Washington
Considering
Nuclear Strikes Against Iran
By Bill Van Auken
10 April 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
Bush administration is in the advanced stages of the planning and preparation
for a full-scale air war against Iran, including the possible use of
tactical nuclear weapons against selected targets, according to reports
published this week.
“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,”
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh writes in the new edition of the
New Yorker magazine, dated April 17.
The New Yorker report was
largely corroborated by an article in Sunday’s Washington Post,
which reported, “Although a land invasion is not contemplated,
military officers are weighing alternatives ranging from a limited air
strike aimed at key nuclear sites, to a more extensive bombing campaign
designed to destroy an array of military and political targets.”
The Post added that the administration
is considering an “ambitious campaign of bombing and cruise missiles
leveling targets well beyond nuclear facilities, such as Iranian intelligence
headquarters, the Revolutionary Guard and some in the government.”
It also said that war planners are “contemplating tactical nuclear
devices.”
According to Hersh’s
account, while the ostensible purpose of this military planning is the
destruction of Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons, “President
Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is
regime change.”
Officials told Hersh that
the Pentagon’s plans call for bombing “many hundreds”
of targets inside Iran, the majority of them having no connection with
the country’s nuclear program.
According to an unnamed former
Pentagon official quoted in Hersh’s report, the Bush administration’s
strategy is based on the premise that “a sustained bombing campaign
in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public
to rise up and overthrow the government.” The former official
told Hersh, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself,
‘What are they smoking?’”
That top US officials may
have convinced themselves that a US bombing campaign, which would undoubtedly
cost thousands of lives and leave a substantial section of Iran’s
infrastructure in ruins, would trigger a pro-American uprising is indeed
mind-boggling.
Even more ominous, however,
is the fact that they are drawing up plans for the first use of nuclear
weapons in war—this time wholly unprovoked—since the American
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The Pentagon, Hersh reports,
presented the White House this winter with contingency plans calling
“for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such
as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s
main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of
Tehran.”
The article further quotes
a former defense official as revealing that US warplanes operating off
of aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea have been “flying simulated
nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known
as ‘over the shoulder’ bombing—since last summer...
within range of Iranian coastal radars.”
A former senior intelligence
official told Hersh that if the US wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear
facilities, which are widely dispersed and, in some cases, housed in
fortified underground bunkers, it would almost have to use nuclear weapons.
“Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would
leave a gap,” the official said. “‘Decisive’
is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough
decision. But we made it in Japan.”
“We’re talking about mushroom clouds”
Spelling out the implications
of nuclear strikes, the official added, according to Hersh: “‘...we’re
talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination
over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see
is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have
a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out’—remove
the nuclear option—’they’re shouted down.’”
Hersh reports that the threatened
use of nuclear weapons against Iran is strongly opposed by senior officers
in the military’s uniformed command, some of whom have threatened
to resign over the issue. This was echoed by the Washington Post, which
wrote: “Many military officers and specialists, however, view
the saber rattling with alarm. A strike at Iran, they warn, would at
best just delay its nuclear program by a few years but could inflame
international opinion against the United States, particularly in the
Muslim world and especially within Iran, while making US troops in Iraq
targets for retaliation.”
There has been speculation
that the appearance of reports such as these is part of the Bush administration’s
strategy for intimidating the Iranian regime into giving up its nuclear
program without a fight. On the other hand, there is reason to believe
that senior officers in the US military command may want the discussion
of nuclear strikes against Iran made public as a means of heading off
such a move before the Bush administration can carry it out.
The Iranian government dismissed
the war threats as an intimidation tactic. “We regard that (planning
for air strikes) as psychological warfare stemming from America’s
anger and helplessness,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza
Asefi told the media. At the same time, he charged Washington with seeking
to provoke a crisis. “They do not want us to reach an agreement
with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Europeans,”
he said.
Washington’s principal
ally in the war against Iraq, Britain, likewise rejected the idea that
there was any real threat of a US war against Iran. “...there
is no smoking gun, there is no ‘casus belli,’” said
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw. “We can’t be certain
about Iran’s intentions and that is therefore not a basis for
which anybody would gain authority to go to military action.”
However, according to the
Washington Post, the Blair government “has launched its own planning
for a potential US strike, studying security arrangements for its embassy
and consular offices, for British citizens and corporate interests in
Iran and for ships in the region and British troops in Iraq.”
Many observers point to the
irrationality of launching a war against Iran under conditions where
the US military is already stretched to the breaking point in neighboring
Iraq, and where air strikes across the border would undoubtedly trigger
upheavals within the Iraqi Shiite population, the majority of the country,
making the US occupation even more untenable.
Such reassurances, however,
rely on the unwarranted assumption that rational considerations play
the preponderant role in the formulation of the Bush administration’s
policies. A criminal and reckless military adventure is a very real
possibility, arising to no small degree from the growing domestic political
crisis of the Bush administration. The Bush White House has seen its
popular support slump to historic lows, and it is threatened by a series
of ticking political time bombs: the unraveling situation in Iraq, economic
instability, criminal investigations into corruption and abuse of power.
A decision to embark on another
war as a means of diverting and intimidating public opinion is a very
real possibility. An attack on Iran would also likely give the Bush
White House a real “war on terror” to facilitate its assault
on democratic rights at home and justify even greater US military adventures
in the future against such potential targets as China and Russia. Most
people familiar with political relations in the region predict that
a US strike on Iran would provoke a very real campaign of retaliation
by well-organized and well-equipped forces against US targets both outside
and within the United States.
There has been virtually
no protest from the Democratic Party leadership against the threat of
nuclear attacks on Iran. Many party leaders, including Senator Hillary
Clinton of New York, have made repeated attacks on Bush from the right
on the Iranian question, accusing the administration of failing to prosecute
a sufficiently hard-line policy against Teheran.
According to Hersh’s
account, at least one leading congressional Democrat has been included
in the administration’s discussions with members of Congress on
war plans for Iran. Quoting an unnamed member of the House of Representatives,
Hersh reported that questions from those briefed in Congress were limited
to the military’s technical capacity for carrying out an effective
strike. “There’s no pressure from Congress” against
launching a military attack on Iran, the House member said.
The general consensus for
military aggression against Iran within the American ruling establishment
is driven by the same interests that provided bipartisan support for
the war on Iraq. As a “high ranking diplomat” told Hersh,
“The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and
its oil in the next ten years.”