- President Bush's second inauguration on Thursday will
provide the signal for an intense and urgent debate in Washington over
whether or when to extend the "global war on terror" to Iran,
according to officials and foreign policy analysts in Washington.
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- That debate is being driven by "neo-conservatives"
at the Pentagon who emerged from the post-election Bush reshuffle unscathed,
despite their involvement in collecting misleading intelligence on Iraq's
weapons in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.
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- Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations
with Iran and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered
deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections
is unenforceable and will collapse in months.
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- Only the credible threat, and if necessary the use, of
air and special operations attacks against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities
will stop the ruling clerics in Tehran acquiring warheads, many in the
administration argue.
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- Moderates, who are far fewer in the second Bush administration
than the first, insist that if Iran does have a secret weapons programme,
it is likely to be dispersed and buried in places almost certainly unknown
to US intelligence. The potential for Iranian retaliation inside Iraq and
elsewhere is so great, the argument runs, that there is in effect no military
option.
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- A senior administration official involved in developing
Iran policy rejected that argument. "It is not as simple as that,"
he told the Guardian at a recent foreign policy forum in Washington. "It
is not a straightforward problem but at some point the costs of doing nothing
may just become too high. In Iran you have the intersection of nuclear
weapons and proven ties to terrorism. That is what we are looking at now."
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- The New Yorker reported this week that the Pentagon has
already sent special operations teams into Iran to locate possible nuclear
weapons sites. The report by Seymour Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist,
was played down by the White House and the Pentagon, with comments that
stopped short of an outright denial.
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- "The Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions
and its demonstrated support for terrorist organisations is a global challenge
that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides,"
Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday: "Mr
Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the
credibility of his entire piece is destroyed."
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- However, the Guardian has learned the Pentagon was recently
contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq
(MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border, to collect intelligence. The group, based
at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, was under the protection of Saddam Hussein,
and is under US guard while Washington decides on its strategy.
-
- The MEK has been declared a terrorist group by the state
department, but a former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked
by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee "MEK
cross-border operations". He refused, and does not know if those operations
have begun.
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- "They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from
the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside
the government to write up policy papers on Iran," the former officer
said.
-
- He said the policy discussion was being overseen by Douglas
Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy who was one of the principal
advocates of the Iraq war. The Pentagon did not return calls for comment
on the issue yesterday. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Mr Feith's
Office of Special Plans also used like-minded experts on contract from
outside the government, to serve as consultants helping the Pentagon counter
the more cautious positions of the state department and the CIA.
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- Crazy
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- "They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the
facilities and destabilise the government. They believe they can get rid
of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans,
all the world's problems are solved. I think it's delusional," the
former CIA officer said.
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- However, others believe that at a minimum military strikes
could set back Iran's nuclear programme several years. Reuel Marc Gerecht,
another former CIA officer who is now a leading neo-conservative voice
on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said: "It would certainly
delay [the programme] and it can be done again. It's not a one-time affair.
I would be shocked if a military strike could not delay the programme."
Mr Gerecht said the internal debate in the administration was only just
beginning.
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- "This administration does not really have an Iran
policy," he said. "Iraq has been a fairly consuming endeavour,
but it's getting now towards the point where people are going to focus
on [Iran] hard and have a great debate."
-
- That debate could be brought to a head in the next few
months. Diplomats and officials in Vienna following the Iranian nuclear
saga at the International Atomic Energy Agency expect the Iran dispute
to re-erupt by the middle of this year, predicting a breakdown of the diplomatic
track the EU troika of Britain, Germany and France are pursuing with Tehran.
The Iran-EU agreement, reached in November, was aimed at getting Iran to
abandon the manufacture of nuclear fuel which can be further refined to
bomb-grade.
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- Now the Iranians are feeding suspicion by continuing
to process uranium concentrate into gaseous form, a breach "not of
the letter but of the spirit of the agreement," said one European
diplomat.
-
- Opinions differ widely over how long it would take Iran
to produce a deliverable nuclear warhead, and some analysts believe that
Iranian scientists have encountered serious technical difficulties.
-
- "The Israelis believe that by 2007, the Iranians
could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Some of us believe it could be
the end of this decade," said David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert
at the Institute for Science and International Security. A recent war-game
carried out by retired military officers, intelligence officials and diplomats
for the Atlantic Monthly, came to the conclusion that there were no feasible
military options and if negotiations and the threat of sanctions fail,
the US might have to accept Iran as a nuclear power.
-
- However, Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel who
led the war-game, acknowledged that the Bush administration might not come
to the same conclusion.
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- "Everything you hear about the planning for Iraq
suggests logic may not be the basis for the decision," he said.
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- Mr Gerecht, who took part in the war-game but dissented
from the conclusion, believes the Bush White House, still mired in Iraq,
has yet to make up its mind.
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- "The bureaucracy will come down on the side of doing
nothing. The real issue is: will the president and the vice president disagree
with them? If I were a betting man, I'd bet the US will not use pre-emptive
force. However, I would not want to bet a lot."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1392687,00.html
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