[Kabar-indonesia] 1 of 2: New Yorker/Seymour Hersh: The War Over Iran

[Joyo at aol.com]

-1 of 2-

[2 of 2 includes: The story of the F.B.I. agent who had
the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot -- told for the 
first time]

The New Yorker Magazine  
Issue dated July 10, 2006 
-cover story-

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY

LAST STAND

The War Over Iran

The military's problem with the President's Iran
policy.

by Seymour M. Hersh

On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
announced what appeared to be a major change in U.S.
foreign policy. The Bush Administration, she said,
would be willing to join Russia, China, and its
European allies in direct talks with Iran about its
nuclear program. There was a condition, however: the
negotiations would not begin until, as the President
put it in a June 19th speech at the U.S. Merchant
Marine Academy, "the Iranian regime fully and
verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment and
reprocessing activities." Iran, which has insisted on
its right to enrich uranium, was being asked to
concede the main point of the negotiations before they
started. The question was whether the Administration
expected the Iranians to agree, or was laying the
diplomatic groundwork for future military action. In
his speech, Bush also talked about "freedom for the
Iranian people," and he added, "Iran's leaders have a
clear choice." There was an unspoken threat: the U.S.
Strategic Command, supported by the Air Force, has
been drawing up plans, at the President's direction,
for a major bombing campaign in Iran.

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have
increasingly challenged the President's plans,
according to active-duty and retired officers and
officials. The generals and admirals have told the
Administration that the bombing campaign will probably
not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear program. They
have also warned that an attack could lead to serious
economic, political, and military consequences for the
United States.

A crucial issue in the military's dissent, the
officers said, is the fact that American and European
intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence
of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the
war planners are not sure what to hit. "The target
array in Iran is huge, but it's amorphous," a
high-ranking general told me. "The question we face
is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into
something nefarious?" The high-ranking general added
that the military's experience in Iraq, where
intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply
flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. "We built
this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing
there. This is son of Iraq," he said.

"There is a war about the war going on inside the
building," a Pentagon consultant said. "If we go, we
have to find something."

In President Bush's June speech, he accused Iran of
pursuing a secret weapons program along with its
civilian nuclear-research program (which it is
allowed, with limits, under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty). The senior officers in the
Pentagon do not dispute the President's contention
that Iran intends to eventually build a bomb, but they
are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former
senior intelligence official told me that people in
the Pentagon were asking, "What's the evidence? We've
got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert,
and these guys"—the Iranians—"have been working on
this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We're
coming up with jack shit."

A senior military official told me, "Even if we knew
where the Iranian enriched uranium was—and we don't—we
don't know where world opinion would stand. The issue
is whether it's a clear and present danger. If you're
a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is
the capability of the Iranian response, and the
likelihood of a punitive response—like cutting off oil
shipments? What would that cost us?" Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides "really
think they can do this on the cheap, and they
underestimate the capability of the adversary," he
said.

In 1986, Congress authorized the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff to act as the "principal military
adviser" to the President. In this case, I was told,
the current chairman, Marine General Peter Pace, has
gone further in his advice to the White House by
addressing the consequences of an attack on Iran.
"Here's the military telling the President what he
can't do politically"—raising concerns about rising
oil prices, for example—the former senior intelligence
official said. "The J.C.S. chairman going to the
President with an economic argument—what's going on
here?" (General Pace and the White House declined to
comment. The Defense Department responded to a
detailed request for comment by saying that the
Administration was "working diligently" on a
diplomatic solution and that it could not comment on
classified matters.)

A retired four-star general, who ran a major command,
said, "The system is starting to sense the end of the
road, and they don't want to be condemned by history.
They want to be able to say, 'We stood up.' "

The military leadership is also raising tactical
arguments against the proposal for bombing Iran, many
of which are related to the consequences for Iraq.
According to retired Army Major General William Nash,
who was commanding general of the First Armored
Division, served in Iraq and Bosnia, and worked for
the United Nations in Kosovo, attacking Iran would
heighten the risks to American and coalition forces
inside Iraq. "What if one hundred thousand Iranian
volunteers came across the border?" Nash asked. "If we
bomb Iran, they cannot retaliate militarily by
air—only on the ground or by sea, and only in Iraq or
the Gulf. A military planner cannot discount that
possibility, and he cannot make an ideological
assumption that the Iranians wouldn't do it. We're not
talking about victory or defeat—only about what damage
Iran could do to our interests." Nash, now a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said,
"Their first possible response would be to send forces
into Iraq. And, since the Iraqi Army has limited
capacity, it means that the coalition forces would
have to engage them."

