Do You Think Iran Will Get the Messsage?

 
Here's a scary report from the New York Daily News [ Bush eyes 'surgical' strikes vs. Iran, sez mag]. The Daily News article is based on an analysis by Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker magazine [Shifting Targets]. Hersh describes the increasing rhetoric about Iran's involvement in Iraq and the intelligence evidence that links Iran to the killing of American soldiers. This ties in with the growing realization that Iran is not about to develop nuclear weapons anytime soon. With that excuse gone, America needs another reason to justify the war against Iran. Here's how Hersh describes the situation ...

This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

It looks like the American people weren't buying the nuclear bomb spin so something new was needed. Who do you think is behind this new tactic? It's Dick Cheney, of course. Hersh quotes his unnamed source,

The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Judging from what I saw on television last week, the media is buying into the switch in tactics. Almost everyone who interviewed Ahmadinejad asked about "killing American soldiers in Iraq." Is it really this easy to trick the media? Doesn't anyone have the gumption to stand up to the propaganda machine and ask the hard questions?

Realistically, what do you expect Iran to do? There's a bloody civil war going on just across the river. It involves, among other things, religious groups with which Iran has some sympathy. In addition, Iraq is being occupied by 150,000 troops from a foreign country that labels Iran as a member of the axis of evil. It would be shocking if Iran didn't have people in Iraq with a view to influencing the outcome. I suspect Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are also sending "advisors" and supplies into Iraq.

The logic of the "surgical strike" tactic escapes me. Does the American administration really believe that Iran would roll over and play dead as soon as American bombers attacked supply bases in Iran? Isn't it likely that such an attack would galvanize Iranian public opinion leading to greater involvement in Iraq? Is it possible that some foreign nations like China or Russia would ship anti-aircraft missiles to Iran so it could defend itself? What if Iran retaliated by firing surface-to-sea missiles at the next aircraft carrier to pass through the Strait of Hormuz [Iran tests upgraded surface-to-sea missile]?

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”

Surely those who advise the American President can't be this stupid? You'd think they would have learned a thing or two from their previous mistakes in 2003, wouldn't you? This is a dangerous game. Expanding the war into Iran is not going to make America safer and it's not going to win any friends. America needs people like Zbigniew Brzezinski to speak up now. It's clear that you can't rely on Congress, just like you couldn't rely on it in October 2002 [Iranian Army Is a Terrorist Organization - What's This All About?].