In a piece published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, former U.S. counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke warned that "if we struck Iran, I think we would unite it, trigger a spasm of terrorist attacks against America and Israel and start another war for which we have no exit strategy. Thus, we need an honest national dialogue now on how much we feel threatened by Iran and what the least-bad approaches to mitigating that threat are." -- These seemingly pacific conclusions -- conclusions that strike one as extremely naive, coming from a counterterrorism expert, since there has never been "an honest national dialogue" about U.S. foreign policy in the era of the U.S. national security state -- come as the final sentences in an article so slanted against Iran as to be nothing but a sophisticated piece of jingoism, as an accompanying illustration makes clear. -- Clarke's article is, in fact, a subtle justification of strikes against Iran, one in which fretting about democracy and hand-wringing about terrorism are rhetorical devices merely. -- Few readers of this pious article are likely to reach any other conclusion but that strikes against Iran are justified, regardless of their effects on democracy in Iran or the fallout in terms of counterstrikes (or, as Clarke would have it, "a spasm of terrorist attacks"), and the piece would appear to be part of a preparation of Western public opinion for such military action later this year that has been underway for months. -- Ten notes by UFPPC's Randy Talbot attempt to point out the ruses of Clarke's rhetorical strategy....
Magazine
The Security Adviser
IS A STATE SPONSOR OF TERRORISM WINNING?
By Richard A. Clarke
New York Times Magazine
March 27, 2005
Page 18
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/magazine/27ADVISER.html
[ILLUSTRATION by Nathan Fox, showing a bearded mullah in religious garb who with smug violence plants an Iranian flag on a mountain top as he sits on the shoulders of George W. Bush (dressed in combat fatigues), who is visibly miffed: his right arm is raised to plant the Stars and Stripes on the peak. Nothing in the article makes clear what this race to the peak is supposed to represent, but apparently it signifies the U.S.-Iranian struggle over Iran's nuclear program. -- As chance would have it, on the same day that Richard Clarke's article was published in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post reported that during the Ford administration in the 1970s, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were all in positions of responsibility and failed to object when Henry Kissinger approved allowing U.S. companies to aid Iran to develop a nuclear power program with the same capabilities as the one now being developed there. But now, all four are involved in drumming up support for an attack against the Iranian government for doing the same thing. --R.T.]
Imagine with me a nation's security leaders sitting around the conference table being briefed on the progress of things in Iraq. They celebrate the overwhelming victory of their favorites in the Iraqi elections. They are pleased with the effectiveness of their huge investment in building schools and hospitals in Shiite communities. They are delighted that the thousands of their security forces in Iraq are doing well, with few casualties. The nation? Iran.
Yes, Iran, the nation the Bush administration calls the greatest state sponsor of terrorism, is having some good days, largely at our expense. In the 1980's, Iran suffered an estimated one million casualties in a seven-year war against Iraq. From Iran's perspective, the purpose of the war was to place Iraq's majority Shiite religious faction in charge, to unseat Saddam Hussein, to protect the Shiite holy places and, perhaps, to get its hands on Iraq's vast oil deposits. [NOTE: From this account, one has the impression that Iran attacked Iraq. In fact, the war began with Iraq's invasion of Iran in September 1980 in a territorial dispute over the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, which then escalated into a full-scale war. --R.T.] The costly war ended in a draw, after the two sides exhausted themselves. Seventeen years later, Iran has now achieved three of those four war goals, thanks to 13,000 American casualties and scores of billions of American-taxpayer dollars.
Unlike American aid to Iraq, Iran's assistance is having little problem getting through. [NOTE: No wonder: Iran has an 800-mile border with Iraq, and cannot be unconcerned by what goes on there. --R.T.] Estimated at many hundreds of millions of dollars per year, Iranian aid has a low overhead and is buying Tehran influence in Shiite communities. Intelligence sources report that Iran's secret service and Revolutionary Guards have heavily infiltrated Iraq, with perhaps as many as 5,000 personnel. That would make Iran the third-largest force in the coalition, but it does not, of course, participate in the coalition. Iran operates on its own agenda in Iraq. Iran's goal is to have a government in Baghdad under strong Iranian influence, not to create a mirror image of Tehran. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is widely agreed to be the most influential person in Iraq. He and many of the new leaders of Iraq spent many years living in Iran, with the help of the Tehran government. [NOTE: Sistani needed no "help of the Tehran government" to live in Iran: he was born there. --R.T.]
