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Monday, October 15th, 2007
Volume 6, No. 18
6 Articles 16 Pages
2. The Big Lie: 'Iran is a Threat'
4. Pelosi Says US Appears Guilty of Torture
5. Us Considered A Radiological weapon
6. How The Military Can Stop An Iran Attack
(Editor's note: With regard to article 5. While the article is a revealing one, none the less: The impression is given that our military decided to never use “dirty bombs”.
Our military has released thousands of tons of radioactive material in the form of DU weapons in the Balkans, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and the current war crimes in Iraq.
DU weapons are a weapon of mass destruction.
Some estimates, as incredible as it sounds, state that the radiation equivalent of 40,000 Nagasaki nuclear bombs has been released since DU came into conventional use with Gulf War, and very likely earlier.
And since other types of penetrators will perform nearly as well, the question remains whether or not the intent is a slow radioactive death or debilitation of the inhabitants of regions that are in the sights of imperial America.)
1. THE SCANDAL OF BLACKWATER
(The only punishment doled out to US security men involved in deadly shootings is a jet home)
BY
JEREMY SCAHILL
Erik Prince, the secretive 38-year-old owner of the leading US mercenary firm Blackwater, has seldom appeared in public. But on Tuesday he found himself in front of a Congressional committee, TV cameras trained on his boyish face. The official focus of the hearing, convened by Henry Waxman’s committee on oversight and government reform, was two questions that should have been asked long ago: whether the government’s heavy reliance on private security is serving US interests in Iraq, and whether the specific conduct of Blackwater has advanced or impeded US efforts.
What put Prince in the hot seat were the infamous Nisour Square shootings in Baghdad on September 16, in which as many as 28 Iraqi civilians may have been killed. Waxman said the justice department had asked him not to take testimony on the incident because it was the subject of an FBI investigation. In Prince’s prepared testimony, he said that people should wait for the results of the investigation - originally handled by the state department - “for a complete understanding of that event”.
But the investigative process so far has hardly been impartial. Just hours before Prince’s testimony, CNN reported that the state department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner. The next day came the news that the FBI team assigned to look into the incident in Baghdad had a contract with Blackwater itself to provide security for their investigation.
At the hearing Prince boldly declared that in Iraq his men have acted “appropriately at all times” and appeared to deny that the company had ever killed innocent civilians, only acknowledging that some may have died as a result of “ricochets” and “traffic accidents”. This assertion is simply unbelievable. According to a report prepared by Waxman’s staff, since 2005 Blackwater operatives in Iraq have opened fire on at least 195 occasions. In more than 80% of these instances, the Blackwater agents fired first.
Not surprisingly, Prince said he supported the continuation of Order 17 in Iraq, the Bremer-era decree giving organisations such as Blackwater immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. Prince said Blackwater operatives who “don’t hold to the standard, they have one decision to make: window or aisle” on their flight home. In all, Blackwater has sacked more than 120 of its operatives in Iraq. Given that being fired and sent home have been the only disciplinary consequences faced by Blackwater employees, it is worth asking: what did they do to earn this punishment?
Waxman’s committee scrutinised one incident: the killing of one of the Iraqi vice-president’s bodyguards by an allegedly drunk Blackwater contractor last Christmas Eve. Prince confirmed that Blackwater had whisked him out of Iraq and fired him, and said that he had been fined and billed for his return ticket.
According to the committee report, after the killing the state department chargé d’affaires recommended that Blackwater make a “sizable payment” to the bodyguard’s family. The official suggested $250,000, but the department’s diplomatic security service said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed”. In the end, the state department and Blackwater are said to have agreed on a $15,000 payment.
A pattern is emerging from the Congressional investigation into Blackwater: the state department urging the company to pay what amounts to hush money to victims’ families while facilitating the return of contractors involved in deadly incidents for which not a single one has faced prosecution.
2. THE BIG LIE: 'IRAN IS A THREAT'
BY
SCOTT RITTER
Iran has never manifested itself as a serious threat to the national security of the United States, or by extension as a security threat to global security. At the height of Iran’s “exportation of the Islamic Revolution” phase, in the mid-1980’s, the Islamic Republic demonstrated a less-than-impressive ability to project its power beyond the immediate borders of Iran, and even then this projection was limited to war-torn Lebanon.
