thedrifter
10-02-04, 06:20 AM
09-30-2004
From the Editor:
The ‘November Surprise’
By Ed Offley
By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
--President George W. Bush, Jan. 29, 2002
What will happen in November?
By that I do not mean the presidential election outcome on Nov. 2, but rather, the steadily growing crisis between the Western world and Iran sparked by that regime’s relentless efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to carry them. No, a “November surprise” will have nothing to do with American politics or Iraq, but, rather, with the Iranian nuclear crisis.
As Israeli defense analyst Zev Chafets put it this week, “The ayatollahs are about to go atomic.”
In recent months, the theocratic dictators of Tehran have stonewalled European diplomats, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and the Bush administration in what can only be described as a single-minded campaign to create a nuclear arsenal. Moreover, Iran has engaged in bellicose threats to attack anyone who tries to interfere or thwart its program.
Experts say Iran is between one and three years away from creating nuclear warheads for its growing ballistic missile force, and will reach a “point of no return” sometime in November as it proceeds with a comprehensive enrichment program to create bomb-grade material out of its ample uranium stockpile.
The crisis, to no one’s surprise, is being acted out in the Kabuki dance of international diplomacy. After United Nations nuclear inspectors caught Iran concealing its nuclear infrastructure, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in July insisted that his nation – with some of the largest oil reserves on the planet – is merely interested in developing commercial nuclear power.
What is really happening, some experts say, is that the regime in Iraq has decided that its best chances for survival against internal political opposition is to create a confrontation with the outside world that cannot be avoided by the outside world. As Gregory R. Copley noted in an article in Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily last month:
“Tehran’s objective [in its nuclear program] is to force the United States to respond in such a fashion that the event would galvanize Iranian popular support around the [Iraqi] Administration, reducing significantly the chance that the clerical leadership would be overthrown by a U.S.-encouraged Iranian public movement.”
It is interesting to note that the Bush administration for months has deliberately downplayed the bellicose rhetoric from Iran. Despite the current low opinion of the White House toward certain European governments, the administration has acceded to the tripartite diplomatic venture by Britain, France and Germany that has accomplished nothing with Iran except to confirm that diplomacy is useless when a dictatorship is hell-bent on achieving its goal.
This is not mere cynicism on the part of the Bush administration: One side of the dilemma that it (and the rest of the world) faces is that to push hard against Tehran is to grant Iran the external enemy it seeks. As Copley noted, the mullahs in Iran genuinely fear “encirclement by hostile states (Iraq, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, the Gulf States)” as a result of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic overtures elsewhere in the region.
But the other side of the dilemma is that if the United States and Europe avoid confronting Iran over its nuclear ambitions, within the next few years Iran will have a nuclear arsenal capable of threatening its neighbors and all other countries falling within the range of its missile force. Israel, which unilaterally destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, is already making noises about not permitting a similar situation to occur in Iran.
Many experts have already said there is nothing that can be done – that the U.S. military is too stretched out in Iraq, and that no army in the world is large enough to invade and occupy Iran, that covert action would be too little and too ineffective. Once again, the uncertainty of intelligence information raises the specter of insufficient targeting data – and, in any case, a U.S. bombing strike would spark overt warfare between the United States and Iran, probably unleashing widespread terrorist attacks against us from the other side.
Unfortunately, the “do nothing” option may not be an option.
For the past 25 years, elements of the Iranian regime have engaged in covert and indirect warfare against the United States, from the bombing of the Marine barracks and U.S. Embassy in Beirut to the 1996 truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia. Like the pre-9/11 situation involving al Qaeda, our policy to look the other way only meant that we tried to avoid the reality that the other player was engaged in an attempt to attack us and kill American personnel.
A nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran is much more of a threat to the United States and the West than even a terrorist network willing to fly hijacked airliners into buildings. If the insurgency in Iraq has taught us that sometimes there are no easy solutions, the growing Iranian nuclear crisis promises to reinforce that lesson in spades.
