SubscribeInside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States. A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit. “The target array in Iran is huge, but it’s amorphous,” a high-ranking general told me. “The question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious?” The high-ranking general added that the military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. “We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq,” he said.The Last Stand
In 1986, Congress authorized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to act as the “principal military adviser” to the President. In this case, I was told, the current chairman, Marine General Peter Pace, has gone further in his advice to the White House by addressing the consequences of an attack on Iran. “Here’s the military telling the President what he can’t do politically”—raising concerns about rising oil prices, for example—the former senior intelligence official said. “The J.C.S. chairman going to the President with an economic argument—what’s going on here?”this is awesome.
late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The huge complex includes large underground facilities built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in the ground and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand centrifuges. “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ ” At the time, a number of retired officers, including two Army major generals who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and Charles Swannack, Jr., had begun speaking out against the Administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This period is known to many in the Pentagon as “the April Revolution.”
“An event like this doesn’t get papered over very quickly,” the former official added. “The bad feelings over the nuclear option are still felt. The civilian hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the brass, and the brass feel they were tricked into it”—the nuclear planning—“by being asked to provide all options in the planning papers.”
Centcom's original commission was to respond to possible Soviet aggression in the region in the cold-war era; today, in very different conditions, much of its geopolitical concern has been neatly transferred to China (see Robert D Kaplan, "How We Would Fight China", Atlantic Monthly, June 2005). What is intriguing is the tension between the presentation of US deployments in the middle east and southwest Asia as being tied to the threat of al-Qaida as a central part of the global war on terror, and the organisation of a major wargame devoted entirely to oil security.The United States vs China: the war for oil.
As the United States military gears up for Donald Rumsfeld's "long war", the issue of China and its linkage with Gulf oil security is an unspoken element that comes to the surface only when such exercises as the Hawaii wargame are revealed and reported. It is a salutary reminder: while all the public emphasis is on the war on terror, China looms in US military planning as a powerful presence behind the scenes.
The "great game" now being played out in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider region has much more to do with the twin issues of oil and China than is readily admitted. It is just one more reason why any talk of a complete US military withdrawal from Iraq is simply unthinkable.
He might move for the military option, but this article could very well change things. The senior leadership is now on the record with their opposition. It would be politically very dangerous for him to proceed now that this is out in the public.
...I’ll give you the thoughts of retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who... conducted a war game simulation on a possible Iran invasion for the December 2004 Atlantic Monthly, but who also graciously answered several of my questions yesterday on this Hersh story.The Significance Of Hersh's Story
...I asked Gardiner about some of Hersh's major points and the sources Hersh uses inside the Pentagon:
Sy's sources inside the Pentagon could not be better.
I suggested to Gardiner that it appears that Bush would opt for an air campaign supported by Special Forces, at Cheney’s urging.
He might move for the military option, but this article could very well change things. The senior leadership is now on the record with their opposition. It would be politically very dangerous for him to proceed now that this is out in the public.
Gardiner's assessments of the significance of this story:
This has to be seen as a watershed event. The military have challenged the White House. It was more subtle than MacArthur in Korea, but still it is a major challenge. They have been stage props for photo ops for too long; they are saying enough is enough.
I asked Gardiner to update his prediction of the odds of an attack before November, and what he thinks about those chances after the election:
About 4 in 10 before November.
...And Gardiner then concluded with this:
I think he is going to have trouble doing anything.
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posted by AspectRatio at 7:04 AM on July 2, 2006