European and American pressure on Syria has driven President Bashar al-Assad into the arms of Tehran. Although Syria's forces may withdraw from Lebanon, the Hezbollah terrorist force created by Iran will stay and has now gained Washington's acceptance as a legitimate Lebanese political party. Hezbollah is widely believed to have been responsible for the terrorist murders of more than 300 Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, as well as many Israelis. [NOTE: A more neutral description of Hezbollah: "a political and military organization in Lebanon founded in 1982 to fight Israel in southern Lebanon. It is regarded by the Arab and Muslim world, and by some European Union countries, as a legitimate, militant, Shia political party in Lebanon, and by the Israeli government and several Western governments as an Islamic fundamentalist, or Islamist, terrorist organization." Hezbollah runs hospitals, schools, and orphanages, operates a television station, and holds eight seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament. --R.T.]
With oil costing more than $50 a barrel, the money keeps on flowing into Tehran's treasury. Western oil companies, including a Halliburton subsidiary, work with the Iranians, planning new oil pipelines to increase their output. The hope of American national security planners has been for democracy to flourish in Iran. [NOTE: For Iranians, and for most neutral observers outside the United States, expressions of a desire "for democracy to flourish in Iran" by "national security planners" of the United States have no credibility. It is by now a well established historical fact that in August 1953 the CIA, with help from Great Britain, overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, because Iran had nationalized its oil industry two years earlier, and installed a pro-Western dictator in his place. In a recent book, Steven Kinzer concluded that Middle Eastern terrorism is the "haunting and terrible legacy" of that anti-democratic coup (All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror [Wiley, 2003], p. 215). --R.T.] Unfortunately, when a progressive parliament was elected, the ruling mullahs vetoed its actions and then stacked it with their supporters. There will soon be another election in Iran, but it is likely to be fixed by the mullahs. [NOTE: Concerns on the part of the Bush administration about fixed elections in other countries now inspire laughter around the world. --R.T.]
Iran's nuclear strategists are also succeeding. President Bush has agreed to give Iran trade concessions to get it to abide by nuclear-nonproliferation agreements. [NOTE: These concessions are so minor that they were immediately dismissed by Iran as "funny and disrespectful." --R.T.] Optimists think such concessions will halt the Iranian nuclear weapons program and buy agreement to a reliable inspection regime. Cynics suggest that Iran is playing for time to finish making bombs in hidden facilities. [NOTE: Unmentioned here, and unmentioned in all mainstream news reports about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, is the history of Israel's nuclear weapons program. Israel developed nuclear weapons clandestinely at a complex of nuclear facilities at Dimona beginning in 1957. At various times, Israel claimed the complex was a textile factory, an agricultural station, and a metals research lab. Finally, in 1960, Ben-Gurion admitted that Dimona was a nuclear research center -- for "peaceful purposes." In the late 1960s a CIA report concluded that Israel was producing nuclear weapons, but U.S. officials still routinely feign uncertainty about their existence. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that Israel now possesses between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads. --R.T.] Either outcome, trade concessions or nuclear weapons, will strengthen Iran.
The president recently said that reports of the United States preparing to attack Iran were "simply ridiculous." He then quickly added, "All options are on the table." There are reports that Pentagon planners, reacting to the prospect of drawn-out negotiations, are developing strike packages to take out W.M.D. sites in Iran. [NOTE: Scott Ritter claims that such plans are not a reaction to "the prospect of drawn-out negotiations"; rather, "the Pentagon has been tasked with being prepared to launch a massive military bombardment by June of 2005. October of 2004 was a status report on those preparations." On Mar. 13, the Sunday Times of London reported that Israel is actively training for an air and ground attack on Iran involving its élite Shaldag commando unit, F-15s, and bunker-busting bombs. --R.T.] Some planners say such strikes would cause the people to overthrow the mullahs. Actually, if we struck Iran, I think we would unite it, trigger a spasm of terrorist attacks against America and Israel and start another war for which we have no exit strategy. Thus, we need an honest national dialogue now on how much we [NOTE: Do the two pronouns in this sentence have the same referent? --R.T.] feel threatened by Iran and what the least-bad approaches to mitigating that threat are.
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