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Beating Louder on Iran: Bush's
War Drums
RAY McGOVERN
Counterpunch
Thursday Aug 23, 2007
It is as though I'm back as an analyst
at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran.
The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.
It is precisely the kind of work we analysts
used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning
our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means
entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now-ever
since 9/11, when "everything changed."
Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few
exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk
if they expose things like fraudulent wars.
The craft of CIA analysis was designed
to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible-and
held accountable-for assimilating information from all sources
and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of
various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection
platforms, to spies, to-not least-open media.
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Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk
puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking,
80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key
intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It
helps to have been trained-as my contemporaries and I had the
good fortune to be trained-by past masters of the discipline of
media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese
and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with
a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
Reporting From Informants
The above is in no way intended to minimize
the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting
and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage
of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information
from such sources can often make a crucial contribution. Consider,
for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's
foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully "turned"
into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility.
Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively,
were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President
George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that
the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri;
rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was "regime
change." (Don't feel embarrassed if you did not know this;
although it is publicly available, our corporate- owned, war profiteering
media has largely suppressed this key story.)
One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence
Robert Baer, now reports (in this week's Time) that, according
to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for
a strike on Iran;" that the administration's plan to put
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list
points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional
"neo-conservative" thinking that still guides White
House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall
of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.
Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer's sources
tell him that administration officials are thinking "as long
as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's
nuclear facilities."
Rove and Snow: Going Wobbly?
Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing
in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the
past Karl Rove has served as a counterweight to Vice President
Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney's
death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former
Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked
shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most devoted neo-cons just
before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com)
speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect
to Rove's departure.
In short, it seems possible that Rove,
who is no one's dummy and would not want to be required to "spin"
an unnecessary war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney
over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided-or
was urged-to spend more time with his family. As for administration
spokesperson Tony Snow, it seems equally possible that, before
deciding he had to leave the White House to make more money, he
concluded that his stomach could not withstand the challenge of
conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney needed
to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.
We now know that it was because former
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war-as
can be seen in his Nov. 6, 2006 memo to the president-that Rumsfeld
was canned. (That was the day BEFORE the election.) In that memo,
Rumsfeld called for a "major adjustment" in war policy.
And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings, was called
to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched
by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with
the most senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been
saying, quite openly, Please, please; no more troops; a surge
would simply give the Iraqis still more time and opportunity to
diddle us while American troops continue to die. So much for the
president always listening to his senior military commanders.
And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.
In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld
suggested that U.S. generals "withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable
positions-cities, patrolling, etc.," and move troops to Kuwait
to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. Bush, of course, chose to
do just the opposite.
Our domesticated press has not yet been
able to put two and two together on this story, so it has been
left to investigative reporters like Robert Parry to do so. In
his Aug. 17 essay, "Rumsfeld's Mysterious Resignation",
Parry closes with this:
"The touchy secret about Rumsfeld's
departure seems to have been that Bush didn't want the American
people to know that one of the chief Iraq War architects had
turned against the idea of an open-ended military commitment
and that Bush had found himself with no choice but to
oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause."
Granted, it is speculative that similar
factors, this time with respect to war planning for Iran, were
at work in the decisions on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone
ought to ask them.
Surgical Strikes First?
With the propaganda buildup we have seen
so far on Iran, what seems most likely, at least initially, is
an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran.
That can be done with cruise missiles. With some twenty targets
already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets
already in place to do that job. But the "while-we're-at-it"
neo-con logic referred to above may well be applied after, or
even in conjunction with, that kind of limited cruise missile
attack.
Cheerleading in the Domesticated Media
Yes, it is happening again.
The lead editorial in yesterday's Washington
Post regurgitates the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary
Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a
growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;" that it is
"waging war against the United States and trying to kill
as many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran
a "specially designated global terrorist" organization,
says the Post, "seems to be the least the United States
should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored
bomb attacks in Iraq."
It's as though Dick Cheney and friends
are again writing the Post's editorials. And not only that:
arch neo-con James Woolsey told Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the
US may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear
weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, "I'm afraid within,
well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they could
have the bomb."
Woolsey, self-described "anchor of
the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs," has long been out in front plumbing for wars, like
Iraq, that he and other neo-cons myopically see as being in Israel's,
as well as America's, interest. On the evening of 9/11, Woolsey
was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings the notion
that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship of the
attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that,
no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to
include removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be
involved the next time (sic).
The latest media hype is also rubbish.
And Woolsey knows it. And so do reporters for the Washington
Post, who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a
highly interesting story about waiting for a key National Intelligence
Estimate-as if for Godot.
The NIE That Didn't Bark
The latest National Intelligence Estimate
regarding if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been
ready since February. It has been sent back four times-no doubt
because its conclusions do not support what Cheney and Woolsey
are telling the president and, through the domesticated press,
telling the rest of us as well.
The conclusion of the most recent published
NIE (early 2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear
weapon until "early to mid-next decade," a formula memorized
and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell
at his confirmation hearing in February. One can safely assume
that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first "final
draft" of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for
half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of the new
estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to
suit Cheney.
It is a scandal that the congressional
oversight committees have not been briefed on the conclusions
of the new estimate, even though it cannot pass Cheney's smell
test. For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims
of Cheney, Woolsey, and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and
provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible
approach to Iran.
But Attacking Iran Would Be Crazy
Despite the administration's war-like record,
many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran
won't happen because it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck
president who wouldn't dare undertake yet another reckless adventure
when the last one went so badly.
But rationality and common sense have not
exactly been the strong suit of this administration. Bush has
placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with
its own false sense of reality. Worse still: as psychiatrist Justin
Frank pointed out in the July 27 VIPS memo "Dangers of a
Cornered Bush," updating his book, Bush
on the Couch:"
"We are left with a president who
cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned
thought in coping with events outside his control, like those
in the Middle East.
"This makes it a monumental challenge-as
urgent as it is difficult-not only to get him to stop the carnage
in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking
a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure-like going to
war with Iran, in order to embellish the image he so proudly
created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of
'the first war of the 21st century.'"
Scary.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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