Iranian military capability reached its modern peak in the late 1970’s, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi. The combined effects of institutional distrust on the part of the theocrats who currently govern the Islamic Republic of Iran concerning the conventional military institutions, leading as it did to the decay of the military through inadequate funding and the creation of a competing paramilitary organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command (IRGC), and the disastrous impact of an eight-year conflict with Iraq, meant that Iran has never been able to build up conventional military power capable of significant regional power projection, let alone global power projection.
Where Iran has demonstrated the ability for global reach is in the spread of Shi’a Islamic fundamentalism, but even in this case the results have been mixed. Other than the expansive relations between Iran (via certain elements of the IRGC) and the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, Iranian success stories when it comes to exporting the Islamic revolution are virtually non-existent. Indeed, the efforts on the part of the IRGC to export Islamic revolution abroad, especially into Europe and other western nations, have produced the opposite effect desired. Based upon observations made by former and current IRGC officers, it appears that those operatives chosen to spread the revolution in fact more often than not returned to Iran noting that peaceful coexistence with the West was not only possible but preferable to the exportation of Islamic fundamentalism. Many of these IRGC officers began to push for moderation of the part of the ruling theocrats in Iran, both in terms of interfacing with the west and domestic policies.
The concept of an inherent incompatibility between Iran, even when governed by a theocratic ruling class, and the United States is fundamentally flawed, especially from the perspective of Iran. The Iran of today seeks to integrate itself responsibly with the nations of the world, clumsily so in some instances, but in any case a far cry from the crude attempts to export Islamic revolution in the early 1980’s. The United States claims that Iran is a real and present danger to the security of the US and the entire world, and cites Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear technology, Iran’s continued support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s “status” as a state supporter of terror, and Iranian interference into the internal affairs of Iraq and Afghanistan as the prime examples of how this threat manifests itself.
On every point, the case made against Iran collapses upon closer scrutiny. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), mandated to investigate Iran’s nuclear programs, has concluded that there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Furthermore, the IAEA has concluded that it is capable of monitoring the Iranian nuclear program to ensure that it does not deviate from the permitted nuclear energy program Iran states to be the exclusive objective of its endeavors. Iran’s support of the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon - Iranian protestors shown here supporting Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during an anti-Israel rally - while a source of concern for the State of Israel, does not constitute a threat to American national security primarily because the support provided is primarily defensive in nature, designed to assist Hezbollah in deterring and repelling an Israeli assault of sovereign Lebanese territory. Similarly, the bulk of the data used by the United States to substantiate the claims that Iran is a state sponsor of terror is derived from the aforementioned support provided to Hezbollah. Other arguments presented are either grossly out of date (going back to the early 1980’s when Iran was in fact exporting Islamic fundamentalism) or unsubstantiated by fact.
The US claims concerning Iranian interference in both Iraq and Afghanistan ignore the reality that both nations border Iran, both nations were invaded and occupied by the United States, not Iran, and that Iran has a history of conflict with both nations that dictates a keen interest concerning the internal domestic affairs of both nations. The United States continues to exaggerate the nature of Iranian involvement in Iraq, arresting “intelligence operatives” who later turned out to be economic and diplomatic officials invited to Iraq by the Iraqi government itself. Most if not all the claims made by the United States concerning Iranian military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been backed up with anything stronger than rhetoric, and more often than not are subsequently contradicted by other military and governmental officials, citing a lack of specific evidence.
Iran as a nation represents absolutely no threat to the national security of the United States, or of its major allies in the region, including Israel. The media hype concerning alleged statements made by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has created and sustained the myth that Iran seeks the destruction of the State of Israel. Two points of fact directly contradict this myth. First and foremost, Ahmadinejad never articulated an Iranian policy objective to destroy Israel, rather noting that Israel’s policies would lead to its “vanishing from the pages of time.” Second, and perhaps most important, Ahmadinejad does not make foreign policy decisions on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the sole purview of the “Supreme Leader,” the Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2003 Khomeini initiated a diplomatic outreach to the United States inclusive of an offer to recognize Israel’s right to exist. This initiative was rejected by the United States, but nevertheless represents the clearest indication of what the true policy objective of Iran is vis-à-vis Israel.
