Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Veteran US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh was interviewed last week by Jon Stewart, host of the late night political satire program, The Daily Show.
Hersh was wry, but grim. As far as he’s concerned, there will be an attack on Iran one way or the other. This next preemptive adventure, he says, could be underway in just a few months’ time, during this coming northern summer.

Hersh has to be regarded as credible. He has some forty years’ worth of insider contacts – army, intelligence, public service, in and out of Washington. (Hersh broke many stories, from Mai Lai back in 1968 to Abu Grahib last year.)

When his recent New Yorker article The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret claimed that US special forces are already inside Iran, the administration described the piece as "riddled with inaccuracies" – but failed to deny any of the specific allegations.

The deficit and the depleted state of US troops should rule out a ground attack, one would think – most part-time soldiers from the National Guard and Army Reserve are already in the fulltime army, many in Iraq; all kinds of schemes are in place to bribe and/or draft former soldiers back into the service; existing contracts are being extended under "stop loss" provisions and tours of duty are being prolonged. Well over 10,000 are injured on top of more than 1500 killed. The military has failed to meet its recruitment objectives for January.

On the other hand, realistic planning has been conspicuously absent from the entire Iraq invasion and occupation, so I guess there’s no reason to expect rational decisions now. (For a detailed account of some of these failures of both judgement and logistics, see James Fallows’ piece Blind Into Baghdad.)

Hersh certainly doesn’t expect sensible decisions. He’s convinced the men known as "the crazies" during the George Bush Snr. years – people like Wolfowitz, Feith and Bolton – along with Rumsfeld and Cheney, now have control of the administration’s foreign policy. Hersh recently told independent radio presenter Amy Goodman that the US government is in the hands of "a cult":

"Eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease.

"It does say something about how fragile our democracy is. You do have to wonder what a democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there… serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically…and Rumsfeld… The goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers..."

What seems to be in the offing is an airstrike aimed primarily at a couple of dozen nuclear installations, plus Iranian defence facilities: a quick burst of ‘shock and awe’, not necessarily followed up by invasion, though an uprising leading to showers of roses and chocolates is again expected.

In his New Yorker piece, Hersh quoted a consultant with close Pentagon ties:

"'The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible'; and a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA): 'The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal... the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure... they also need to be whacked'."

The pro-administration Washington Times confirmed Hersh’s outline when it reported in late January that the US airforce is "flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data".

The article also confirmed that US Special Forces, Israeli-trained Kurds and US-trained members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) – an anti-Tehran rebel group formerly allied with Saddam Hussein and listed by the State Department as a terrorist group – are engaged in a "large-scale covert operation" to monitor Iranian nuclear facilities and secure the support of Iranians who favour the US anti-clerical policy.

Along with "Israelis and other U.S. assets", using false passports, who have already created a network of front companies, they are to set up a support network with safe houses so they can move money, weapons and people round Iran.

All this tallies with Hersh’s claim that, under new Pentagon rules:

"U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited."

One of Hersh’s sources told him that the hawks believe an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will produce a popular uprising against the mullahs, something he suggests is extremely ill-informed, since Iranians across the political spectrum support Iran’s nuclear program, possibly as many as 80%.

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The trouble with Iran did not start with the current administration. The removal of Iran’s Prime Minister in 1953 was the CIA’s maiden voyage in the new activity of deposing foreign governments.

Many people remember the US embassy staff being held in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. Fewer, especially in the US, are aware of the history of the preceding 30 years, a riveting account of which can be found in Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle Eastern Terror (John Wiley, 2003).

In 1953, Iran had a functioning democracy. Democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1951, was deposed in a CIA coup after he demanded a fair share of oil revenues for his people and ended up nationalising Anglo-Iranian Oil.

Vis-à-vis the Cold War, Mossadegh had pursued a neutralist foreign policy and was not even a socialist, but his determination to return some of the oil wealth to Iranians interfered with western control of Iran’s oil. Mossadegh was replaced with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who ran a police state – another of "our despots".

During the revolution of 1978, the Shah was granted asylum in the US. Seeing this as a signal for a repetition of 1953, students took the entire staff of the US embassy prisoner and held them for 14 months – though all were ultimately released.

Officials of the new Reagan-Bush administration secretly sold weapons to Iran through the 1980s to finance its covert war in Central America (the Iran-Contra affair). Reagan was simultaneously arming Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq, a strategy possibly designed to keep the two countries embroiled in the drawn-out quagmire of the Iran-Iraq war so they could exhaust each other and save the US the trouble.

