IS IRAN STILL GOING TO GET BOMBED?

One point I failed to consider fully in my first post on this week’s publication of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is how its publication affects the prospects for military action. Much of the commentariat, both on the left and the right, seem certain now, as Slate’s foreign affairs specialist Fred Kaplan puts it, "If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero." Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan's conclusion upon reading the NIE is equally optimistic: “I do think it removes all likelihood of this administration launching a new war in the next year.” Adrian Hamilton's latest column in the Independent is entitled: “Forget any idea of a military strike on Iran”. And Ray Takeyh, author of the recent book ‘Hidden Iran’ and a self-proclaimed expert on the region at the influential Council of Foreign Relations in New York, says that the report “essentially removes the possibility of a military confrontation between the United States and Iran over the nuclear issue…the military option at this point is not on the table.”

Really Ray?

The miserable record of the past seven years suggests that President Bush and his acolytes have never let anything as insignificant as facts or figures get in the way of their policies and prejudices. As one senior Bush aide told the New York Times Magazine in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It is only in this context – of an irrational and arrogant administration which prefers fantasy over reality, and ill-conceived and unilateral actions over reasoned deliberation and empirical evidence – that we can truly understand how and why it is that George Bush is able to stand up, in front of the White House press corps, on the day after the NIE is released (the very same NIE which declares Iran has (i) no nuclear weapons, (ii) no nuclear weapons programme and (iii) no foreseeable plans to launch a nuclear weapons programme) and proclaim, “I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger…I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn't changed.” What?!?! (I am reminded here of comedian Stephen Colbert's hilarious and sarcastic denunciation of Bush, standing only a few feet away from the President and the First Lady at the White House Press Corespondents Dinner last year: “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.”)

So, Bush feels no differently about Iran. Nor do the media’s most influential neoconservatives (Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Norman Podhoretz). In fact, one of their number, the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan, gave the game away this week:

“The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action. A military strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities was always fraught with risk. For the Bush administration, that option is gone.”

Notice the crucial part of this statement – no, not the “option is gone” part or the “fraught with risk” part. Notice the key caveat: “The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran…unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action.”

So the military option is still on the table, says Bush, and – forget the nukes! - it will be used in response to provocations by the Iranians, say his neocon supporters. It all makes perfect sense. But, what if the Iranians refuse to play ball and ‘provoke’ the Americans, either in Iraq or Lebanon or elsewhere? Simple – the Americans will then do the provoking.

In fact, earlier this year, in February, a former Bush administration official actually suggested that the US government is using the backdrop of sectarian violence in Iraq to deliberately provoke a military conflict with the Iranians. Speaking on CNN, Hillary Mann, the former director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council, warned that the hawks in the Pentagon were “trying to push a provocative, accidental conflict”. She added that the administration hopes to goad the Iranians into an overreaction so that it would then have the justification to carry out “limited strikes” against nuclear infrastructure and Revolutionary Guards buildings inside of Iran.

In the same month, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and one of Washington’s leading foreign policy ‘grandees’, went even further than Mann. Most stunning and shocking was his description of what he called a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As Barry Grey – one of the few journalists present on Capitol Hill to actually record and report Brzezinski’s damning comments – points out, “this was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.”

It is a view shared by (among others) long-time neocon watchers, Jim Lobe of the IPS news agency and Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, as well as the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the New Yorker only two months ago:

“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.”

“Counterterrorism”? Hallelujah! God bless 9/11. Everything ultimately comes back to the good old ‘War on Terror’. So, even if Iran has no nukes, and the American intelligence admits they have no nukes, the American government still has a backdoor route (excuse? ruse? pretext?) to launching an attack on the Iranians. If they do, God help us all – because even George W. Bush himself has described a potential conflict with Iran as "World War III."