Iran: Bush bombs that would backfire

Iran ready for showdown with US: former president

AFP | April 18 2006

Iran is ready to face a military showdown with the United States over its nuclear programme, influential former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said Tuesday, warning of the grave consequences of any attack.

Rafsanjani also issued a stern warning to Israel, insisting the Jewish state would not dare to attack the Iran which has "longer arms".

"We are not seeking a confrontation but, if it is imposed on us, we are prepared for it," he told a press conference at the end of a three-day visit to Kuwait.

"The consequences of such an attack on Iran will be very grave and they (the Americans) will not benefit from it."

Rafsanjani, who earlier held talks with Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, said Kuwait and other Gulf Arab states had told him they would not back a US attack on Iran.

Rafsanjani, who lost out in elections last year to hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, remains powerful as the head of the Expediency Council, Iran's top political arbitration body.

His visit to Kuwait followed Iran's announcement last week that it had successfully enriched uranium to the level needed to make reactor fuel, triggering global concern about its nuclear ambitions.

The enrichment process can be extended to make the fissile core of an atom bomb and the UN Security Council has given Iran's hardline leadership until the end of the month to freeze the sensitive fuel cycle work.

Well, since this administration has proven chronically unable to calculate the unforeseen or to compensate for the unexpected and given their predilection for all options military, I personally don't see this ending any way but badly for the US.

Well, look at that! We agree on something. There are no good alternatives, and any decision made by the President will be full of risk.

No effective intervention is probable by Israel or the UN, so any effort to halt the Iranian nuclear weapons program will have to be made by the United States alone. Covert and conventional munitions might do the job, but again they might not. If set the Iranian enrichment program were not seriously setback at least 5 years, the mission would be an operational failure. Even with operational success the blowback would be serious.

If the President fails to successful intervene and Iran acquires nuclear weapons in the near future, that would also be a negative outcome. If an Iranian Bomb explodes over Tel Aviv, or in the Thames, or Los Angeles, who is going to have to bear the burden of blame for millions of deaths?

So, if Iran is prevented from acquiring the capability of visiting nuclear death all that follows will be blameworthy. Increased tension, attempts to embargo oil shipments, and increased terrorist activity will all be regarded as proof of the President's "idiocy". The Left will make a campaign issue of how they would have done better, and they might even win an election.

If the President decides to let nature take its course, and Iran later is responsible for the deaths of millions, then Bush will be castigated and pilloried for not acting to prevent Iran from developing an Atomic Bomb while the costs would have been comparatively modest.

The only outcome that might be a happy one is if the Iranians don't use their nuclear weapons to strike Israel or the United States, and that even with the Bomb, Iran has the self restraint not to bully, blackmail, or threaten other neighbors or the world at large. This, BTW, is not a probable, it is only a remotely possible outcome. It will make a pleasant dream, until the nightmare walks.

Gee, if we were really all that concerned about an Iranian Bomb, maybe your president should've thought twice before committing such a huge waste of military manpower and resources by invading Iraq....

President Bush is your President too. As President of the United States he is the titular head of our government, and Commander-in-Chief of all our our military forces. If you had been more in touch with the American electorate, the President might have been Kerry. President Kerry would have faced the same problems, and been called upon to make the same sort of no-win decisions that President Bush has.

He is the appointed, nominal head of the government. He is not now, nor has he ever been, MY president. As for the rest, if the Supreme Court hadn't unconstitutionally intervened in 2000, if Ohio hadn't been allowed to commit election fraud in '04, if Shrub had just been honest about his bloodlust to attack Iraq, if... if... if.... We'd be living in a completely different world, where I might actually be proud of my country and proud of most of it's inhabitants.

Nevertheless, none of that happened and we're stuck facing this conundrum of an atomic Iran with very limited options because your president was so myopically all-fired anxious to attack Iraq that apparently he forgot to consider other scenarios or the consequences to the nation if his own reckless actions didn't work out exactly as planned.

So, you lose an election, or two, and your response is to whine about how unfair political life is? Get used to it, the Left is likely to lose many more elections so long as they blame everyone but themselves.

You're going to get another chance at electing someone that YOU approve of in little while. If the American People are as stupid, ignorant and easily fooled as you believe, then you should have no trouble winning an election. On the other hand, if the American People aren't all that stupid or malleable, you may continue to only win in the urban areas where smart intellectuals reside.

Nice try, but it's your president that's gotten us in this pickle. Of course, if he's as brilliant a statesman as you and he seem to think, we'll be just fine...

If not, someone else-- as he puts it-- will be left to pick up the pieces.

Somehow, that's cold comfort.

Naw, I don't think the President is a "great" statesman, but he is President and will do what he considers best for the country.

BTW, we aren't in this "pickle" because of this President's policies. The problems we are facing today have their origins long ago, and have festered through both Democratic and Republican administration. Ultimately, today's problems aren't really the "fault" of any one person, much less the failure of any administration to do the "right" thing. Everyone has tried to do what they thought best given the circumstances of the time. Some of those policies worked out, and others didn't. Trying to lay all the world's ills upon the back of one ole' boy who likes to think he's from deep in the heart of Texas just doesn't cut it.

Oh, please. We're both too old to believe the "good ol' boy from Texas" bullsh!t.

And we are in exactly this pickle-- i.e., faced with the possibilty of a nuclear Iran and no real good response to the problem-- because of your "good ol' boy's" retarded (or nefarious, depending on whether you believe he's criminally negligent, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and call him stupid rather than feloniously irresponsible) response to world politics. He's misunderstood the use of diplomacy, he's underestimated the Iranians and he's misused the military in his pointless misadventure in Iraq. And his woodenheadedness continues unabated!

