Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin passed this one along – I’ve been waiting for Sy Hersh to drop another shoe ever since his post Abu Ghraib speaking engagements, when he warned of even bigger Big Bad Stuff to come. And advised an interviewer that if he had a second passport, to keep it handy.
You know… if Hersh is accurate about this story, the United States of America is contemplating using nuclear weapons against Iran, as one of many possible options (or threatened options) to pre-emptively end their own nuclear weapons program.
If this country drops the Bomb, it will no longer be my country. I will stop thinking it is my country if a third atomic flower blooms over a city populated by men and women, but perhaps it stopped being my country a long time ago.
Maybe it’s all an elaborate fakeout, designed to scare the Iranians into overthrowing their government and the Revolutionary Guards and chucking all their technical specs and centrifuges into a big pile and burning them. We can only hope this is the case… but even if it’s a psyche job, I think that there really are people in the Administration and the Pentagon who think tactical nukes are potentially useful tools. Else why the expense of having the Air Force flying practice ballistic bombing runs over the Arabian sea?
And let’s not forget the recent news of the new, updated nukes that we’ll probably be stockpiling Real Soon Now. Uh, huh. We’re not only assuming threatening postures, we’re rattling New and Improved atomic sabres at the Iranians, and that’s never a good sign, because hot new toys just beg to be taken out of the toybox to be played with.
There’re a lot of things to freak out about tonight. So let’s get started. This is the kind of thing that require large amounts of warm, sweetened milk and at least two squares of Valhrona Le Noir Extra Amer 85% Cocoa in order to achieve the proper lightly relaxed, yet tightly wired mental state. Of these things nightmares come.
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.
…(okay, even without nukes, we should not be poking that anthill with a stick marked “Special Forces.”)
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?’
…(They don’t have Saddam Hussein to kick around any more. Osama who?)
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.”
…(Oh, perfect. Well, it’s not like we didn’t already know that.)
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.
…(You’re right, this is all sooo familiar. Which is insulting, really. Let’s think of it as an exercise in economies of scale. Two wars are better than one… or is that three? At least it’s a simple matter of changing “Q” to “N” on all the shipping crates full of MRE’s, ammo, and body bags.)
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.”
…(Really, that boondoggle idea is looking better and better. Or the milk is starting to fight the dark, dark chocolate.)
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.”
When I first started reading this story, I was listening to a poetry special on WBEZ that didn’t help matters any, because it featured a performance artist/musician/poet who did an anti-war piece on the steps of the Utah Capitol at a recent peace rally, wearing a white gas mask, banging an artillery shell with a hammer, and gasping for air into a mike as two women in blue burkhas whirled on either side of him (some photos of Alex performing the same piece at another event are here). And some of the other poetry readings really got under my skin, too. Many of them sounded like neo-Beats, and some of them were political like Alex’s piece. Creepy, but comforting to know that subversive art is not dead.
If we use nukes in Iran for real, the streets will be full of the outraged citizenry here in America, and the uncategorically weird performance artists will probably be in the first ranks. Me, I’ll be bringing up the rear with a stash of chocolate, and wondering about the weather in Toronto.
Related Articles: Washington Post