The fact of the matter is that the “Iranian Threat” is derived solely from the rhetoric of those who appear to seek confrontation between the United States and Iran, and largely divorced from fact-based reality. A recent request on the part of Iran to allow President Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at “ground zero” in Manhattan was rejected by New York City officials. The resulting public outcry condemned the Iranian initiative as an affront to all Americans, citing Iran’s alleged policies of supporting terrorism. This knee-jerk reaction ignores the reality that Iran was violently opposed to al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan throughout the 1990’s leading up to 2001, and that Iran was one of the first Muslim nations to condemn the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.
A careful fact-based assessment of Iran clearly demonstrates that it poses no threat to the legitimate national security interests of the United States. However, if the United States chooses to implement its own unilateral national security objectives concerning regime change in Iran, there will most likely be a reaction from Iran which produces an exceedingly detrimental impact on the national security interests of the United States, including military, political and economic. But the notion of claiming a nation like Iran to constitute a security threat simply because it retains the intent and capability to defend its sovereign territory in the face of unprovoked military aggression is absurd. In the end, however, such absurdity is trumping fact-based reality when it comes to shaping the opinion of the American public on the issue of the Iranian “threat.”
BY
CYNTHIA TUCKER
Just imagine that Vice President Dick Cheney went on a visit to a foreign country - Great Britain, let’s say - and that one of his Secret Service agents was shot several times and killed by a drunken bodyguard hired by the Brits. Let’s say the British government quickly hushed up the crime and spirited the bodyguard out of the country, leaving him free to go about his life.
Americans would, of course, be outraged - and rightly so. They would demand justice for the slain Secret Service agent. The ensuing controversy would preoccupy the White House and damage relations between the two countries.
So what happened when a Blackwater USA security guard fatally shot a bodyguard of Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi? The Blackwater man, who had been drinking heavily, had left a Christmas party in the Green Zone last year when he was confronted by the Iraqi guards. According to reports, he opened fire, killing a 32-year-old Iraqi. The Blackwater employee was spirited out of the country, with the help of the U.S. State Department. He has so far faced no criminal proceedings. He was not subject to any Iraqi laws or to U.S. military jurisdiction.
If Americans are still puzzled by the hostility with which so many Iraqis - indeed, so many Muslims - view the U.S. occupation, this one episode ought to go a long way toward explaining the resentment. While the Bush administration continues to justify its invasion by pretending to a deep concern for the Iraqi people, the lives of average Iraqis haven’t counted for much. Blackwater paid the family of the slain Iraqi bodyguard $20,000 in compensation.
Last week, the House voted to hold private contractors accountable in U.S. courts for any misdeeds abroad; the Senate is likely to follow suit. Even if the law passes, the damage is done. A heavy-handed occupation has alienated much of the Middle East.
In what seems another lifetime, President Bush promised a “humble” foreign policy. But after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he followed a swaggering and belligerent course, fueled by cowboy rhetoric and a stubborn, even messianic, insistence that he knew what was right. His policies were supported by a scared-silly American public desperate to believe that our military might still guarantee our continued dominance of the world.
Many of us, however, didn’t want to send our own sons and daughters to supplement that military power. So we relied heavily on mercenaries from companies such as Blackwater and DynCorp and Triple Canopy to do dirty jobs in dangerous places.
In testimony before Congress last week, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, vigorously defended his company as “Americans, working for Americans, protecting Americans.” Of the drunken bodyguard, he said, “We can’t flog him. We can’t incarcerate him. That’s up to the Justice Department.” He also noted that the bodyguard was forced to forfeit his Christmas bonus and pay his own way back to the United States.
For all the credit the White House takes for establishing a democratically elected government in Iraq, it is hardly a sovereign nation. If it were, it would be able to prosecute Blackwater’s bodyguards under its own laws and eject them from the country. But because the State Department depends so heavily on contractors, it’s unlikely they’ll be leaving even if the Iraqi government wants them out. That makes our presence a foreign occupation, not benign assistance.
