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THE IRAN PLANS
Would President Bush go to war to stop
Tehran from getting the bomb?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2006-04-17
Posted 2006-04-10
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to
stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine
activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air
attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials
said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and
teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover,
to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government
ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is
determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot
program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic
Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the
capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing
estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or
military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its
research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military,
and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in
the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said
that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White
House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence
official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a
strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the
Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to
get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes
that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future,
would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his
legacy.”
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the
Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a
belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the
religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the
government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself,
‘What are they smoking?’ ”
The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick
Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of
President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a
nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is:
How long will the present Iranian regime last?”
When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is
putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no
choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military
attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as
wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal
with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to
rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial
accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war,
“given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to
invade Quebec.”
One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the
high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of
“coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how
they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in
order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has
been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had
to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In
response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it
would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has
indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department
also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but
wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies”
in this account but would not specify them.)
“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told
me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to
fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they
control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to
control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”
A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view.
“This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to
change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The
danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that
the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A
military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the
risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring
to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful,
and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And
here comes Al Qaeda.”
In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on
plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including
at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations
Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their
content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal
briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re
doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”
The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to
the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led
the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to
hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is
building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not
to take military action, the House member added. “The only political
pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush,
the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a
messianic vision.”
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are
already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from
carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons
delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder”
bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of
Iranian coastal radars.
Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in
Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the
National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided
an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner
estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He
added:
I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran
probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would
want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently
been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered
aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit
the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means
targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . .
. Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with
penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White
House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster
tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear
sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two
hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A.
safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand
centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately
seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could
provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year.
(Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its
enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none
of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The
elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear
ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not
insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and
rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with
nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence
community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge
underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the
underground facility was designed for “continuity of government”—for the
political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are
similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American
leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S.
knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the
ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior
intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined
that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American
intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design
their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically
in the ventilator shafts, he said.
A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view,
even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough
damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The former
defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell
them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure.
The United States should act like we’re ready to go.” He added, “We don’t
have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and
standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do
things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad
stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”
But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former
senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s
underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or
which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of
reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally
destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical
nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear
weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official
said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a
tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”
He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the
technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom
clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is
not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a
little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody
tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”
The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings
inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some
officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans
for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The
White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from
you.’ ”
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the
Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a
resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon
civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be
stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were
considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments
within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other
countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter
may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had
agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they
are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The
internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said.
“And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of
offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear
weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science
Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build
the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.
The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an
Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001,
as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc
panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public
Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating
tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and
noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt
destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise
of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent
members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the
national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense
for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security.
The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The Iranians
have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue
where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he
said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a
chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout
the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”
With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably
expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who
is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously
argued against an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher
target” than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing to
stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe
hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”
The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force
intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine
per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people
who believe it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can achieve
its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been
supported by neoconservatives.
If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops
now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets
with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian
casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant
with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working
with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the
Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops
“are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic
tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the
consultant said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting a line
from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader aim, the
consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the
regime.
The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in
covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s
Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if
conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and
would have to be reported to key members of Congress.
“ ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence
official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that
clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the
battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence,
operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The
guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in
Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we
have the green light to do everything we want.”
The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his
determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by
allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the
Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist
activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official
biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to
Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings
of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983.
Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the
F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.
Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for
two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard
colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding
it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re
sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve
got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back
off.”
Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base
throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had
replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former
senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran,
depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the
West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting
to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe
that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that,
particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s
attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many
experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not
in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The
Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program,
but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme
Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will
not take action without his approval.”
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have
the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream
to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The whole
internal debate is on which way to go”—in terms of stopping the Iranian
program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally
renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. “God may
smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot
become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize
that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against
the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.”
While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense
debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that.
Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now
the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based
on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a
deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert nuclear
program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation,
diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out.
But if you do it”—bomb Iran—“without being able to show there’s a secret
program, you’re in trouble.”
Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the
Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years away, at the latest,
from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their
nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a
senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s
duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside Iran—the
program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the
military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly
made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support
it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term,
told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I believe it,
but I don’t know it.”
In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access
to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan,
who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting
up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine
visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent
interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and
its time line for building a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable
danger,’ ” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon
adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The
concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has credibility
problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what
they want to hear”—or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez
Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on
terror.
“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I
don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are
beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and
targeting information is coming in from our own sources— sensors and the
covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to
the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’
People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”
The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of
promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a
recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,”
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration
strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the
Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:
The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on
the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary
of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global
challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading
supporter of global terrorism.
Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran
“questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked,
“What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all
this?” The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the
I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent
comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a
decade away from being a nuclear power.)
Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it
said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which
had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more
than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The
Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility
that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the
laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The
stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been
fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they
appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read,
“RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”
I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence
officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory
than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially
been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working
together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept
on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force.
It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave
Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in
Europe. It was a classic “walk-in.”
A European intelligence official said, “There was some hesitation on our
side” about what the materials really proved, “and we are still not
convinced.” The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts
suggested, “but had the character of sketches,” the European official
said. “It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”
The threat of American military action has created dismay at the
headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe
that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has
presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in
Iran,” the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is
that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But,
if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the
development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat
said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future
intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American
policy.”
In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year
between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the
Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of
State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled:
“We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct
threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and
we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you
will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”
Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the
I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All
of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some
think the Iranian leadership are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally
certified nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding
concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the
neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At the end of the day, it will
work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians.”
The central question—whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans
to enrich uranium—is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and
the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former
I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s
nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome.
American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage
of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”
Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of
going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A.
to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force
Iran to put its cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna
expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A.
He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an
inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can only bomb.”
There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or
among its European allies. “We’re quite frustrated with the
director-general,” the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has
been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight.
It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of
letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous.
It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk.”
The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that
President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign
will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on
the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime
change,” a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans
have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going
along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on
something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged
in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”
“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former
National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried
we’re going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that
the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but
that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up
the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British “are jumpy about the
Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise.”
The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its
record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but “to the best of our
knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could
successfully run centrifuges” to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason
for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The
regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a
hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American
bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will
fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear
superconfident until the moment they back off.”
The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the
time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs
to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I
think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in
sanctions—“is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on
the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there
is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact
could be catastrophic.”
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable
ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his
party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his
popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last
year that military action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been
more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off
the table.
Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of
an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and
Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence
official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You
can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said,
would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic
to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young
people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it,” he
said. “If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in
trouble in the long run.”
Another European official told me that he was aware that many in
Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he said, with a
resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The
timetable is short.”
A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose
leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to
begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several
officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack
on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was
a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a
speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s
hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world
peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will
use military might to protect our ally Israel.”
Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to
consider the following questions: “What will happen in the other Islamic
countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us
globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on
Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international
standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security
Council?”
Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would
not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It
could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide
passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean.
Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic
consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep
shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to
work. “It’s impossible to block passage,” he said. The government
consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil
problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its
strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those
in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert
estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere
from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher,
depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.
Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet
minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed
on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the
United Arab Emirates. “They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could
begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy
world.”
Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere,
with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported
that the planning to counter such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at
U.S. intelligence agencies. “The best terror network in the world has
remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the
Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will
mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of
southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the
sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against
us.” (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he
said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and
the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)
The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up
like a candle.” The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq
would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite
militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is
predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in
Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight
thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with
ten mullahs and one sound truck.”
“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad
will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more
credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the
Iranians.”
The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who would be unhappy
if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime
change. This is wishful thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is
now.”
Source: The New Yorker
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