Preparations for Iran Under Way

I'm not prone to exaggeration when I blog, but Hersh's most recent article in the New Yorker magazine, "The Coming Wars", is some scary stuff. That the hawks and neo-cons in the administration have been gunning for Iran for some time now is without question. But Hersh reveals to us the extent of the preparations, as well as their plans for the future.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

In the remainder of the article Hersh goes into great detail as to how they've gone about preparing for this. First has been the emasculation of the CIA, and the delegation of authority for cover ops assignments to the Pentagon.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

If you cornered Cambone, Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld they would tell you that the purpose of this is make these operations more effective, in light of the CIA's failure in Iraq(ignorning completely the political pressure asserted on the CIA to produce the conclusions they did, of course.) But in their heart of hearts, they know that what they really want is more freedom to operate without any oversight by Congress. Less accountability means more freedom to act outside of their range of authority, outside even the range of legality if and when it's necessary. The payoff has already produced:

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids.

The Neo-cons have more then the short-term security of American at hand of course, though that will be the justification given to the American people for any attack. No, an attack on Iran fits neatly into their grand scheme of remaking the Middle East by force.

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

The sheer, bone-headed foolishness of this plan cannot be overstated. But don't take my word for it:

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.”

In other words, yes the Mullahs are unpopular...except when it comes to the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Like most rational people the world over, the Iranians understand the nuclear weapons, though fraught with risk, can launch their country into the next level of influence, or at the very least give them some means to defend themselves against American attack. They think this because we taught them this lesson. Iraq did not have nukes, so it was invaded. North Korea does have nukes, so it is not. It's a lesson the average Iranian will get.

The way you know to be wary of someone else's political opinion, is when you hear them start off by saying that they're a "realist." That usually means that they're assertions will fly in the face of reality. The hawks in the administration are no different. The assert that realistically, we must be willing to use force against Iran to curtail the development of nuclear weapons that could threaten us. But the fact is they are simply incapable of looking at the larger picture. The government of Iran is our enemy; of that there is no doubt. The people of Iran however, are not. They are suspicious, perhaps hostile, but by and large they are, like most poeple, concerned more with problems at home then with problems with America. We forget whenever we discuss Iran that this mutual hostility is largely our fault; we supported a puppet dictatorship that was loathed by the people, and reacted petulantly and childlishly when our favored Shah was overthrown. The government of Iran, like politicans throughout time(and here at home)realize that by focusing the attention of the people on an outside enemy, they take the attention away from their own failures(see "war on terror" and the economy, for example.) We can refocus that attention. But we cannot do by striking them militarily, and expecting them to rise up and anger at the government that's actually trying to defend them from the strikes, no matter how provoked. Simply ask yourself, if terrorists got into America and hit us again, even if it was clearly a failure by the Bush administration to prevent it, would we rise up in revolt against Bush? Hardly. Why do we think the Iranians will act any differently? Especially when when we present a much greater threat to them, then they do to us.

The idea that our policy towards Iran begins and ends with military strikes, is ridiculous. We have for the first time in 25 years an opportunity to undue the hostility that resulted from the Islamic revolution in Iran. It is presented to us on a platter made of gold, and the neo-cons seek to spit on the platter, deepening the hosility while failing to solve the crisis, all the while undermining ever more our desire to create democracy in the Middle East.

By the way, the Defense Department has attacked Hersh's column as ludicrous...which of course means he's dead on target.

Also, Iran(they apparantly read the New Yorker too)has said that they are perfectly capable of defending themselves from any attack on their facilities (see my earlier post concerning the wargames which shows that they're not completely full of it.)