Not so long ago, the United States was a master in the use of soft power and the light touch: food for famine victims, medicine for sick children, visas for foreign students, radio broadcasts about the wonders of our country, diplomatic missions to beg, cajole and threaten wayward countries back into line. As Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli has noted, the U.S. Agency for International Development employed about 15,000 people during the Vietnam era. Today, it has about 3,000. Now we use our billions to hire mercenaries.
It’s no wonder the rest of the world doesn’t hold us in such high regard anymore.
4. PELOSIE SAYS US APPEARS GUILTY OF TORTURE
(US House Speaker says violent interrogation methods do not work, harm US reputation)
BY
REPORTERS OF AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
The country’s highest ranking Democrat also said that she still hoped to get most US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2008, despite the party’s repeated failure to win over enough Republicans in Congress to an exit strategy.
Interviewed on Fox News, Pelosi said reported interrogation tactics such as simulated drowning, head slapping and exposure to extreme temperatures would amount to banned torture.
“There is a legal definition of torture that I believe this would fit. The president says it is not,” she said.
But the House speaker said she had received only limited briefings from the Bush administration on its interrogation tactics, and had not seen a controversial 2005 memo issued by the Justice Department.
The New York Times on Thursday alleged that the Justice Department document had authorized and justified the use of violent techniques in interrogations of “war on terror” suspects.
The legal department document was circulated in the same year that Congress adopted a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, the Times said.
“This government does not torture people. We stick to US law and our international obligations,” Bush insisted Friday.
The president defended his “war on terror” launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks as well as the secret policy of detaining and interrogating suspects.
“I have put this program in place for a reason and that is to better protect the American people and when we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re gonna detain him and you bet we’re gonna question him,” he added.
Pelosi, however, said violent interrogation methods did not work “and I think that protecting the American people being our top priority, we should do so in a way that is within the law.”
“And experts agree that they do not obtain reliable intelligence through using these tactics and you diminish our reputation in the world, which hurts the cooperation we need to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people.”
On Iraq, Pelosi said she was “much more optimistic” about executing a swift end to the war than Democratic presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton appear to be.
She said that despite setbacks in a series of congressional votes, the Democratic party’s strategy is still to get US troops “out in large numbers by the end of next year, and that is not contradicted by the leadership of Iraq.”
A “minimal” force could remain beyond 2008 to guard US diplomats and fight Al-Qaeda extremists, Pelosi said.
Clinton, the clear Democratic frontrunner for next year’s White House race, says she also wants to start pulling the bulk of US troops out of Iraq, but said last month that she could foresee now what she would “inherit” from Bush.
5. US CONSIDRED A RADIOLOGICAL WEAPON
BY
ROBERT BURNS
Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military’s pursuit of a “new concept of warfare” using radioactive materials from atomic bomb making to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations.
Military historians who have researched the broader radiological warfare program said in interviews that they had never before seen evidence that it included pursuit of an assassination weapon. Targeting public figures in such attacks is not unheard of; just last year an unknown assailant used a tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London.
No targeted individuals are mentioned in references to the assassination weapon in the government documents declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP in 1995.
The decades-old records were released recently to the AP, heavily censored by the government to remove specifics about radiological warfare agents and other details. The censorship reflects concern that the potential for using radioactive poisons as a weapon is more than a historic footnote; it is believed to be sought by present-day terrorists bent on attacking U.S. targets.
The documents give no indication whether a radiological weapon for targeting high-ranking individuals was ever used or even developed by the United States. They leave unclear how far the Army project went. One memo from December 1948 outlined the project and another memo that month indicated it was under way. The main sections of several subsequent progress reports in 1949 were removed by censors before release to the AP.
The broader effort on offensive uses of radiological warfare apparently died by about 1954, at least in part because of the Defense Department’s conviction that nuclear weapons were a better bet.
Whether the work migrated to another agency such as the CIA is unclear. The project was given final approval in November 1948 and began the following month, just one year after the CIA’s creation in 1947.
It was a turbulent time on the international scene. In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and two months later Mao Zedong’s communists triumphed in China’s civil war.
As U.S. scientists developed the atomic bomb during World War II, it was recognized that radioactive agents used or created in the manufacturing process had lethal potential. The government’s first public report on the bomb project, published in 1945, noted that radioactive fission products from a uranium-fueled reactor could be extracted and used “like a particularly vicious form of poison gas.”
