In a piece posted Monday on the web site of the New Yorker that will be appearing in the Jul. 10 number of the magazine, investigative reporter extraordinaires Seymour Hersh reported that in April Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs, succeeded in getting the White House to drop nuclear weapons from the bombing campaign against Iran that it is planning.[1] -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's tendency to override professional military advice in drawing up plans is causing growing resistance from commanders, and as a result Rumsfeld will be turning more and more to special operations, "where he has direct authority and does not have to put up with the objections of the Chiefs," according to Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who taught at the National War College. -- The last half of Hersh's piece was devoted to an analysis of the diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program that adds nothing to what is already known....
1.
Annals of National Security
LAST STAND
By Seymour M. Hersh
** The militarys problem with the Presidents Iran policy. **
New Yorker
July 10, 2006 (posted July 3)
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060710fa_fact
On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced what appeared to be a major change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bush Administration, she said, would be willing to join Russia, China, and its European allies in direct talks with Iran about its nuclear program. There was a condition, however: the negotiations would not begin until, as the President put it in a June 19th speech at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the Iranian regime fully and verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities. Iran, which has insisted on its right to enrich uranium, was being asked to concede the main point of the negotiations before they started. The question was whether the Administration expected the Iranians to agree, or was laying the diplomatic groundwork for future military action. In his speech, Bush also talked about freedom for the Iranian people, and he added, Irans leaders have a clear choice. There was an unspoken threat: the U.S. Strategic Command, supported by the Air Force, has been drawing up plans, at the Presidents direction, for a major bombing campaign in Iran.
Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the Presidents plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Irans nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.
A crucial issue in the militarys dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit. The target array in Iran is huge, but its amorphous, a high-ranking general told me. The question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious? The high-ranking general added that the militarys experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq, he said.
There is a war about the war going on inside the building, a Pentagon consultant said. If we go, we have to find something.
In President Bushs June speech, he accused Iran of pursuing a secret weapons program along with its civilian nuclear-research program (which it is allowed, with limits, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). The senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the Presidents contention that Iran intends to eventually build a bomb, but they are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former senior intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking, Whats the evidence? Weve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys -- the Iranians -- have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? Were coming up with jack shit.
A senior military official told me, Even if we knew where the Iranian enriched uranium was -- and we dont -- we dont know where world opinion would stand. The issue is whether its a clear and present danger. If youre a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is the capability of the Iranian response, and the likelihood of a punitive response -- like cutting off oil shipments? What would that cost us? Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary, he said.
In 1986, Congress authorized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to act as the principal military adviser to the President. In this case, I was told, the current chairman, Marine General Peter Pace, has gone further in his advice to the White House by addressing the consequences of an attack on Iran. Heres the military telling the President what he cant do politically -- raising concerns about rising oil prices, for example -- the former senior intelligence official said. The J.C.S. chairman going to the President with an economic argument -- whats going on here? (General Pace and the White House declined to comment. The Defense Department responded to a detailed request for comment by saying that the Administration was working diligently on a diplomatic solution and that it could not comment on classified matters.)
A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they dont want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, We stood up.
In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Irans uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The huge complex includes large underground facilities built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in the ground and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand centrifuges. Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning, the former senior intelligence official told me. And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable. At the time, a number of retired officers, including two Army major generals who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and Charles Swannack, Jr., had begun speaking out against the Administrations handling of the Iraq war. This period is known to many in the Pentagon as the April Revolution.
An event like this doesnt get papered over very quickly, the former official added. The bad feelings over the nuclear option are still felt. The civilian hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the brass, and the brass feel they were tricked into it -- the nuclear planning -- by being asked to provide all options in the planning papers.
Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force as a colonel, said that Rumsfelds second-guessing and micromanagement were a fundamental problem. Plans are more and more being directed and run by civilians from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Gardiner said. It causes a lot of tensions. Im hearing that the military is increasingly upset about not being taken seriously by Rumsfeld and his staff.
Gardiner went on, The consequence is that, for Iran and other missions, Rumsfeld will be pushed more and more in the direction of special operations, where he has direct authority and does not have to put up with the objections of the Chiefs. Since taking office in 2001, Rumsfeld has been engaged in a running dispute with many senior commanders over his plans to transform the military, and his belief that future wars will be fought, and won, with airpower and Special Forces. That combination worked, at first, in Afghanistan, but the growing stalemate there, and in Iraq, has created a rift, especially inside the Army. The senior military official said, The policymakers are in love with Special Ops -- the guys on camels.
