Are Neo-cons Preparing For Iran Attack?

The following are extracts from a Dec. 4 article by prominent US journalist Robert Dreyfuss (with underlining by APS): "What, exactly, does president-elect... Obama's mild-mannered choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, former senator Tom Daschle, have to do with neo-conservatives who want to bomb Iran? A familiar coalition of hawks, hardliners and neo-cons expects Obama's proposed talks with Iran to fail - and they're already proposing an escalating set of measures instead. Some are meant to occur alongside any future talks. These include steps to enhance co-ordination with Israel, tougher sanctions against Iran, and a region-wide military build-up of US strike forces, including the prepositioning of military supplies within striking distance of that country.

"Once the future negotiations break down, as they are convinced will happen, they propose that Washington quickly escalate to war-like measures, including a US Navy-enforced embargo on Iranian fuel imports and a blockade of that country's oil exports. Finally, of course, comes the strategic military attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran that so many of them have wanted for so long.

"It's tempting to dismiss the hawks now as twice-removed from power: first, figures like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were purged from top posts in the... Bush administration after 2004; then the election of Obama and the announcement on Monday (Dec. 1) of his centrist, realist-minded team of establishment foreign policy gurus seemed to nail the doors to power shut for the neo-cons, who have bitterly criticized the president-elect's plans to talk with Iran, withdraw US forces from Iraq, and abandon the reckless "war on terror" rhetoric of the Bush era.

"...When it comes to Iran, however, it's far too early to dismiss the hawks. To be sure, they are now plying their trade from outside the corridors of power, but they have more friends inside the Obama camp than most people realize. Several top advisers to Obama - including Tony Lake,...[UN] ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle and Dennis Ross, along with leading Democratic hawks like Richard Holbrooke, close to...Biden or... Clinton - have made common cause with war-minded think-tank hawks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and other hardline institutes.

"Last spring, Tony Lake and Susan Rice, for example, took part in a WINEP '2008 Presidential Task Force' study which resulted in a report entitled, 'Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen US-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge'. The Institute, part of the Washington-based Israel lobby, was founded in co-ordination with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and has been vigorously supporting a confrontation with Iran.

"The task force report, issued in June, was overseen by four WINEP heavyweights: Robert Satloff, WINEP's executive director, Patrick Clawson, its chief Iran analyst, David Makovsky, a senior fellow, and Dennis Ross, an adviser to Obama who is also a WINEP fellow. Endorsed by both Lake and Rice, the report opted for an alarmist view of Iran's nuclear program and proposed that the next president set up a formal US-Israeli mechanism for co-ordinating policy towards Iran (including any future need for 'preventive military action'). It drew attention to Israeli fears that 'the United States may be reconciling itself to the idea of 'living with an Iranian nuclear bomb', and it raised the spurious fear that Iran plans to arm terrorist groups with nuclear weapons.

"...Just as in the wars against Iraq in 1990-1991 and 2003-2008, the US hardly needs Israeli aid, which would be both superfluous and inflammatory. Dennis Ross and others at WINEP, however, would strongly disagree that Israel is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Ross, who served as Middle East envoy for president George H W Bush and then Bill Clinton, was also a key participant in a September 2008 task force chaired by two former senators, Republican Daniel Coats and Democrat Chuck Robb, and led by Michael Makovsky, brother of WINEP's David Makovsky, who served in the Office of the Secretary of Defence in the heyday of the Pentagon neo-cons from 2002-2006.

"Robb, incidentally, had already served as the neo-cons' channel into the 2006 Iraq Study Group (ISG), chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton. According to Bob Woodward's latest book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, it was Robb who insisted that the Baker-Hamilton task force include an option for a 'surge' in Iraq.

"The report of the Coats-Robb task force - 'Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development' - went far beyond the WINEP task force report that Lake and Rice signed off on. It concluded that any negotiations with Iran were unlikely to succeed and should, in any case, be short-lived. As the report put the matter, 'It must be clear that any US-Iranian talks will not be open-ended, but will be limited to a pre-determined time period so that Tehran does not try to 'run out the clock'.

"Anticipating the failure of the talks, the task force (including Ross) urged 'prepositioning military assets' coupled with a 'show of force' in the region. This would be followed almost immediately by a blockade of Iranian gasoline imports and oil exports, meant to paralyze Iran's economy, followed by what they call, vaguely, 'kinetic action'. That "kinetic action" - a US assault on Iran - should, in fact, be massive, suggested the Coats-Robb report.

"Besides hitting dozens of sites alleged to be part of Iran's nuclear research program, the attacks would target Iranian air defense and missile sites, communications systems, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps facilities, key parts of Iran's military-industrial complex, munitions storage facilities, airfields, aircraft facilities, and all of Iran's naval facilities. Eventually, they say, the US would also have to attack Iran's ground forces, electric power plants and electrical grids, bridges, and 'manufacturing plants, including steel, autos, buses, etc'....

"...That such a high-level group of luminaries should even propose steps like these - and mean it - can only be described as lunacy. That an important adviser to Obama would sign on to such a report should be shocking, though it has received next to no attention. Palling around with the neo-cons + At a November 6 forum at WINEP, Patrick Clawson, the erudite, neo-conservative strategist who serves as the organization's deputy director for research, laid out the institute's view of how to talk to Iran in the Obama era. Doing so, he said, is critically important, but only to show the rest of the world that the US has taken the last step for peace - before, of course, attacking. Then, and only then, will the US have the legitimacy it needs to launch military action against Iran"....