Among the documents released to the AP - an Army memo dated Dec. 16, 1948, and labeled secret - described a crash program to develop a variety of military uses for radioactive materials. Work on a “subversive weapon for attack of individuals or small groups” was listed as a secondary priority, to be confined to feasibility studies and experiments.
The top priorities listed were:
1 - Weapons to contaminate “populated or otherwise critical areas for long periods of time.”
2 - Munitions combining high explosives with radioactive material “to accomplish physical damage and radioactive contamination simultaneously.”
3 - Air and-or surface weapons that would spread contamination across an area to be evacuated, thereby rendering it unusable by enemy forces.
The stated goal was to produce a prototype for the No. 1 and No. 2 priority weapons by Dec. 31, 1950.
The 4th ranked priority was “munitions for attack on individuals” using radioactive agents for which there is “no means of therapy.”
“This class of munitions is proposed for use by secret agents or subversive units for lethal attacks against small groups of important individuals, e.g., during meetings of civilian or military leaders,” it said.
Assassination of foreign figures by agents of the U.S. government was not explicitly outlawed until President Gerald R. Ford signed an executive order in 1976 in response to revelations that the CIA had plotted in the 1960s to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro, including by poisoning.
The Dec. 16, 1948, memo said a lethal attack against individuals using radiological material should be done in a way that makes it impossible to trace the U.S. government’s involvement, a concept known as “plausible deniability” that is central to U.S. covert actions.
“The source of the munition, the fact that an attack has been made, and the kind of attack should not be determinable, if possible,” it said. “The munition should be inconspicuous and readily transportable.”
Radioactive agents were thought to be ideal for this use, the document said, because of their high toxicity and the fact that the targeted individuals could not smell, taste or otherwise sense the attack.
“It should be possible, for example, to develop a very small munition which could function unnoticeably and which would set up an invisible, yet highly lethal concentration in a room, with the effects noticeable only well after the time of attack,” it said.
“The time for lethal effects could, it is believed, be controlled within limits by the amount of radioactive agent dispersed. The toxicities are such that should relatively high concentrations be required for early lethal effects, on a weight basis, even such concentrations may be found practicable.”
Tom Bielefeld, a Harvard physicist who has studied radiological weapons issues, said that while he had never heard of this project, its technical aims sounded feasible.
Bielefeld noted that polonium, the radioactive agent used to kill Litvinenko in November 2006, has just the kind of features that would be suitable for the lethal mission described in the Dec. 16 memo.
Barton Bernstein, a Stanford history professor who has done extensive research on the U.S. military’s radiological warfare efforts, said he did not believe this aspect had previously come to light.
“This is one of those items that surprises us but should not shock us, because in the Cold War all kinds of ways of killing people, in all kinds of manners - inhumane, barbaric and even worse - were periodically contemplated at high levels in the American government in what was seen as a just war against a hated and hateful enemy,” Bernstein said.
The project was run by the Army Chemical Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Alden H. Waitt, and supervised by a now-defunct agency called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. The project’s first chief was Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Army’s head of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs. The radiological project was approved by Groves’ successor, Maj. Gen. Kenneth D. Nichols.
The released documents were in files of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project held by the National Archives.
Among the officials copied in on the Dec. 16 memo were Herbert Scoville, Jr., then the technical director of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and later the CIA’s deputy director for research, and Samuel T. Cohen, a physicist with RAND Corp. who had worked on the Manhattan Project.
The initial go-ahead for the Army to pursue its radiological weapons project was given in May 1948, a point in U.S. history, following the successful use of two atomic bombs against Japan to end World War II, when the military was eager to explore the implications of atomic science for the future of warfare.
In a July 1948 memo outlining the program’s intent, before specifics had received final approval, a key focus was on long-lasting contamination of large land areas where residents would be told that unless the areas were abandoned they probably would die from radiation within one to 10 years.
“It is thought that this is a new concept of warfare, with results that cannot be predicted,” it said.
