1.

World

U.S. STRIKE ON IRAN 'NOT BEING PREPARED'
By Demetri Sevastopulo, Daniel Dombey, and Andrew Ward

Financial Times (UK)
November 12, 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/38dd00ca-90a6-11dc-a6f2-0000779fd2ac.html

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is not preparing a pre-emptive attack on Iran in spite of an increase in bellicose rhetoric from Washington, according to senior officers.

Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, told the *Financial Times* that while dealing with Iran was a “challenge,” a strike was not “in the offing”.

“None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said.

“Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”

Adm. Fallon did not rule out the possibility of a strike at some point. But his comments served as a shot across the bows of hawks who are arguing for imminent action. They also echoed the views of the senior brass that military action is currently unnecessary, and should only be considered as an absolute last resort.

In recent months, President George W. Bush and his top officials have made a string of tough statements that have fuelled speculation that the U.S. was preparing to strike Iran over its nuclear program. Adm. Fallon declined to comment specifically on whether the U.S. rhetoric was feeding the speculation, but said that “generally, the bellicose comments are not particularly helpful.”

“That said we have to make sure that there is no mistake here on the part of the Iranians about our resolve in tending to business in the region,” said Adm Fallon. “There has got to be some combination of strength and willingness to engage. How to come up with the right combination of that is the real trick.”

Several senior active and retired miltary officers told the *FT* that the Pentagon believes striking Iran at this point would be a strategic mistake, as even a limited air strike could spark a broader conflict.

“The U.S. might think in terms of a limited strike but military officers like to point out that the enemy has a vote,” said Jo-Anne Hart, an Iran expert at Brown University who consults for the military. Retired General Anthony Zinni, a former Centcom commander, said the US military was “stretched too thin” to fight a protracted war with Iran.

Retired Gen. John Abizaid, who preceeded Adm. Fallon, recently said the U.S. should avoid a war with Iran, which would be “devastating for everybody.” He added that the U.S. should do everything to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon, but said Washington could live with that outcome if it happened.

In another sign that the Pentagon is trying to reduce tensions with Iran, the U.S. military this week released nine Iranians it had been holding in Iraq. The move came after Robert Gates, defense secretary, confirmed that Tehran had told the Iraqi government it would be willing to stop sending weapons to militias in Iraq.

Speaking to the FT before the release, Adm. Fallon said there had “certainly been a downturn” in roadside bomb attacks on U.S. forces, but that the “jury is still out” on whether Iran had reduced its support for militias in Iraq.

“We need to see them do something along the lines of ‘we are serious about having a dialogue’ and then maybe we can do something,” he added.

2.

U.S. SOFTENS STANCE ON IRAN STRIKES
By David Blair

Telegraph (London)
November 13, 2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/13/wiran113.xml

The United States is trying to reduce tensions with Iran by playing down the possibility of launching military strikes against the country's nuclear facilities, observers believe.

A series of public statements and Washington's decision to free nine of the 20 Iranians held captive in Iraq last week suggest that America is trying to send conciliatory signals.

The Bush administration is deeply divided over how to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, believed to favor the military option. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and Robert Gates, the defense secretary, are both thought to oppose Mr Cheney.

Instead, they advocate employing diplomatic and economic pressure to compel Iran to change course.

Significantly, service chiefs in the Pentagon are deeply sceptical of the military option.

Admiral William Fallon, the head of Central Command, which has responsibility for U.S. forces in the Middle East, told the Financial Times that a strike was "not in the offing."

He added: "Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to do that is the real objective. Attacking them strikes me as being not the first choice."

If America did launch strikes at Iran's nuclear facilities, notably the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, Tehran would have numerous options for retaliation. It could fire missiles at Western targets in the Gulf states and sponsor attacks on U.S. and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hence any American attack would have to be a broad and lengthy campaign, designed to destroy Iran's ability to retaliate.

With U.S. forces stretched thinly around the world, this would be a major undertaking.

Rosemary Hollis, the director of research at the foreign affairs think tank, Chatham House, said: "The real analysis made by the service chiefs says, 'no we do not want to go to war with Iran, but we must scare them.' We're being told that no one is going to choose to go to war with Iran, but that doesn't mean it can't happen."