Don’t be surprised by a “November surprise.” My bet: a blitzkrieg aerial bombing campaign against all known Iranian nuclear facilities.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=53&rnd=257.1354556992083
Ellie
From the Editor:
The ‘November Surprise’
By Ed Offley
By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
--President George W. Bush, Jan. 29, 2002
What will happen in November?
By that I do not mean the presidential election outcome on Nov. 2, but rather, the steadily growing crisis between the Western world and Iran sparked by that regime’s relentless efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to carry them. No, a “November surprise” will have nothing to do with American politics or Iraq, but, rather, with the Iranian nuclear crisis.
As Israeli defense analyst Zev Chafets put it this week, “The ayatollahs are about to go atomic.”
In recent months, the theocratic dictators of Tehran have stonewalled European diplomats, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and the Bush administration in what can only be described as a single-minded campaign to create a nuclear arsenal. Moreover, Iran has engaged in bellicose threats to attack anyone who tries to interfere or thwart its program.
Experts say Iran is between one and three years away from creating nuclear warheads for its growing ballistic missile force, and will reach a “point of no return” sometime in November as it proceeds with a comprehensive enrichment program to create bomb-grade material out of its ample uranium stockpile.
The crisis, to no one’s surprise, is being acted out in the Kabuki dance of international diplomacy. After United Nations nuclear inspectors caught Iran concealing its nuclear infrastructure, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in July insisted that his nation – with some of the largest oil reserves on the planet – is merely interested in developing commercial nuclear power.
What is really happening, some experts say, is that the regime in Iraq has decided that its best chances for survival against internal political opposition is to create a confrontation with the outside world that cannot be avoided by the outside world. As Gregory R. Copley noted in an article in Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily last month:
“Tehran’s objective [in its nuclear program] is to force the United States to respond in such a fashion that the event would galvanize Iranian popular support around the [Iraqi] Administration, reducing significantly the chance that the clerical leadership would be overthrown by a U.S.-encouraged Iranian public movement.”
It is interesting to note that the Bush administration for months has deliberately downplayed the bellicose rhetoric from Iran. Despite the current low opinion of the White House toward certain European governments, the administration has acceded to the tripartite diplomatic venture by Britain, France and Germany that has accomplished nothing with Iran except to confirm that diplomacy is useless when a dictatorship is hell-bent on achieving its goal.
This is not mere cynicism on the part of the Bush administration: One side of the dilemma that it (and the rest of the world) faces is that to push hard against Tehran is to grant Iran the external enemy it seeks. As Copley noted, the mullahs in Iran genuinely fear “encirclement by hostile states (Iraq, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, the Gulf States)” as a result of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic overtures elsewhere in the region.
But the other side of the dilemma is that if the United States and Europe avoid confronting Iran over its nuclear ambitions, within the next few years Iran will have a nuclear arsenal capable of threatening its neighbors and all other countries falling within the range of its missile force. Israel, which unilaterally destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, is already making noises about not permitting a similar situation to occur in Iran.
Many experts have already said there is nothing that can be done – that the U.S. military is too stretched out in Iraq, and that no army in the world is large enough to invade and occupy Iran, that covert action would be too little and too ineffective. Once again, the uncertainty of intelligence information raises the specter of insufficient targeting data – and, in any case, a U.S. bombing strike would spark overt warfare between the United States and Iran, probably unleashing widespread terrorist attacks against us from the other side.
Unfortunately, the “do nothing” option may not be an option.
For the past 25 years, elements of the Iranian regime have engaged in covert and indirect warfare against the United States, from the bombing of the Marine barracks and U.S. Embassy in Beirut to the 1996 truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia. Like the pre-9/11 situation involving al Qaeda, our policy to look the other way only meant that we tried to avoid the reality that the other player was engaged in an attempt to attack us and kill American personnel.
A nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran is much more of a threat to the United States and the West than even a terrorist network willing to fly hijacked airliners into buildings. If the insurgency in Iraq has taught us that sometimes there are no easy solutions, the growing Iranian nuclear crisis promises to reinforce that lesson in spades.
Don’t be surprised by a “November surprise.” My bet: a blitzkrieg aerial bombing campaign against all known Iranian nuclear facilities.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=53&rnd=257.1354556992083
Ellie