WarSclerotic

Military brass contemplating idea of strike against Iran again | ….

For most of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the idea of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, while never formally taken off the table, has been dismissed as the worst possible option for halting Iran’s march towards nuclear weapons. Over the last few months, however, that worst possible option has risen to the status of a possible Plan B.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for instance, has gone from arguing “Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need” in 2008 to saying “I don’t think we’re prepared to even talk about containing a nuclear Iran” in an interview with Fox News last month.

According to Joe Klein, writing in Time, U.S. military leaders have come around to considering the possibility of military action after the failure of some very good negotiated deals.

Klein quotes a recently retired U.S. military official with extensive knowledge of the Iranian issue as saying, “I started to rethink this last November. We offered the Iranians a really generous deal, which their negotiators accepted,” referring to an offer to exchange Iran’s 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium (3.5% pure) for higher-enriched (20%) uranium for medical research and use. “When the leadership shot that down, I began to think, Well, we made the good-faith effort to engage. What do we do now?”

While negotiations and diplomacy remain the preferred course of action, Klein writes, the repeated rejection of negotiated deals by the Iranian leadership has pushed diplomatic and military leaders into a corner. Klein reports that U.S. military planners have moved well along the path towards planning targeted military strikes, even including the Israelis in the planning process as protection against a rogue strike by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Adding to the sudden resurfacing of a military option: the opinion of Sunni Muslim leaders in neighboring Persian Gulf states. Yousef al-Otaiba said on July 6 that he favors a military strike despite the economic and military damage it would likely cause his country, and Klein reports that Saudi officials have vigorously pressed the case for a strike to visiting American diplomats. Several states in the region, including Jordan and Egypt, have stated that if Iran goes nuclear, they will too, adding to the destabilizing threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

For now, at least officially, military action against Iran remains unthinkable for the reasons Gates gave back in 2008: the attack would prompt retaliation against America and its allies, including Israel, from Iran and its proxy Hezbollah and infuriate the Russians and Chinese, who the U.S. has been assiduously cultivating as members of a unified front against a nuclear Iran. It could be, as Klein speculates in his article, that the saber-rattling is merely an effort to get Iran to negotiate in earnest, but the track record so far on such efforts suggests that the Iranian leadership remains unwilling to offer more than window dressing. In which case, the talk of military action might be real, and the world should prepare for the worst-case scenario.

This entry was posted on July 15, 2010 at 10:46 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.