon, with comments that stopped short of an outright denial.

"The Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organisations is a global challenge that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides," Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday: "Mr Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed."

However, the Guardian has learned the Pentagon was recently contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border, to collect intelligence. The group, based at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, was under the protection of Saddam Hussein, and is under US guard while Washington decides on its strategy.

The MEK has been declared a terrorist group by the state department, but a former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee "MEK cross-border operations". He refused, and does not know if those operations have begun.

"They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran," the former officer said.

He said the policy discussion was being overseen by Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy who was one of the principal advocates of the Iraq war. The Pentagon did not return calls for comment on the issue yesterday. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Mr Feith's Office of Special Plans also used like-minded experts on contract from outside the government, to serve as consultants helping the Pentagon counter the more cautious positions of the state department and the CIA.

Crazy

"They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilise the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world's problems are solved. I think it's delusional," the former CIA officer said.

However, others believe that at a minimum military strikes could set back Iran's nuclear programme several years. Reuel Marc Gerecht, another former CIA officer who is now a leading neo-conservative voice on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said: "It would certainly delay [the programme] and it can be done again. It's not a one-time affair. I would be shocked if a military strike could not delay the programme." Mr Gerecht said the internal debate in the administration was only just beginning.

"This administration does not really have an Iran policy," he said. "Iraq has been a fairly consuming endeavour, but it's getting now towards the point where people are going to focus on [Iran] hard and have a great debate."

That debate could be brought to a head in the next few months. Diplomats and officials in Vienna following the Iranian nuclear saga at the International Atomic Energy Agency expect the Iran dispute to re-erupt by the middle of this year, predicting a breakdown of the diplomatic track the EU troika of Britain, Germany and France are pursuing with Tehran. The Iran-EU agreement, reached in November, was aimed at getting Iran to abandon the manufacture of nuclear fuel which can be further refined to bomb-grade.

Now the Iranians are feeding suspicion by continuing to process uranium concentrate into gaseous form, a breach "not of the letter but of the spirit of the agreement," said one European diplomat.

Opinions differ widely over how long it would take Iran to produce a deliverable nuclear warhead, and some analysts believe that Iranian scientists have encountered serious technical difficulties.

"The Israelis believe that by 2007, the Iranians could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Some of us believe it could be the end of this decade," said David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert at the Institute for Science and International Security. A recent war-game carried out by retired military officers, intelligence officials and diplomats for the Atlantic Monthly, came to the conclusion that there were no feasible military options and if negotiations and the threat of sanctions fail, the US might have to accept Iran as a nuclear power.

However, Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel who led the war-game, acknowledged that the Bush administration might not come to the same conclusion.

"Everything you hear about the planning for Iraq suggests logic may not be the basis for the decision," he said.

Mr Gerecht, who took part in the war-game but dissented from the conclusion, believes the Bush White House, still mired in Iraq, has yet to make up its mind.

"The bureaucracy will come down on the side of doing nothing. The real issue is: will the president and the vice president disagree with them? If I were a betting man, I'd bet the US will not use pre-emptive force. However, I would not want to bet a lot."

Julian Borger and Ian Traynor
The Guardian


1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Iran Says Has Military Might to Deter Any Attack

By Paul Hughes
Reuters

Tuesday 18 January 2005

Tehran - Iran has the military might to deter attacks against it, its defence minister said in remarks published on Tuesday, one day after U.S. President George W. Bush said he would not rule out military action against Iran.

Ali Shamkhani said the Islamic Republic, which has seen U.S. forces topple regimes in neighbouring Afghanistan and Iraq in the last three years, did not fear attack.

"We are able to say that we have strength such that no country can attack us because they do not have precise information about our military capabilities due to our ability to implement flexible strategies," the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Shamkhani as saying.

"We can claim that we have rapidly produced equipment that has resulted in the greatest deterrent," he said, without elaborating.

Iran last October announced successful trials of its Shahab-3 ballistic missile with a range of 1,250 miles (2,000 km), putting parts of Europe, as well as Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf, within its reach.

Bush said on Monday that Washington would not rule out military action against Iran, which he labelled in 2002 an "axis of evil" member alongside Iraq and North Korea, if it was not more forthcoming about its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

Iranian officials said they were unconcerned about the threats of military action, which seemed to suggest Washington was eager to tackle Iran in Bush's second term.

"Iran has no fear of foreign enemies' threats...as they are very well aware that the Islamic Republic is not a place for adventurism," the ISNA student news agency quoted influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as saying.

Bush's comments followed an article in the New Yorker magazine on Sunday which said U.S. commando units were conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to identify hidden nuclear and chemical sites for possible future strikes.

Iran denies its nuclear facilities are to be used to make nuclear weapons and Pentagon officials have said the New Yorker report was "riddled with errors".

Iran Unconcerned

Ali Aghamohammadi, head of the Propaganda Office at Iran's Supreme National Security Council, dismissed the New Yorker report as "psychological warfare against Iran."

"The entry of American commandos (into Iran) is not that easy and believing this story would be naive," state radio quoted him as saying.

The European Union insisted on Tuesday diplomacy was the right approach with Iran.

"We are working with our Iranian partners in good faith as I trust they are working with us in good faith. We will pursue that path as long as it's possible and fruitful to do so," said Commission external affairs spokeswoman Emma Udwin.

Britain, Germany and France have sought to persuade Tehran to give up technology that can be used to make nuclear warheads in return for incentives such as trade deals and help with a civilian nuclear programme.

Mehr news agency, which analysts say has close ties to the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an editorial entitled "Futile espionage" ridiculed U.S. attempts to destabilise Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"The United States is well aware that Iran has strongly withstood U.S. pressure for over 25 years ... Today, the Islamic Republic has acquired massive military might, the dimensions of which still remain unknown, and is prepared to attack any intruder with a fearsome rain of fire and death," it said.

"The U.S. and Israel know that they can never militarily challenge Iran, since attacking the Islamic Republic would be biting off more than they could chew and would only choke them if they attempted it," it added

9:02 AM  

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