por Suzanne Goldenberg
“President George Bush has charged the Pentagon with devising an expanded bombing plan for Iran that can be carried out at 24 hours' notice, it was reported yesterday. An extensive article in the New Yorker magazine by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh describes the contingency bombing plan as part of a general overhaul by the Bush administration of its policy towards Iran. It said a special planning group at the highest levels of the US military had expanded its mission from selecting potential targets connected to Iranian nuclear facilities, and had been directed to add sites that may be involved in aiding Shia militant forces in Iraq to its list.That new strategy, intended to reverse the rise in Iranian power that has been an unintended consequence of the war in Iraq, could bring the countries much closer to open confrontation and risks igniting a regional sectarian war between Shia and Sunni Muslims, the New Yorker says.
Elements of the tough new approach towards Tehran outlined by Hersh include:
· Clandestine operations against Iran and Syria, as well as the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon - even to the extent of bolstering Sunni extremist groups that are sympathetic to al-Qaida
· Sending US special forces into Iranian territory in pursuit of Iranian operatives, as well as to gather intelligence
· Secret operations are being funded by Saudi Arabia to avoid scrutiny by Congress. ‘There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,‘ Hersh quotes a Pentagon consultant as saying.
As in the run-up to the Iraq war, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, has bypassed other administration officials to take charge of the aggressive new policy, working along with the deputy national security adviser, Elliott Abrams, and the former ambassador to Kabul and Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad. Mr Cheney is also relying heavily on Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national security adviser, who spent 22 years as ambassador to the US, and who has been offering his advice on foreign policy to Mr Bush since he first contemplated running for president. The New Yorker revelations, arriving soon after Mr Cheney reaffirmed that war with Iran remained an option if it did not dismantle its nuclear programme, further ratcheted up fears of a military confrontation between Washington and Tehran. Such concerns deepened further with the warning from the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that there could be no stopping or rolling back of his country's nuclear programme. ‘The train of the Iranian nation is without brakes and a rear gear,‘ Iranian radio reported Mr Ahmadinejad as saying. Hersh, who made his reputation by breaking the story of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, was among the first US journalists to report on the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Although the most explosive material was supplied by unnamed sources, his status in US journalism made his latest report an immediate talking point on yesterday's TV chatshows. His assertion that the Bush administration was actively preparing for an attack on Iran was denied by the Pentagon. ‘The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran. To suggest anything to the contrary is simply wrong, misleading and mischievous,‘ the Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, told reporters. Hersh was just as adamant. ‘This president is not going to leave office without doing something about Iran,‘ he told CNN. Hersh claims that the former director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, resigned his post to take a parallel job as the deputy director of the state department because of his discomfort with an approach that so closely echoed the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. In seeking to contain Iranian influence - and that of its most powerful protege, the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah - the US has worked with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both countries see a powerful Iran as an existential threat, and the Saudis suspect Tehran's hand behind rising sectarian tensions in its eastern province, as well as a spate of bombing attacks inside the kingdom. One prime arena for the new strategy is Lebanon where the administration has been trying to prop up the government of Fouad Siniora, which faces a resurgent Hizbullah movement in the aftermath of last summer's war with Israel. Some of the billions of aid to the Beirut government has ended up in the hands of radical Sunnis in the Beka'a valley, Hersh writes. Syrian extremist groups have also benefited from the new policy. ‘These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hizbullah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with al-Qaida,‘ Hersh writes‘.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2021434,00.html#article_continue
JPTF 2007/02/26
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