When someone like Joseph Cirincione says he’s worried that the US may attack Iran, it’s time to pay attention.

Cirincione is no bushy-haired stranger. He worked for nearly a decade as a senior staffer for the House armed services committee, he’s a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank with strong connections to both the US and UK governments — the British government appropriated an IISS assessment of Iraq’s banned weapons capacity for use in the infamous “dodgy dossier” — and the Council on Foreign Relations, a stomping ground for establishment politicians and policy veterans of both dominant US political parties. At present he’s the non-proliferation director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent, genuinely non-partisan, mainstream US think tank.

In a March 27 op-ed piece in Foreign Policy magazine, Ciricione writes that he has argued for months, in interviews and with friends, that the administration had no intention of attacking Iran. Now, though, he says (free registration required) that “colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch … have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.”

He cites some points that will already be familiar to anyone paying attention to the administration’s rhetoric on Iran.

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. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops. The intelligence agencies say the nuclear threat from this nation is 10 years away, but the director of intelligence paints a more ominous picture. A new U.S. national security strategy trumpets preemptive attacks and highlights the country as a major threat. And neoconservatives beat the war drums, as the cable media banner their stories with words like “countdown” and “showdown.”

[...]

The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war. It is now trying to link Iran to the 9/11 attacks by repeatedly claiming that Iran is the main state sponsor of terrorism in the world (though this suggestion is highly questionable). It is also attempting to make the threat urgent by arguing that Iran might soon pass a “point of no return” if it can perfect the technology of enriching uranium, even though many other nations have gone far beyond Iran’s capabilities and stopped their programs short of weapons. And, of course, it is now publicly linking Iran to the Iraqi insurgency and the improvised explosive devices used to kill and maim U.S. troops in Iraq, though Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace admitted there is no evidence to support this claim.

If diplomacy fails, the administration might be able to convince leading Democrats to back a resolution for the use of force against Iran. Many Democrats have been trying to burnish a hawkish image and place themselves to the right of the president on this issue. They may find themselves trapped by their own rhetoric, particularly those with presidential ambitions.

Emphasis mine. This is all true. We pointed out two months ago that John Negroponte accused Iran of supplying “Shia militants” with sophisticated designs and hardware for improvised explosive devices, thereby strongly implying both that Iran was actively involved in killing US troops and that the insurgency had expanded beyond the usual Ba’athist and Sunni fundamentalist suspects to include factions among the governing majority. Bush later echoed these claims, while Don Rumsfeld and joint chiefs chairman Peter Pace said they had no evidence to support them. (Our White House correspondent, Eric Brewer, asked Scott McClellan about the conflicting administration statements and threw the hapless White House spokesman into a tailspin.)

Two stories written after Ciricione’s Foreign Policy article, one in the Washington Post and one in London’s conservative Sunday Telegraph, both support his assessment and suggest that the UK government has, once again, bowed to the inevitability of US action (more on those stories here).

But there’s another aspect to the story that hasn’t been widely discussed in the US, and that’s the British government’s attempts to generate anti-Iran sentiment on their side of the Atlantic. An October, 2005, story in Foreign Policy notes that the first claims that Iran is supplying explosive devices to the Iraqi insurgency arose from the UK government.

Jonathan Lindley, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says that the prime minister’s office has decided to use “more stick and less carrot” in its relations with Iran. The first evidence of this new approach came early this month, when a British official accused Iran of supplying the Basra insurgency with bombmaking technology via Hezbollah. The next day, Blair himself repeated the charge. That was a turnaround from previous statements, when British officials had argued that the Iranians were actually helping in Iraq by acting as a calming influence on the more excitable Shiite groups.

Then on October 11, the Foreign Office’s Middle East Minister, Kim Howells, declared in a Parliamentary debate that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it could give momentum to proposals for Britain to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal. Howells ended the debate by responding to calls from members of parliament for a tougher policy toward Iran with a cryptic message, suggesting that the government is no longer quite as certain that it will never strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. “[T]he world of diplomacy requires one to choose language very carefully. My right honorable friend the foreign secretary said that he could not envisage any circumstances in which there would be some sort of armed response to the problem of nuclear proliferation. I hope that the honorable gentleman will understand what I am saying.”