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France presented a united front on the issue after meeting in Berlin. Mrs. Merkel said: "We discussed how we and other European countries want to reduce our trade links with Iran."

3.

U.S.: IRAN ATTACK PLANS READY IF NEEDED
By Robert Burns

Associated Press
November 8, 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/08/AR2007110801321.html

WASHINGTON -- U.S. defense officials have signaled that up-to-date attack plans are available if needed in the escalating crisis over Iran's nuclear aims, although no strike appears imminent.

The Army and Marine Corps are under enormous strain from years of heavy ground fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, the United States has ample air and naval power to strike Iran if President Bush decided to target nuclear sites or to retaliate for alleged Iranian meddling in neighboring Iraq.

Among the possible targets, in addition to nuclear installations like the centrifuge plant at Natanz: Iran's ballistic missile sites, Republican Guard bases, and naval warfare assets that Tehran could use in a retaliatory closure of the Straits of Hormuz, a vital artery for the flow of Gulf oil.

The Navy has an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf area with about 60 fighters and other aircraft that likely would feature prominently in a bombing campaign. And a contingent of about 2,200 Marines are on a standard deployment to the Gulf region aboard ships led by the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship. Air Force fighters and bombers are available elsewhere in the Gulf area, including a variety of warplanes in Iraq and at a regional air operations center in Qatar.

But there has been no new buildup of U.S. firepower in the region. In fact there has been some shrinkage in recent months. After adding a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf early this year -- a move that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said was designed to underscore U.S. long-term stakes in the region -- the Navy has quietly returned to a one-carrier presence.

Talk of a possible U.S. attack on Iran has surfaced frequently this year, prompted in some cases by hard-line statements by White House officials. Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, stated on Oct. 21 that the United States would "not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," and that Iran would face "serious consequences" if it continued in that direction. Gates, on the other hand, has emphasized diplomacy.

Bush suggested on Oct. 17 that Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear arms could lead to "World War III." Yet on Wednesday, in discussing Iran at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Bush made no reference to the military option.

"The idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is dangerous, and, therefore, now is the time for us to work together to diplomatically solve this problem," Bush said, adding that Sarkozy also wants a peaceful solution.

Iran's conventional military forces are generally viewed as limited, not among the strongest in the Middle East. But a leading expert on the subject, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says it would be a mistake to view the Islamic republic as a military weakling.

"Its strengths in overt conflict are more defensive than offensive, but Iran has already shown it has great capability to resist outside pressure and any form of invasion and done so under far more adverse and divisive conditions than exist in Iran today," Cordesman wrote earlier this year.

Cordesman estimates that Iran's army has an active strength of around 350,000 men.

At the moment, there are few indications of U.S. military leaders either advising offensive action against Iran or taking new steps to prepare for that possibility. Gates has repeatedly emphasized that while military action cannot be ruled out, the focus is on diplomacy and tougher economic sanctions.

Asked in late October whether war planning had been ramped up or was simply undergoing routine updates, Gates replied, "I would characterize it as routine." His description of new U.S. sanctions announced on Oct. 25 suggested they are not a harbinger of war, but an alternative.

A long-standing responsibility of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is to maintain and update what are called contingency plans for potential military action that a president might order against any conceivable foe. The secret plans, with a range of timelines and troop numbers, are based on a variety of potential scenarios -- from an all-out invasion like the March 2003 march on Baghdad to less demanding missions.

Another military option for Washington would be limited, clandestine action by U.S. special operations commandos, such as Delta Force soldiers, against a small number of key nuclear installations.

The man whose responsibility it would be to design any conventional military action against Iran -- and execute it if ordered by Bush -- is Adm. William Fallon, the Central Command chief. He is playing down prospects of conflict, saying in a late September interview that there is too much talk of war.

"This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me, which is not helpful and not useful," Fallon told Al-Jazeera television, adding that he does not expect a war against Iran. During a recent tour of the Gulf region, Fallon made a point of telling U.S. allies that Iran is not as strong as it portrays itself.

"Not militarily, economically or politically," he said.

