Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: US/IRAN:  Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Plan

Un'analisi che contribuisce a chiarire gli ostacoli che la strategia di 
guerra promossa da Bush/Cheney ha incontrato, e speriamo continui ad 
incontrare, da parte dello stesso Pentagono.
Un confronto tra Amministrazione e Pentagono che attraversa anche 
momenti farseschi, come quando gli ufficiali si rifiutano di portare un 
attacco limitato se prima l'amministrazione non elabora un piano per 
gestire i possibili eventi successivi.
A questo punto l'amministrazione ha davvero bisogno di un evento esterno 
per sferrare l'attacco.
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US/IRAN:  Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Plan
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
WASHINGTON, Jun 6 (IPS) - Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal 
by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against Iranian 
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the 
administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the 
United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according 
to a former George W. 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 Defence Department (DoD) 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 proposal 
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 for such an attack. Carpenter said the DoD 
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 DoD officials involved not only the 
potential of the Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but 
possible responses by Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.
Carpenter suggested that DoD 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 DoD "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 Defence 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 DoD 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 Jul. 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 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 at Iran's nuclear 
programme and military power had been blocked by opposition from the 
Pentagon. Cheney's proposal for an attack on IRGC bases in June 2007, 
tied to the alleged Iranian role in providing both weapons -- especially 
the highly lethal explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) -- 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 which could he could use to 
try to overcome that obstacle: his alliance with Gen. David Petraeus.
As IPS reported earlier this week, 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 
EFPs and shipping them to the Mahdi Army militiamen.
Petraeus was also a supporter of Cheney's proposal for striking IRGC 
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 DoD 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.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising 
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest 
book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in 
Vietnam", was published in 2006.
(END/2008)
-- 
[namib] Posso legalmente inneggiare al comunismo, ma non al fascismo.
L'una appartenenza è appunto *criminale*, l'altra no.
[tonibaruch] Purtroppo abbiamo questa legge idiota, è vero.
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