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Inter Press Service
– June 10, 2008 via military.com
Pentagon officials firmly opposed Vice President Dick Cheney's
proposal to strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases last
summer by insisting that the administration make clear decisions
about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict
with Iran, according to a former Bush administration official.
J. Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state
in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled
in an interview that senior Defense Department officials and the
Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against
the Cheney proposal.
McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposed
several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training
camps in Iran," citing two officials involved in Iran policy.
According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on
Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think tank, Pentagon
officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited
airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of
events that would follow an Iranian retaliation against such an
attack. Carpenter said the Defense Department officials insisted
that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about
how far the administration would go -- what would happen after the
Iranians would go after our folks."
The question of escalation posed by Defense Department officials
involved not only the potential of the Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack,
Carpenter said, but also possible responses across the Middle East
by Hezbollah and by Iran.
Carpenter suggested that Defense Department officials were shifting
the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which
they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of
escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be
politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.
The former State Department official said the Defense Department
"knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on
that question."
The Joint Chiefs were fully supportive of the position taken by
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the Cheney proposal, according
to Carpenter. "It's clear that the military leadership was being
very conservative on this issue," he said.
At least some Defense Department and military officials suggested
that Iran had more and better options for hitting back at the United
States than the United States had for hitting Iran, according to one
former Bush administration insider.
Former Bush speechwriter and senior policy adviser Michael Gerson,
who had left the administration in 2006, wrote a column in the
Washington Post on July 20, 2007, in which he gave no hint of
Cheney's proposal but referred to "options" for striking Iranian
targets based on the Cheney line that Iran "smuggles in the advanced
explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers."
Gerson cited two possibilities: "Engaging in hot pursuit against
weapon supply lines over the Iranian border or striking explosives
factories and staging areas within Iran." But the Pentagon and the
military leadership were opposing such options, he reported, because
of the fear that Iran has "escalation dominance" in its conflict
with the United States.
That meant, according to Gerson, that "in a broadened conflict, the
Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than
we complicate theirs."
Carpenter's account of the Pentagon's position on the Cheney
proposal suggests, however, that civilian and military opponents
were saying that Iran's ability to escalate posed the question of
whether the United States was going to go to a full-scale air war
against Iran.
Pentagon civilian and military opposition to such a strategic attack
on Iran had become well-known during 2007. But this is the first
evidence from an insider that Cheney's proposal was perceived as a
ploy to provoke Iranian retaliation that could used to justify a
strategic attack on Iran.
The option of attacking nuclear sites had been raised by President
Bush with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in "the tank" at the
Pentagon on Dec. 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs,
according a report by Time magazine's Joe Klein last June. After he
become head of the Central Command in March 2007, Adm. William
Fallon also made his opposition to such a massive attack on Iran
known to the White House, according to Middle East specialist
Hillary Mann, who had developed close working relationships with
Pentagon officials when she worked on the National Security Council
staff.
It appeared in early 2007, therefore, that a strike against Iran's
nuclear program and military power had been blocked by opposition
from the Pentagon. Cheney's proposal for an attack on Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps bases in June 2007, tied to the alleged
Iranian role in providing both weapons -- especially the highly
lethal explosively formed projectiles -- and training to Shiite
militias appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm
resistance of military leaders to such an unprovoked attack.
Although the Pentagon bottled up the Cheney proposal in inter-agency
discussions, Cheney had a strategic asset that he could use to try
to overcome that obstacle: his alliance with Gen. David Petraeus.
And Cheney had already used Gen. David Petraeus' takeover as the top
commander of U.S. forces in Iraq in early February 2007 to do an end
run about the Washington national security bureaucracy to establish
the propaganda line that Iran was manufacturing explosively formed
projectiles and shipping them to the Mahdi Army militiamen.
Petraeus was also a supporter of Cheney's proposal for striking
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran, going so far as
to hint in an interview with Fox News last September that he had
passed on to the White House his desire to do something about
alleged Iranian assistance to Shiites that would require U.S. forces
beyond his control.
At that point, Adm. Fallon was in a position to deter any effort to
go around Defense Department and military opposition to such a
strike because he controlled all military access to the region as a
whole. But Fallon's forced resignation in March and the subsequent
promotion of Petraeus to become CENTCOM chief later this year gives
Cheney a possible option to ignore the position of his opponents in
Washington once more in the final months of the administration.
www.military.com/news/article/ex-official-says-dod-nixed-iran-attack.html
Source:
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8761
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