6. HOW THE MILITARY CAN STOP AN IRAN ATTACK
BY
JEREMY BRECHER AND BRENDAN SMITH
Sometimes history–and necessity–make strange bedfellows. The German general staff transported Lenin to Russia to lead a revolution. Union-buster Ronald Reagan played godfather to the birth of the Polish Solidarity union. Equally strange–but perhaps equally necessary–is the addressee of a new appeal signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Cindy Sheehan, Ann Wright and many other leaders of the American peace movement:
“ATTENTION: Joint Chiefs of Staff and all U.S. Military Personnel: Do not attack Iran.”
The initiative responds to the growing calls for an attack on Iran from the likes of Norman Podhoretz and John Bolton, and the reports of growing war momentum in Washington by reporters like Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and Joe Klein of Time. International lawyer Scott Horton says European diplomats at the recent United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York “believe that the United States will launch an air war on Iran, and that it will occur within the next six to eight months.” He puts the likelihood of conflict at 70 percent.
The initiative also responds to the recent failure of Congress to pass legislation requiring its approval before an attack on Iran and the hawk-driven resolution encouraging the President to act against the Iranian military. Marcy Winograd, president of Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles, who originally suggested the petition, told The Nation:
If we thought that our lawmakers would restrain the Bush Administration from further endangering Americans and the rest of the world, we would concentrate solely on them. If we went to Las Vegas today, would we find anyone willing to bet on this Congress restraining Bush? I don’t think so.
Because our soldiers know the horrors of war–severed limbs, blindness, brain injury–they are loath to romanticize the battlefield or glorify expansion of the Iraq genocide that has left a million Iraqis dead and millions others exiled.
Military Resistance
What could be stranger than a group of peace activists petitioning the military to stop a war? And yet there is more logic here than meets the eye.
Asked in an online discussion September 27 whether the Bush Administration will launch a war against Iran, Washington Post intelligence reporter Dana Priest replied, “Frankly, I think the military would revolt and there would be no pilots to fly those missions.”
She acknowledged that she had indulged in a bit of hyperbole, then added, “but not much.”
There have been many other hints of military disaffection from plans to attack Iran–indeed, military resistance may help explain why, despite years of rumors about Bush Administration intentions, such an attack has not yet occurred. A Pentagon consultant told Hersh more than a year ago, “There is a war about the war going on inside the building.” Hersh also reported that Gen. Peter Pace had forced Bush and Cheney to remove the “nuclear option” from the plans for possible conflict with Iran–in the Pentagon it was known as the April Revolution.
In December, according to Time correspondent Joe Klein, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a secure room known as The Tank. The President was told that “the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran’s government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities.” But the Joint Chiefs were “unanimously opposed to taking that course of action,” both because it might not eliminate Iran’s nuclear capacity and because Iran could respond devastatingly in Iraq–and in the United States.
In an article published by Inter Press Service, historian and national security policy analyst Gareth Porter reported that Adm. William Fallon, Bush’s then-nominee to head the Central Command (Centcom), sent the Defense Department a strongly worded message earlier this year opposing the plan to send a third carrier strike group into the Persian Gulf. In another Inter Press analysis, Porter quotes someone who met with Fallon saying an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.” He added, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional…. There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.”
Military officers in the field have frequently refuted Bush Administration claims about Iranian arms in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porter says that when a State Department official this June publicly accused Iran of giving arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the US commander of NATO forces there twice denied the claim.
More recently, top brass have warned that the United States is not prepared for new wars. Gen. George Casey, the Army’s top commander, recently made a highly unusual personal request for a House Armed Services Committee hearing in which he warned that “we are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight and are unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other potential contingencies.” While this could surely be interpreted as a call for more troops and resources, it may simultaneously be a warning shot against adventures in Iran.
An October 8 report by Tim Shipman in the Telegraph says that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has “taken charge of the forces in the American government opposed to a US military attack on Iran.” He cites Pentagon sources saying that Gates is waging “a subtle campaign to undermine the Cheney camp” and that he is “encouraging the Army’s senior officers to speak frankly about the overstretch of forces, and the difficulty of fighting another war.” Shipman reports Gates has “forged an alliance with Mike McConnell, the national director of intelligence, and Michael Hayden, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to ensure that Mr. Cheney’s office is not the dominant conduit of information and planning on Iran to Mr. Bush.”