The Americans serving as advisers to the Iraqi police
and military may be at special risk, Nash added, since
an American bombing "would be seen not only as an
attack on Shiites but as an attack on all Muslims.
Throughout the Middle East, it would likely be seen as
another example of American imperialism. It would
probably cause the war to spread."

In contrast, some conservatives are arguing that
America's position in Iraq would improve if Iran chose
to retaliate there, according to a government
consultant with close ties to the Pentagon's civilian
leaders, because Iranian interference would divide the
Shiites into pro- and anti-Iranian camps, and unify
the Kurds and the Sunnis. The Iran hawks in the White
House and the State Department, including Elliott
Abrams and Michael Doran, both of whom are National
Security Council advisers on the Middle East, also
have an answer for those who believe that the bombing
of Iran would put American soldiers in Iraq at risk,
the consultant said. He described the counterargument
this way: "Yes, there will be Americans under attack,
but they are under attack now."

Iran's geography would also complicate an air war. The
senior military official said that, when it came to
air strikes, "this is not Iraq," which is fairly flat,
except in the northeast. "Much of Iran is akin to
Afghanistan in terms of topography and flight
mapping—a pretty tough target," the military official
said. Over rugged terrain, planes have to come in
closer, and "Iran has a lot of mature air-defense
systems and networks," he said. "Global operations are
always risky, and if we go down that road we have to
be prepared to follow up with ground troops."

The U.S. Navy has a separate set of concerns. Iran has
more than seven hundred undeclared dock and port
facilities along its Persian Gulf coast. The small
ports, known as "invisible piers," were constructed
two decades ago by Iran's Revolutionary Guards to
accommodate small private boats used for smuggling.
(The Guards relied on smuggling to finance their
activities and enrich themselves.) The ports, an Iran
expert who advises the U.S. government told me,
provide "the infrastructure to enable the Guards to go
after American aircraft carriers with suicide water
bombers"—small vessels loaded with high explosives. He
said that the Iranians have conducted exercises in the
Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel linking the
Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and then on to the
Indian Ocean. The strait is regularly traversed by oil
tankers, in which a thousand small Iranian boats
simulated attacks on American ships. "That would be
the hardest problem we'd face in the water: a thousand
small targets weaving in and out among our ships."

America's allies in the Gulf also believe that an
attack on Iran would endanger them, and many American
military planners agree. "Iran can do a lot of
things—all asymmetrical," a Pentagon adviser on
counter-insurgency told me. "They have agents all over
the Gulf, and the ability to strike at will." In May,
according to a well-informed oil-industry expert, the
Emir of Qatar made a private visit to Tehran to
discuss security in the Gulf after the Iraq war. He
sought some words of non-aggression from the Iranian
leadership. Instead, the Iranians suggested that
Qatar, which is the site of the regional headquarters
of the U.S. Central Command, would be its first target
in the event of an American attack. Qatar is a leading
exporter of gas and currently operates several major
offshore oil platforms, all of which would be
extremely vulnerable. (Nasser bin Hamad M. al-Khalifa,
Qatar's ambassador to Washington, denied that any
threats were issued during the Emir's meetings in
Tehran. He told me that it was "a very nice visit.")

A retired American diplomat, who has experience in the
Gulf, confirmed that the Qatari government is "very
scared of what America will do" in Iran, and "scared
to death" about what Iran would do in response. Iran's
message to the oil-producing Gulf states, the retired
diplomat said, has been that it will respond, and "you
are on the wrong side of history."

In late April, the military leadership, headed by
General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White
House dropped its insistence that the plan for a
bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear
device to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at
Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The
huge complex includes large underground facilities
built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in the ground
and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand
centrifuges. "Bush and Cheney were dead serious about
the nuclear planning," the former senior intelligence
official told me. "And Pace stood up to them. Then the
world came back: 'O.K., the nuclear option is
politically unacceptable.' " At the time, a number of
retired officers, including two Army major generals
who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and Charles Swannack,
Jr., had begun speaking out against the
Administration's handling of the Iraq war. This period
is known to many in the Pentagon as "the April
Revolution."

"An event like this doesn't get papered over very
quickly," the former official added. "The bad feelings
over the nuclear option are still felt. The civilian
hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the brass,
and the brass feel they were tricked into it"—the
nuclear planning—"by being asked to provide all
options in the planning papers."

Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the
National War College before retiring from the Air
Force as a colonel, said that Rumsfeld's
second-guessing and micromanagement were a fundamental
problem. "Plans are more and more being directed and
run by civilians from the Office of the Secretary of
Defense," Gardiner said. "It causes a lot of tensions.
I'm hearing that the military is increasingly upset
about not being taken seriously by Rumsfeld and his
staff."