Despite the secret trade of the 1980s, which involved people now serving with Bush, the durability of the Iranian revolution and the temerity of impounding the US Embassy staff have served as long term irritants for the US – though the Clinton administration did officially say sorry for the 1953 coup which set democracy in Iran back by more than half a century.

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While Israel declined to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NNPT) and has never admitted to its weapons program and its 200-odd nuclear warheads, Iran signed up. One of the carrots offered to signatories was the right to establish the full nuclear fuel cycle for peaceful purposes.

Uranium enrichment, part of this cycle and needed for the manufacture of reactor fuel, is also a step in the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. If the west wants to make sure Iran can never make a bomb it needs to prohibit enrichment. But this means reneging on the terms of the NNPT. Iran appears to have absolutely no intention of backing down on this particular right under the NNPT.

Senior Iranians pointed out last week that relinquishing their enrichment program would give existing producers of nuclear fuel a monopoly. Iran has its own ambitions of becoming a world supplier. Yesterday, President Khatami stressed that Iran considers enrichment a clear right and will never give it up.

The progress of nuclear proliferation has been steady over the near-sixty years since the first and only nuclear attacks – on Japan. It has been a chain reaction. The US built the first bomb because of fears that Hitler was on the way. The Soviets built theirs because the US had one. Britain and France responded to the Soviets. China felt the need because the West and the Soviets had one. India responded to China’s acquisition, Pakistan to India’s. North Korea feared the US – and Iran, if it is aiming for a bomb, is responding to the US and/or Israel. See arabomb.

Threat or perceived threat is a key motivation, perhaps the key motivation, for proliferation.

While Rice has been telling Iran this week that "next steps are in the offing and I think we all understand what the next steps mean", a new nuclear program was announced here in the US. This program, ostensibly intended to update the existing arsenal so it will survive indefinitely, has been characterised by critics as a pretext for developing a whole new generation of weapons, possibly including the bunker buster, a burrowing nuke which could destroy underground targets. Congress withdrew funding for this effort in November.

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Seymour Hersh aside, any close observer of the build-up to the Iraq invasion is no doubt aware of the signs of something very similar in relation to Iran. In November Colin Powell alleged that Iran was "working hard" to develop a nuclear tipped missile, though the information came from someone described a "walk-in" and was uncorroborated. See washingtonpost.

Information from the political wing of the MEK, the exile group rated terrorist by the State Department, charged that Pakistani nuclear vendor AQ Khan had sold designs and fissile material to Iran, and was taken seriously by the Pentagon. The MEK were the source of information about Iran’s hitherto secret enrichment plant at Natanz, but subsequent MEK allegations have proven unreliable.

Later in November The Guardian reported that the Pentagon was including leadership and political targets in strike planning. In December, the Pentagon staged war games simulating an attack on Iran’s nuclear and defence facilities and reportedly tested a ground invasion.

While the accusations flew, officials acknowledged to Los Angeles Times reporters that the US lacked reliable intelligence, just the hunch that Iran’s enrichment facilities are not as innocent as claimed and that other covert facilities exist which have not been disclosed.

This year, President Bush targeted Iran in his State of the Union address and Dick Cheney sounded bellicose on the morning of the inauguration, though he indicated that Israel might conduct the hostilities.

Perhaps there is no strike plan. But denials such as Condi Rice’s "simply not on the agenda at this point in time" have to be taken with a grain of salt. On Iraq, she said "We're going to seek a peaceful solution to this" in October 2002. And Bush famously stated back in May 2002 that there were no Iraqi war plans "on my desk" (they were presumably on the windowsill).

David Kay, who led the hunt for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion, wrote a plea for caution in the Washington Post this week, citing "an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war".

"The International Atomic Energy Agency has announced that while Iran now admits having concealed for 18 years nuclear activities that should have been reported to the IAEA, it is has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program."

He then sets out a blueprint for avoiding the mistakes made before the Iraq invasion. Key aspects are these: Beware of exiles, who have their own agenda. Stop denigrating the IAEA and ElBaradei and assist them in their work. Don’t cook the intelligence to justify war. And accept that overheated accusations without evidence will not help – seek a truly independent assessment:

"Now is the time to reach outside the secret brotherhood and pull in respected outsiders to lead the assessment. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt. What is in doubt is the ability of the U.S. government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of military action by the United States or Israel."

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