Every indication is that the “war about the war” is ongoing. Hersh recently reported that the attack-Iran faction has found a new approach that it hopes will be more acceptable to the public–and presumably to the Pentagon brass. Instead of broad bombing attacks designed to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capacity and promote regime change, it calls for “surgical strikes” on Revolutionary Guard facilities; they would be justified as retaliation in the “proxy war” that General Petraeus alleges Iran is fighting “against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.” According to Hersh, the revised bombing plan is “gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon.” But Israeli officials are concerned that such a plan might leave Iran’s nuclear capacity intact.
Appeal to Principle
The appeal for military personnel to resist an attack is primarily based on principle. It asserts that any pre-emptive US attack on Iran would be illegal under international law and a crime under US law. Such an attack would violate Article II, Section 4, of the UN Charter forbidding the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Since Iran has not attacked the United States, an attack against it without authorization by the Security Council would be a violation of international law. Under the US Constitution and the UN Charter, this is the law of the land. Under the military’s own laws, armed forces have an obligation to refuse orders that violate US law and the Constitution. And under the principles established by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II, “just obeying orders” is no defense for officials who participate in war crimes.
But the petition also addresses some of the practical concerns that have clearly motivated military officers to oppose an attack on Iran. It would open US soldiers in Iraq to decimation by Iranian forces or their Iraqi allies. It would sow the seeds of hatred for generations. Like the attack on Iraq, it would create more enemies, promote terrorism and make American families less safe.
The petitioners recognize the potential risks of such action to military personnel. “If you heed our call and disobey an illegal order you could be falsely charged with crimes including treason. You could be falsely court martialed. You could be imprisoned.”
But they also accept risks themselves, aware that “in violation of our First Amendment rights, we could be charged under remaining section of the unconstitutional Espionage Act or other unconstitutional statute, and that we could be fined, imprisoned, or barred from government employment.”
In ordinary times, peace activists would hardly be likely to turn to the military as allies. Indeed, they would rightfully be wary of military officers acting on their own, rather than those of their civilian superiors–in violation of the Constitution’s provisions for civilian oversight of the military. But these are hardly ordinary times. While the public is highly dubious of getting into another war in the Middle East, there now appear to be virtually no institutional barriers to doing so.
Military-Civilian Alliance
Is there a basis for cooperation between the military brass and citizens who believe an attack on Iran would be criminal and/or suicidal? Perhaps. The brass can go public with the truth and ask Congress to provide a platform for explaining the real consequences of an attack on Iran. They can call for a national debate that is not manipulated by the White House. (They can also inform other players of the consequences: tell Wall Street the effects on oil and stock prices and tell European military and political leaders what it is likely to mean in terms of terrorism.) The peace movement has already forged an alliance with Iraq War veterans who oppose the war and with high military officials who oppose torture; a tacit alliance with the brass to halt an attack on Iran is a logical next step.
Such an approach puts the problem of civilian control of the military in a different light. The purpose of civilian control, after all, is not to subject the military to the dictatorial control of one man who may, at the least, express the foolishness and frailty that all flesh is heir to. The purpose is to subject the military to the control of democratic governance, which is to say of an informed public and its representatives.
What contribution can the peace movement make to this process? We can cover military officials’ backs when they speak out–no one is better placed than the peace movement to defend them against Bushite charges of defying civilian control. We can help open a forum for military officers to speak out. Many retired officers have spoken out publicly on the folly of the war in Iraq. We can use our venues in universities and communities to invite them to speak out even more forcefully on the folly of an attack on Iran. We can place ads pointing out military resistance to an attack on Iran and featuring warnings of its possible consequences from past and present military officials. And we can encourage lawmakers to reach out to military officials and offer to give them cover and a forum to speak out. Says petition initiator Marcy Winograd, “I’d like to see peace activists and soldiers sit down, break bread, march together, testify together and forge a powerful union to end the next war before the bloodletting begins.”
The peace movement leaders who appealed to the military had to break through the conventional presumption that the brass were their enemies in all situations. Such an unlikely alliance could be a starting point for a nonviolent response to the Bush Administration’s pursuit of a permanent state of war.
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