Gardiner went on, "The consequence is that, for Iran
and other missions, Rumsfeld will be pushed more and
more in the direction of special operations, where he
has direct authority and does not have to put up with
the objections of the Chiefs." Since taking office in
2001, Rumsfeld has been engaged in a running dispute
with many senior commanders over his plans to
transform the military, and his belief that future
wars will be fought, and won, with airpower and
Special Forces. That combination worked, at first, in
Afghanistan, but the growing stalemate there, and in
Iraq, has created a rift, especially inside the Army.
The senior military official said, "The policymakers
are in love with Special Ops—the guys on camels."

The discord over Iran can, in part, be ascribed to
Rumsfeld's testy relationship with the generals. They
see him as high-handed and unwilling to accept
responsibility for what has gone wrong in Iraq. A
former Bush Administration official described a recent
meeting between Rumsfeld and four-star generals and
admirals at a military commanders' conference, on a
base outside Washington, that, he was told, went
badly. The commanders later told General Pace that
"they didn't come here to be lectured by the Defense
Secretary. They wanted to tell Rumsfeld what their
concerns were." A few of the officers attended a
subsequent meeting between Pace and Rumsfeld, and were
unhappy, the former official said, when "Pace did not
repeat any of their complaints. There was
disappointment about Pace." The retired four-star
general also described the commanders' conference as
"very fractious." He added, "We've got twenty-five
hundred dead, people running all over the world doing
stupid things, and officers outside the Beltway
asking, 'What the hell is going on?' "

Pace's supporters say that he is in a difficult
position, given Rumsfeld's penchant for viewing
generals who disagree with him as disloyal. "It's a
very narrow line between being responsive and
effective and being outspoken and ineffective," the
former senior intelligence official said.

But Rumsfeld is not alone in the Administration where
Iran is concerned; he is closely allied with Dick
Cheney, and, the Pentagon consultant said, "the
President generally defers to the Vice-President on
all these issues," such as dealing with the specifics
of a bombing campaign if diplomacy fails. "He feels
that Cheney has an informational advantage. Cheney is
not a renegade. He represents the conventional wisdom
in all of this. He appeals to the strategic-bombing
lobby in the Air Force—who think that carpet bombing
is the solution to all problems."

Bombing may not work against Natanz, let alone against
the rest of Iran's nuclear program. The possibility of
using tactical nuclear weapons gained support in the
Administration because of the belief that it was the
only way to insure the destruction of Natanz's buried
laboratories. When that option proved to be
politically untenable (a nuclear warhead would, among
other things, vent fatal radiation for miles), the Air
Force came up with a new bombing plan, using advanced
guidance systems to deliver a series of large
bunker-busters—conventional bombs filled with high
explosives—on the same target, in swift succession.
The Air Force argued that the impact would generate
sufficient concussive force to accomplish what a
tactical nuclear warhead would achieve, but without
provoking an outcry over what would be the first use
of a nuclear weapon in a conflict since Nagasaki.

The new bombing concept has provoked controversy among
Pentagon planners and outside experts. Robert Pape, a
professor at the University of Chicago who has taught
at the Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space
Studies, told me, "We always have a few new toys, new
gimmicks, and rarely do these new tricks lead to a
phenomenal breakthrough. The dilemma is that Natanz is
a very large underground area, and even if the roof
came down we won't be able to get a good estimate of
the bomb damage without people on the ground. We don't
even know where it goes underground, and we won't have
much confidence in assessing what we've actually done.
Absent capturing an Iranian nuclear scientist and
documents, it's impossible to set back the program for
sure."

One complicating aspect of the multiple-hit tactic,
the Pentagon consultant told me, is "the liquefaction
problem"—the fact that the soil would lose its
consistency owing to the enormous heat generated by
the impact of the first bomb. "It will be like bombing
water, with its currents and eddies. The bombs would
likely be diverted." Intelligence has also shown that
for the past two years the Iranians have been shifting
their most sensitive nuclear-related materials and
production facilities, moving some into urban areas,
in anticipation of a bombing raid.

"The Air Force is hawking it to the other services,"
the former senior intelligence official said. "They're
all excited by it, but they're being terribly
criticized for it." The main problem, he said, is that
the other services do not believe the tactic will
work. "The Navy says, 'It's not our plan.' The Marines
are against it—they know they're going to be the guys
on the ground if things go south."