The discord over Iran can, in part, be ascribed to Rumsfelds testy relationship with the generals. They see him as high-handed and unwilling to accept responsibility for what has gone wrong in Iraq. A former Bush Administration official described a recent meeting between Rumsfeld and four-star generals and admirals at a military commanders conference, on a base outside Washington, that, he was told, went badly. The commanders later told General Pace that they didnt come here to be lectured by the Defense Secretary. They wanted to tell Rumsfeld what their concerns were. A few of the officers attended a subsequent meeting between Pace and Rumsfeld, and were unhappy, the former official said, when Pace did not repeat any of their complaints. There was disappointment about Pace. The retired four-star general also described the commanders conference as very fractious. He added, Weve got twenty-five hundred dead, people running all over the world doing stupid things, and officers outside the Beltway asking, What the hell is going on?
Paces supporters say that he is in a difficult position, given Rumsfelds penchant for viewing generals who disagree with him as disloyal. Its a very narrow line between being responsive and effective and being outspoken and ineffective, the former senior intelligence official said.
But Rumsfeld is not alone in the Administration where Iran is concerned; he is closely allied with Dick Cheney, and, the Pentagon consultant said, the President generally defers to the Vice-President on all these issues, such as dealing with the specifics of a bombing campaign if diplomacy fails. He feels that Cheney has an informational advantage. Cheney is not a renegade. He represents the conventional wisdom in all of this. He appeals to the strategic-bombing lobby in the Air Force -- who think that carpet bombing is the solution to all problems.
Many of the Bush Administrations supporters view the abrupt change in negotiating policy as a deft move that won public plaudits and obscured the fact that Washington had no other good options. The United States has done what its international partners have asked it to do, said Patrick Clawson, who is an expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a conservative think tank. The ball is now in their court -- for both the Iranians and the Europeans. Bushs goal, Clawson said, was to assuage his allies, as well as Russia and China, whose votes, or abstentions, in the United Nations would be needed if the talks broke down and the U.S. decided to seek Security Council sanctions or a U.N. resolution that allowed for the use of force against Iran.
If Iran refuses to re-start negotiations, it will also be difficult for Russia and China to reject a U.N. call for International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, Clawson said. And the longer we go without accelerated I.A.E.A. access, the more important the issue of Irans hidden facilities will become. The drawback to the new American position, Clawson added, was that the Iranians might take Bushs agreeing to join the talks as a sign that their hard line has worked.
Clawson acknowledged that intelligence on Irans nuclear-weapons progress was limited. There was a time when we had reasonable confidence in what we knew, he said. We could say, Theres less time than we think, or, Its going more slowly. Take your choice. Lack of information is a problem, but we know theyve made rapid progress with their centrifuges. (The most recent American intelligence estimate is that Iran could build a warhead sometime between 2010 and 2015.)
Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council aide for the Bush Administration, told me, The only reason Bush and Cheney relented about talking to Iran was because they were within weeks of a diplomatic meltdown in the United Nations. Russia and China were going to stiff us -- that is, prevent the passage of a U.N. resolution. Leverett, a project director at the New America Foundation, added that the White Houses proposal, despite offering trade and economic incentives for Iran, has not resolved any of the fundamental contradictions of U.S. policy. The precondition for the talks, he said -- an open-ended halt to all Iranian enrichment activity -- amounts to the President wanting a guarantee that theyll surrender before he talks to them. Iran cannot accept long-term constraints on its fuel-cycle activity as part of a settlement without a security guarantee -- for example, some form of mutual non-aggression pact with the United States.
Leverett told me that, without a change in U.S. policy, the balance of power in the negotiations will shift to Russia. Russia sees Iran as a beachhead against American interests in the Middle East, and theyre playing a very sophisticated game, he said. Russia is quite comfortable with Iran having nuclear fuel cycles that would be monitored, and theyll support the Iranian position -- in part, because it gives them the opportunity to sell billions of dollars worth of nuclear fuel and materials to Tehran. They believe they can manage their long- and short-term interests with Iran, and still manage the security interests, Leverett said. China, which, like Russia, has veto power on the Security Council, was motivated in part by its growing need for oil, he said. They dont want punitive measures, such as sanctions, on energy producers, and they dont want to see the U.S. take a unilateral stance on a state that matters to them. But, he said, theyre happy to let Russia take the lead in this. (China, a major purchaser of Iranian oil, is negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with Iran for the purchase of liquefied natural gas over a period of twenty-five years.) As for the Bush Administration, he added, unless theres a shift, its only a question of when its policy falls apart.
Its not clear whether the Administration will be able to keep the Europeans in accord with American policy if the talks break down. Morton Abramowitz, a former head of State Department intelligence, who was one of the founders of the International Crisis Group, said, The world is different than it was three years ago, and while the Europeans want good relations with us, they will not go to war with Iran unless they know that an exhaustive negotiating effort was made by Bush. Theres just too much involved, like the price of oil. There will be great pressure put on the Europeans, but I dont think theyll roll over and support a war.