It was said of Philip II of Spain, but it applies equally to George II of the US, "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence." Fortunately for the country, that also appears to apply to Shrub's dwindling supporters as well.

"Cabal" Blocked 2003 Nuclear Talks With Iran
"Cabal" Blocked 2003 Nuclear Talks With Iran
By Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service
Tuesday 28 March 2006

Washington - The George W. Bush administration failed to enter into negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programme in May 2003 because neoconservative zealots who advocated destabilisation and regime change were able to block any serious diplomatic engagement with Tehran, according to former administration officials.

The same neoconservative veto power also prevented the administration from adopting any official policy statement on Iran, those same officials say.

Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-2003 was the result of obstruction by a "secret cabal" of neoconservatives in the administration, led by Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.

"The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson wrote in an e-mail to IPS.

The Iranian negotiating offer, transmitted to the State Department in early May 2003 by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, acknowledged that Iran would have to address U.S. concerns about its nuclear programme, although it made no specific concession in advance of the talks, according to Flynt Leverett, then the National Security Council's senior director for Middle East Affairs.

It also raised the possibility of cutting off Iran's support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and converting Hezbollah into a purely socio-political organisation, according to Leverett. That was an explicit response to Powell's demand in late March that Iran "end its support for terrorism".

In return, Leverett recalls, the Iranians wanted the United States to address security questions, the lifting of economic sanctions and normalisation of relations, including support for Iran's integration into the global economic order.

Leverett also recalls that it was drafted with the blessing of all the major political players in the Iranian regime, including the "Supreme Leader", Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Realists, led by Powell and his Deputy Richard Armitage, were inclined to respond positively to the Iranian offer. Nevertheless, within a few days of its receipt, the State Department had rebuked the Swiss ambassador for having passed on the offer.

Exactly how the decision was made is not known. "As with many of these issues of national security decision-making, there are no fingerprints," Wilkerson told IPS. "But I would guess Dick Cheney with the blessing of George W. Bush."

As Wilkerson observes, however, the mysterious death of what became known among Iran specialists as Iran's "grand bargain" initiative was a result of the administration's inability to agree on a policy toward Tehran.

A draft National Security Policy Directive (NSPD) on Iran calling for diplomatic engagement had been in the process of interagency coordination for more than a year, according to a source who asks to remain unidentified.

But it was impossible to get formal agreement on the NSPD, the source recalls, because officials in Cheney's office and in Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans wanted a policy of regime change and kept trying to amend it.

Opponents of the neoconservative policy line blame Condoleezza Rice, then the National Security Adviser, for the failure of the administration to override the extremists in the administration. The statutory policymaker process on Iran, Wilkerson told IPS in e-mail, was "managed by a national security adviser incapable of standing up to the cabal..."

In the absence of an Iran policy, the two contending camps struggled in 2003 over a proposal by realists in the administration to reopen the Geneva channel with Iran that had been used successfully on Afghanistan in 2001-2002. They believed Iran could be helpful in stabilising post-conflict Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiite militants who they expected to return from Iran after Hussein's overthrow owed some degree of allegiance to Iran.

The neoconservatives tried to block those meetings on tactical policy grounds, according to Leverett. "They were saying we didn't want to engage with Iran because we didn't want to owe them," he recalls.

Nevertheless, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad was authorised to begin meeting secretly in Geneva with Iranian officials to discuss Iraq. The neoconservatives then tried to sandbag the talks by introducing a demand for full information on any high-ranking al Qaeda cadres who might be detained by the Iranians.

Iran regarded that information as a bargaining chip to be given up only for a quid pro quo from Washington. The Bush administration, however, had adopted a policy in early 2002 of refusing to share any information with Iran on al Qaeda or other terrorist organisations.

On May 3, as the Iranian "grand bargain" proposal was on its way to Washington, Tehran's representative in Geneva, Javad Zarif, offered a compromise on the issue, according to Leverett: if the United States gave Iran the names of the cadres of the Mujahideen e Kalq (MEK) who were being held by U.S. forces in Iraq, Iran would give the United States the names of the al Qaeda operatives they had detained.

The MEK had carried out armed attacks against Iran from Iraqi territory during the Saddam regime and had been named a terrorist organisation by the United States. But it had capitulated to U.S. forces after the invasion, and the neoconservatives now saw the MEK as a potential asset in an effort to destabilise the Iranian regime.

The MEK had already become a key element in the alternative draft NSPD drawn up by neoconservatives in the administration.

The indictment of Iran analyst Larry Franklin on Feith's staff last year revealed that, by February 2003, Franklin had begun sharing a draft NSPD that he knew would be to the liking of the Israeli Embassy.

(Franklin eventually pled guilty to passing classified information to two employees of an influential pro-Israel lobbying group and was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison.)

Reflecting the substance of that draft policy, ABC News reported on May 30, 2003 that the Pentagon was calling for the destabilisation of the Iranian government by "using all available points of pressure on the Iranian regime, including backing armed Iranian dissidents and employing the services of the Mujahideen e Kalq..."

Nevertheless, Pres. Bush apparently initially saw nothing wrong with trading information on MEK, despite arguments that MEK should not be repatriated to Iran. "I have it on good authority," Leverett told IPS, "that Bush's initial reaction was, 'But we say there is no such thing as a good terrorist'." Nevertheless, Bush finally rejected the Iranian proposal.

By the end of May, the neoconservatives had succeeded in closing down the Geneva channel for good. They had hoped to push through their own NSPD on Iran, but according to the Franklin indictment, in October 1983, Franklin told an Israeli embassy officer that work on the NSPD had been stopped.

But the damage had been done. With no direct diplomatic contact between Iran and the United States, the neoconservatives had a clear path to raising tensions and building political support for regarding Iran as the primary enemy of the United States.
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Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

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