"It's the bomber mentality," the Pentagon consultant
said. "The Air Force is saying, 'We've got it covered,
we can hit all the distributed targets.' " The Air
Force arsenal includes a cluster bomb that can deploy
scores of small bomblets with individual guidance
systems to home in on specific targets. The weapons
were deployed in Kosovo and during the early stages of
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Air Force is
claiming that the same techniques can be used with
larger bombs, allowing them to be targeted from
twenty-five thousand feet against a multitude of
widely dispersed targets. "The Chiefs all know that
'shock and awe' is dead on arrival," the Pentagon
consultant said. "All except the Air Force."

"Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on this—they
don't want to repeat the mistake of doing too little,"
the government consultant with ties to Pentagon
civilians told me. "The lesson they took from Iraq is
that there should have been more troops on the
ground"—an impossibility in Iran, because of the
overextension of American forces in Iraq—"so the air
war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force."

Many of the Bush Administration's supporters view the
abrupt change in negotiating policy as a deft move
that won public plaudits and obscured the fact that
Washington had no other good options. "The United
States has done what its international partners have
asked it to do," said Patrick Clawson, who is an
expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a
conservative think tank. "The ball is now in their
court—for both the Iranians and the Europeans." Bush's
goal, Clawson said, was to assuage his allies, as well
as Russia and China, whose votes, or abstentions, in
the United Nations would be needed if the talks broke
down and the U.S. decided to seek Security Council
sanctions or a U.N. resolution that allowed for the
use of force against Iran.

"If Iran refuses to re-start negotiations, it will
also be difficult for Russia and China to reject a
U.N. call for International Atomic Energy Agency
inspections," Clawson said. "And the longer we go
without accelerated I.A.E.A. access, the more
important the issue of Iran's hidden facilities will
become." The drawback to the new American position,
Clawson added, was that "the Iranians might take
Bush's agreeing to join the talks as a sign that their
hard line has worked."

Clawson acknowledged that intelligence on Iran's
nuclear-weapons progress was limited. "There was a
time when we had reasonable confidence in what we
knew," he said. "We could say, 'There's less time than
we think,' or, 'It's going more slowly.' Take your
choice. Lack of information is a problem, but we know
they've made rapid progress with their centrifuges."
(The most recent American intelligence estimate is
that Iran could build a warhead sometime between 2010
and 2015.)

Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council
aide for the Bush Administration, told me, "The only
reason Bush and Cheney relented about talking to Iran
was because they were within weeks of a diplomatic
meltdown in the United Nations. Russia and China were
going to stiff us"—that is, prevent the passage of a
U.N. resolution. Leverett, a project director at the
New America Foundation, added that the White House's
proposal, despite offering trade and economic
incentives for Iran, has not "resolved any of the
fundamental contradictions of U.S. policy." The
precondition for the talks, he said—an open-ended halt
to all Iranian enrichment activity—"amounts to the
President wanting a guarantee that they'll surrender
before he talks to them. Iran cannot accept long-term
constraints on its fuel-cycle activity as part of a
settlement without a security guarantee"—for example,
some form of mutual non-aggression pact with the
United States.

Leverett told me that, without a change in U.S.
policy, the balance of power in the negotiations will
shift to Russia. "Russia sees Iran as a beachhead
against American interests in the Middle East, and
they're playing a very sophisticated game," he said.
"Russia is quite comfortable with Iran having nuclear
fuel cycles that would be monitored, and they'll
support the Iranian position"—in part, because it
gives them the opportunity to sell billions of
dollars' worth of nuclear fuel and materials to
Tehran. "They believe they can manage their long- and
short-term interests with Iran, and still manage the
security interests," Leverett said. China, which, like
Russia, has veto power on the Security Council, was
motivated in part by its growing need for oil, he
said. "They don't want punitive measures, such as
sanctions, on energy producers, and they don't want to
see the U.S. take a unilateral stance on a state that
matters to them." But, he said, "they're happy to let
Russia take the lead in this." (China, a major
purchaser of Iranian oil, is negotiating a
multibillion-dollar deal with Iran for the purchase of
liquefied natural gas over a period of twenty-five
years.) As for the Bush Administration, he added,
"unless there's a shift, it's only a question of when
its policy falls apart."

It's not clear whether the Administration will be able
to keep the Europeans in accord with American policy
if the talks break down. Morton Abramowitz, a former
head of State Department intelligence, who was one of
the founders of the International Crisis Group, said,
"The world is different than it was three years ago,
and while the Europeans want good relations with us,
they will not go to war with Iran unless they know
that an exhaustive negotiating effort was made by
Bush. There's just too much involved, like the price
of oil. There will be great pressure put on the
Europeans, but I don't think they'll roll over and
support a war."