The Europeans, like the generals at the Pentagon, are concerned about the quality of intelligence. A senior European intelligence official said that while there was every reason to assume that the Iranians were working on a bomb, there wasnt enough evidence to exclude the possibility that they were bluffing, and hadnt moved beyond a civilian research program. The intelligence official was not optimistic about the current negotiations. Its a mess, and I dont see any possibility, at the moment, of solving the problem, he said. The only thing to do is contain it. The question is, What is the redline? Is it when you master the nuclear fuel cycle? Or is it just about building a bomb? Every country had a different criterion, he said. One worry he had was that, in addition to its security concerns, the Bush Administration was driven by its interest in democratizing the region. The United States is on a mission, he said.
A European diplomat told me that his government would be willing to discuss Irans security concerns -- a dialogue he said Iran offered Washington three years ago. The diplomat added that no one wants to be faced with the alternative if the negotiations dont succeed: either accept the bomb or bomb them. Thats why our goal is to keep the pressure on, and see what Irans answer will be.
A second European diplomat, speaking of the Iranians, said, Their tactic is going to be to stall and appear reasonable -- to say, Yes, but . . . We know whats going on, and the timeline were under. The Iranians have repeatedly been in violation of I.A.E.A. safeguards and have given us years of coverup and deception. The international community does not want them to have a bomb, and if we let them continue to enrich thats throwing in the towel -- giving up before we talk. The diplomat went on, It would be a mistake to predict an inevitable failure of our strategy. Iran is a regime that is primarily concerned with its own survival, and if its existence is threatened it would do whatever it needed to do -- including backing down.
The Iranian regimes calculations about its survival also depend on internal political factors. The nuclear program is popular with the Iranian people, including those -- the young and the secular -- who are most hostile to the religious leadership. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, has effectively used the program to rally the nation behind him, and against Washington. Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics have said that they believe Bushs goal is not to prevent them from building a bomb but to drive them out of office.
Several current and former officials I spoke to expressed doubt that President Bush would settle for a negotiated resolution of the nuclear crisis. A former high-level Pentagon civilian official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the government, said that Bush remains confident in his military decisions. The President and others in the Administration often invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in public, as an example of a politician who, in his own time, was punished in the polls but was rewarded by history for rejecting appeasement. In one speech, Bush said, Churchill seemed like a Texan to me. He wasnt afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.
Iran has not, so far, officially answered President Bushs proposal. But its initial response has been dismissive. In a June 22nd interview with the Guardian, Ali Larijani, Irans chief nuclear negotiator, rejected Washingtons demand that Iran suspend all uranium enrichment before talks could begin. If they want to put this prerequisite, why are we negotiating at all? Larijani said. We should put aside the sanctions and give up all this talk about regime change. He characterized the American offer as a sermon, and insisted that Iran was not building a bomb. We dont want the bomb, he said. Ahmadinejad has said that Iran would make a formal counterproposal by August 22nd, but last week Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Irans supreme religious leader, declared, on state radio, Negotiation with the United States has no benefits for us.
Despite the tough rhetoric, Iran would be reluctant to reject a dialogue with the United States, according to Giandomenico Picco, who, as a representative of the United Nations, helped to negotiate the ceasefire that ended the Iran-Iraq War, in 1988. If you engage a superpower, you feel you are a superpower, Picco told me. And now the haggling in the Persian bazaar begins. We are negotiating over a carpet -- the suspected weapons program -- that were not sure exists, and that we dont want to exist. And if at the end there never was a carpet itll be the negotiation of the century.
If the talks do break down, and the Administration decides on military action, the generals will, of course, follow their orders; the American military remains loyal to the concept of civilian control. But some officers have been pushing for what they call the middle way, which the Pentagon consultant described as a mix of options that require a number of Special Forces teams and air cover to protect them to send into Iran to grab the evidence so the world will know what Iran is doing. He added that, unlike Rumsfeld, he and others who support this approach were under no illusion that it could bring about regime change. The goal, he said, was to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., said in a speech this spring that his agency believed there was still time for diplomacy to achieve that goal. We should have learned some lessons from Iraq, ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said. We should have learned that we should be very careful about assessing our intelligence. . . . We should have learned that we should try to exhaust every possible diplomatic means to solve the problem before thinking of any other enforcement measures.
He went on, When you push a country into a corner, you are always giving the drivers seat to the hard-liners. . . . If Iran were to move out of the nonproliferation regime altogether, if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon program, we clearly will have a much, much more serious problem.