Fallon's immediate predecessor, retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, raised eyebrows in September when he suggested that initiating a war against Iran would be a mistake. He urged vigorous efforts to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but failing that, he said, "There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran." He also said he believed Iran's leaders could be dissuaded from using nuclear arms, once acquired.

The possibility of U.S. military action raises many tough questions, beginning perhaps with the practical issue of whether the United States knows enough about Iran's network of nuclear sites -- declared sites as well as possible clandestine ones -- to sufficiently set back or destroy their program.

Among other unknowns: Iran's capacity to retaliate by unleashing terrorist strikes against U.S. targets.

Nonmilitary specialists who have studied Iran's nuclear program are doubtful of U.S. military action.

"There is a nontrivial chance that there will be an attack, but it's not likely," said Jeffrey Lewis, director of a nuclear strategy project at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy group.

4.

War stories

RESIGN, RETIRE, RENOUNCE
By Fred Kaplan

** What should generals do if Bush orders a foolish attack on Iran? **

Slate
October 17, 2007

http://www.slate.com/id/2176122/

From the Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Central Command, most of America's military leaders have expressed wariness about, if not outright opposition to, the idea of bombing Iran.

So, if President George W. Bush starts to prepare -- or actually issues the order -- for an attack, what should the generals do? Disobey? Rally resistance from within? Resign in protest? Retire quietly? Or salute and execute the mission?

The appropriateness of military dissent is a hot topic among senior officers these days in conferences, internal papers, and backroom discussions, all of which set off emotional arguments and genuine soul-searching.

"What should we have done in the run-up to the war in Iraq?" the generals are asking. "What should I do the next time?" is the tacit question stirring the conscience.

At play here is a tension between two fundamental principles of the military: the duty to provide civilian decision-makers with unvarnished military advice on issues of warfare and the obligation to obey all lawful orders by superiors. Under the Constitution, the president is superior to the highest-ranked general or admiral.

For the past few years, many officers have wrung their hands over the top generals' failure to assert their views as strongly as they should have during the planning stages of the Iraq war. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted on invading with one-third to half as many troops as the generals were recommending. They knew that disaster loomed, yet after the first round of disagreement, they said nothing.

In April 2006, three years after the war began, six retired generals spoke out against the war plans and called for Rumsfeld's resignation. Critics of the war lauded this "generals' revolt," but many active-duty officers -- especially the junior and midlevel officers actually doing the fighting -- were repelled. They asked: Where were these generals when they were still wearing the uniform, when their dissent might have meant something? How could they have led us into battle while having so little confidence in the battle plan?

Yet some senior officers believe dissent has no place within the military, especially once a decision is made. Others wouldn't go that far, but the guidelines are murky on where to draw the line. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is clear: All military personnel, including officers, are obligated to obey "lawful orders." In fact, it is a crime, punishable by court-martial, not to obey. The qualifier -- "lawful order" -- is important: It pre-empts the Nazi defense of war crimes ("I was just following orders" is no excuse if the orders were unlawful), and it's a legitimate way out for conscientious soldiers who do not want to take part in atrocities like My Lai or torture sessions like Abu Ghraib.

But it's one thing for a sergeant to disobey a lieutenant in the frenzy of battle. It's quite another for generals to declare a president's order "unlawful." That's not an act of conscience; it's a coup d'état. (There are some circumstances that could confuse the most honorable officer. For instance, in the last weeks of Richard Nixon's presidency, when Nixon was drinking heavily and teetering on the edge of sanity, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him before executing any military orders from the White House. Even then, it's worth noting, the chain of command was circumvented by the civilian defense secretary, not by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)

Outright disobedience of a presidential order, then, is an option that no senior U.S. officer wants even to contemplate -- and we should be thankful for that. But in a widely circulated article titled "Knowing When To Salute," published in the July 2007 newsletter of the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, retired Lt. Col. Leonard Wong and retired Col. Douglas Lovelace laid out nine options short of disobedience that a senior officer might take when political leaders resist military advice.

If the situation involves little or no threat to national security, they write, an officer can request reassignment, decline a promotion, or take early retirement.

