AMERICA’S IRAN RAIDS

By now, you’ve prob­a­bly heard about Seymour Hersh’s lat­est bomb­shell: that U.S. forces have been con­duct­ing covert raids into Iran 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 civil­ians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the mil­i­tary infra­struc­ture as pos­si­ble, the gov­ern­ment con­sul­tant with close ties to the Pentagon told me…
Defense Department civil­ians, under the lead­er­ship of Douglas Feith, have been work­ing with Israeli plan­ners and con­sul­tants to develop and refine poten­tial nuclear, chemical-​​weapons, and mis­sile tar­gets inside Iran. (After [the Israel raid on Iraq’s nuclear reac­tor at] Osirak, Iran sit­u­ated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of strik­ing range of other coun­tries, espe­cially Israel. Distance no longer lends such pro­tec­tion, how­ever: Israel has acquired three sub­marines capa­ble of launch­ing cruise mis­siles and has equipped some of its air­craft with addi­tional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-​​16I fight­ers within the range of most Iranian tar­gets.)
They believe that about three-​​quarters of the poten­tial tar­gets can be destroyed from the air, and a quar­ter are too close to pop­u­la­tion cen­ters, or buried too deep, to be tar­geted, the con­sul­tant said. Inevitably, he added, some sus­pi­cious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli com­mando team­sin on-​​the-​​ground sur­veil­lance­be­fore being targeted. 

All of which sounds per­fectly rea­son­able to me. But, this being the Bushies, there has to be at least a touch of wild-​​eyed mes­sian­ism thrown into the mix. And indeed, there is, Hersh reports.

The imme­di­ate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least tem­porar­ily derail, Irans 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 col­lapse­like the for­mer Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.
The idea that an American attack on Irans 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 thats tech­no­log­i­cally sophis­ti­cated. Leverett, who is now a senior fel­low at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, will pro­duce an Iranian back­lash against the United States and a ral­ly­ing around the regime.

THERE’S MORE: “Mr. Hershs arti­cle is so rid­dled with errors of fun­da­men­tal fact that the cred­i­bil­ity of his entire piece is destroyed,” says Pentagon mouth­piece Larry DiRita. “Mr. Hershs source(s) feed him with rumor, innu­endo, and asser­tions about meet­ings that never hap­pened, pro­grams that do not exist, and state­ments by offi­cials that were never made.”

January 17th, 2005 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.