That same day, British officials privately briefed The Sun, a jingoistic tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. They told The Sun’s reporters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was training bombmakers and smuggling them into Basra to kill British troops. The newspaper treated the story in a way the briefer must have anticipated. The headline roared, “Trained in Iran to kill our boys.” The choice to leak to The Sun, as opposed to briefing a more subdued or dovish publication, suggests that Blair was trying to whip up public anger toward Tehran. “They could depend on [that kind of spin], given everything The Sun has written about Iraq,” says Stephen Glover, the media commentator of the daily Independent. “The Sun has been the most bellicose supporter of British and American policy in Iraq. A fairly safe bet, on the government’s part, that it would continue to be so in relation to Iran.” If the government’s intention was to influence pundits, rather than the general public, The Times—also owned by Murdoch—would have been the more logical choice. And if the aim was simply to disseminate information, the BBC would have been the obvious venue.

The British claims are the obvious source for Negroponte and Bush, and the trans-Atlantic echo is strongly reminiscent of the dynamic in the run up to the Iraq invasion when the US and UK cited each other’s speculation as evidence for their various then-questionable and ultimately unfounded claims about the threat posed by Iraq.

As it turned out, the bombs to which the Brits referred were based on a design refined by the Irish Republican Army and sold to guerillas and terrorists throughout the world. But the IRA weren’t the originators of the design: they got it from British security forces, and the Iraqis could have gotten it from Palestinians, Lebanon’s Hezbulah or any of the various Iranian dissident groups operating inside Iran. They could even have gotten it from the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a bomb-happy anti-Iran organization that operated from Saddam’s Iraq and is listed as a terrorist group by the US, but that currently enjoys US protection in Iraq, is often cited as a source of US intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program and has been described as a “key tool” in the Bush administration’s plans for regime change in Iran.

So what we’re seeing is not only the mirroring of the administration’s and Tony Blair’s rhetorical assault on Iraq, but the cultivation of violent Iranian dissidents who provide intelligence — some of it accurate, some of it not — that the administration uses to bolster its case against Iran and will no doubt rely on in arriving at whatever rosy predictions they use to convince themselves that an attack on Iran will work out as well as the one on Iraq was meant to, only without the messy complications of a ground war and occupation.

Today’s New York Times has a Q&A session borrowed from the Council on Foreign Relations and featuring Flynt Leverett, a former CIA Middle East analyst and National Security deputy under Condoleezza Rice.

We got into this dilemma because we essentially don’t have a strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue. By “we” I mean the United States and the Bush administration. The Bush administration has deliberately ruled out direct negotiations with Iran either over the nuclear issue or over the broad range of strategic issues that you would need to talk to Iran about if you were going to get a real diplomatic settlement on the nuclear issue.

The administration has, literally for years, ruled out that kind of strategic dialogue with Iran. In the absence of that sort of approach, that sort of channel, the administration is left with two options, one of which is to try and get something done in the Security Council. It has been foreseeable literally for months, if not for longer, that Russia and China at a minimum were not going to be prepared to support serious multilateral sanctions or other serious multilateral punitive measures on Iran. This is not a surprise. As I said, it’s been foreseeable literally for months, but the administration, without a strategy, is going down this feckless road anyway.

The other option that the administration would have is unilateral military action. Right now the administration is not in a position to undertake that. The international outcry would, I think, be enormous. We would literally have no one on our side at this point supporting that kind of action. The administration certainly has many other challenges on its plate that it’s having to cope with right now. And frankly I don’t think a unilateral military strike would solve the problem any more than trying to deal with it through the Security Council. Because of the administration’s deliberate decision to rule out serious strategically grounded diplomacy with Iran on this issue, these are the only two options they’ve got, and neither is going to work.

We’re left, then, with this question: given the choice between two unworkable strategies, one of which involves the UN Security Council and the other of which involves blowing stuff up, which will the Bush administration choose?

Bookmark and Share

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl Google

Hugg Jamespot Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinkedIn LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb

Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Twitter Webride Windows Live Worlds Movies Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™