- Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice
President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards 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.
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- 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 Defense 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.
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- 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 Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but possible responses by
Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.
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- 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 Defense 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 on July 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."
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- 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.
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- 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 Bush
with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in "the tank" at the Pentagon
on December 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs, according
to a report by Time magazine's Joe Klein last June. After he become head
of the Central Command (Centcom) in March 2007, Admiral 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 program 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 Shi'ite 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 General David Petraeus.
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- As Inter Press Service reported earlier last week, Cheney
had already used Petraeus' takeover as the top commander of US 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 Shi'ites that would require US forces beyond his
control. At that point, 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.
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