If it involves a high threat to national security, there are several ascending courses of dissent: "public information" (a euphemism for leaking to the press?), writing a scholarly paper, testifying before Congress, engaging in "joint effort" (plotting?) -- and, finally, if all else fails to change things, resigning.

There is a huge distinction between retiring and resigning. When officers retire, they do so with full benefits, health care, and continued membership in the fraternity of military officers. When they resign, they give up all of that.

This is why no U.S. general has resigned in more than 40 years -- and the last one to do so later asked, without success, for reinstatement.

Yet Wong and Lovelace argued that mere retirement "should not be an option when the threat to national security is high. .&nbps;. . It may be personally satisfying to leave the distasteful aspects of a policy battle, but it ignores a responsibility to the nation and the [military] profession to do what is right."

In other words, if generals want to protest an impending decision, and if that decision affects (in the generals' view, if it gravely harms) national security, they should fall on their swords, and falling on swords unavoidably hurts. If it doesn't hurt, it's not really falling on a sword. Wong likens it to civil disobedience: Those who engage in that act do so knowing they face jail. Similarly, if an officer decides that he cannot in good conscience carry out the obligations of his commission, he should give up the commission and the benefits that go with it. Ducking out quietly -- giving up the responsibilities but not the rewards -- is a cop-out.

Generals who stop short of considering resignation are not necessarily selfish. For there is another distinction to draw between the generals' revolt over Iraq and a hypothetical revolt over, say, a decision to attack Iran.

The retired generals who spoke out in 2006 criticized not so much the decision to invade Iraq but rather the way that the invasion was planned and carried out -- specifically, Rumsfeld's refusal to send what they considered enough troops.

To many officers, these generals -- and many other officers who said nothing -- had the right, even the obligation, to speak their minds on troop levels, tactics, and strategy. However, in disputes that involve policy, many of those same officers believe they have no business speaking out in public or even speaking out at all.

Retired Col. Don Snider, a professor at the Army War College who has written extensively on civil-military relations, says officers can engage in dissent only on very narrow grounds. "Officers are the servants, not the masters," he said in a phone interview. "If they can't accept that, they should get out." However, he emphasized, they should get out quietly -- that is, they should retire (and maybe explain their actions a few years down the road, after the crisis has blown over). To resign in protest would mean injecting themselves into issues -- of policy, politics, and foreign policy -- that go beyond a military officer's professional expertise and ethos.

One officer who often thinks about these issues, but who asked not to be identified, agrees with Snider to a point -- officers, he says, shouldn't go "outside the lane" in their dissent -- but adds that there's a "fine line" between political policy and military judgment. For instance, if a president goes to war on the basis of faulty or jiggered intelligence findings, the decision isn't strictly "policy," since intelligence analysis is also among an officer's professional tasks.

These are the sorts of fine lines that senior officers are mulling and skirmishing over with great intensity right now. If the run-up to Iraq were somehow replayed, it's a fair bet that one or two generals would resign—or retire, then speak out more promptly than they did. (Gen. Greg Newbold, who was the Joint Staff's director of operations at the start of the Bush administration, retired shortly before the invasion but didn't speak out for three years—a lapse that, he later wrote, he regretted.)

If there is a run-up to an Iranian war, what would the generals do? This is not an easy question. But here is my proposal (an easy proposal, some would charge, correctly, since I'm not in the military): If the top officers up and down the chain of command all agreed that an attack on Iran would be a disaster, on whatever grounds, they should do all they can to sway the president -- and anyone who has influence over the president -- against it. They should arrange to be called before congressional committees and to be asked awkward questions, which would elicit their critical replies. At the final hour, they should threaten to retire or resign en masse and, if that didn't work, they should follow through. (Even if they quietly retired, the fact that three or four or six or eight generals did so at once would have some impact.)

This is a dangerous business. It shouldn't be undertaken often (and even on this outing, it should be done only in coordination with, perhaps at the behest of, civilian officials who agree with their positions -- say, the secretaries of defense and state). But if the bombing led to disaster, as many of these officers now believe it would, they must realize -- and, given the experience in Iraq, they probably do realize -- that they would share the responsibility. The question is: Will anticipation of this responsibility lead them to do something beforehand, if only as recompense for having done too little before the disaster of Iraq?