The Europeans, like the generals at the Pentagon, are
concerned about the quality of intelligence. A senior
European intelligence official said that while "there
was every reason to assume" that the Iranians were
working on a bomb, there wasn't enough evidence to
exclude the possibility that they were bluffing, and
hadn't moved beyond a civilian research program. The
intelligence official was not optimistic about the
current negotiations. "It's a mess, and I don't see
any possibility, at the moment, of solving the
problem," he said. "The only thing to do is contain
it. The question is, What is the redline? Is it when
you master the nuclear fuel cycle? Or is it just about
building a bomb?" Every country had a different
criterion, he said. One worry he had was that, in
addition to its security concerns, the Bush
Administration was driven by its interest in
"democratizing" the region. "The United States is on a
mission," he said.

A European diplomat told me that his government would
be willing to discuss Iran's security concerns—a
dialogue he said Iran offered Washington three years
ago. The diplomat added that "no one wants to be faced
with the alternative if the negotiations don't
succeed: either accept the bomb or bomb them. That's
why our goal is to keep the pressure on, and see what
Iran's answer will be."

A second European diplomat, speaking of the Iranians,
said, "Their tactic is going to be to stall and appear
reasonable—to say, 'Yes, but . . .' We know what's
going on, and the timeline we're under. The Iranians
have repeatedly been in violation of I.A.E.A.
safeguards and have given us years of coverup and
deception. The international community does not want
them to have a bomb, and if we let them continue to
enrich that's throwing in the towel—giving up before
we talk." The diplomat went on, "It would be a mistake
to predict an inevitable failure of our strategy. Iran
is a regime that is primarily concerned with its own
survival, and if its existence is threatened it would
do whatever it needed to do—including backing down."

The Iranian regime's calculations about its survival
also depend on internal political factors. The nuclear
program is popular with the Iranian people, including
those—the young and the secular—who are most hostile
to the religious leadership. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
President of Iran, has effectively used the program to
rally the nation behind him, and against Washington.
Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics have said that they
believe Bush's goal is not to prevent them from
building a bomb but to drive them out of office.

Several current and former officials I spoke to
expressed doubt that President Bush would settle for a
negotiated resolution of the nuclear crisis. A former
high-level Pentagon civilian official, who still deals
with sensitive issues for the government, said that
Bush remains confident in his military decisions. The
President and others in the Administration often
invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in
public, as an example of a politician who, in his own
time, was punished in the polls but was rewarded by
history for rejecting appeasement. In one speech, Bush
said, Churchill "seemed like a Texan to me. He wasn't
afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged
ahead, and the world is better for it."

The Israelis have insisted for years that Iran has a
clandestine program to build a bomb, and will do so as
soon as it can. Israeli officials have emphasized that
their "redline" is the moment Iran masters the nuclear
fuel cycle, acquiring the technical ability to produce
weapons-grade uranium. "Iran managed to surprise
everyone in terms of the enrichment capability," one
diplomat familiar with the Israeli position told me,
referring to Iran's announcement, this spring, that it
had successfully enriched uranium to the 3.6-per-cent
level needed to fuel a nuclear-power reactor. The
Israelis believe that Iran must be stopped as soon as
possible, because, once it is able to enrich uranium
for fuel, the next step—enriching it to the
ninety-per-cent level needed for a nuclear bomb—is
merely a mechanical process.

Israeli intelligence, however, has also failed to
provide specific evidence about secret sites in Iran,
according to current and former military and
intelligence officials. In May, Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert visited Washington and, addressing a joint
session of Congress, said that Iran "stands on the
verge of acquiring nuclear weapons" that would pose
"an existential threat" to Israel. Olmert noted that
Ahmadinejad had questioned the reality of the
Holocaust, and he added, "It is not Israel's threat
alone. It is a threat to all those committed to
stability in the Middle East and to the well-being of
the world at large." But at a secret intelligence
exchange that took place at the Pentagon during the
visit, the Pentagon consultant said, "what the
Israelis provided fell way short" of what would be
needed to publicly justify preventive action.

The issue of what to do, and when, seems far from
resolved inside the Israeli government. Martin Indyk,
a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who is now the
director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center
for Middle East Policy, told me, "Israel would like to
see diplomacy succeed, but they're worried that in the
meantime Iran will cross a threshold of nuclear
know-how—and they're worried about an American
military attack not working. They assume they'll be
struck first in retaliation by Iran." Indyk added, "At
the end of the day, the United States can live with
Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian nuclear bombs—but for
Israel there's no Mutual Assured Destruction. If they
have to live with an Iranian bomb, there will be a
great deal of anxiety in Israel, and a lot of tension
between Israel and Iran, and between Israel and the
U.S."

-end/1 of 2... continues...

------------------------------------------
Joyo Indonesia News Service
------------------------------------------