[NYTr] So will Bush nuke Iran? (RESEND)

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[complete story with URL; prior post was incomplete. - NYTr]

sent by Dave Muller - southnews


Daily Mail (UK) - Nov 17, 2007
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=494612&in_page_id=1811


So will Bush nuke Iran?

By MICHAEL BURLEIGH

Increasingly powerful voices in the U.S. are urging war against Iran to 
stop the country acquiring nuclear weapons. This week, in his Mansion 
House foreign policy speech, Gordon Brown declared the U.S. to be 
Britain's greatest ally and stressed that Iran's nuclear programme was
a matter of concern. But how could the West actually destroy Iran's 
nuclear capability? Here, one of our leading academics on war and 
terrorism warns that some in the Bush camp are considering a very 
dangerous option...

To see how an attack on Iran might begin and then play out is not
difficult.

Sceptical public opinion in the West simply won't buy any 
intelligencebased claims of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat after
the lies that were presented at the UN to justify the 2003 invasion of
Iraq.

And since 2004, the CIA has virtually no agents operating in Iran 
anyway, certainly-none able to substantiate intelligence derived from 
electronic surveillance and satellites.

Any attack is therefore likely to be justified by an IED (Improvised 
Explosive Device) going off somewhere in Iraq, which kills a
significant number of U.S. servicemen, and has the hallmark of Iranian
involvement all over it.

A parallel might be the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia
which killed 19 U.S. soldiers and was shown to be backed by Iran.

Strenuous efforts will be made to link any such bomb to the Iranian 
Revolutionary Guard - the elite force of Iranian President Ahmadinejad
- in order to justify air strikes to suppress Iran's Russian-made air 
defence systems.

These consist of about 14 airbases, and the missiles Iran has stationed 
to command the Straits of Hormuz, the waterway south of Iran through 
which some 20 per cent of the world's oil supply passes.

These attacks would be the prelude to raids on the Revolutionary Guard 
bases and installations, which, after the Iranians respond, will 
escalate into a sustained air assault on Iran's many nuclear facilities.

This is where things will get very dangerous. The main target at
Natanz, 150 miles south of Tehran, consists of chambers 75ft below
ground in which centrifuges are being produced to make the nuclear
cascade which is essential for bomb-making.

One American option is to drop Big Blu, a 30,000lb penetration bomb 
whose shock waves would destroy everything inside. Another is the 
B-61-11 bunker-busting nuclear bomb.

Anyone who imagines something akin to the "boomf" of an underground 
nuclear test with no apparent effect on the surface above the test site 
would be wrong.

There will be mushroom clouds and huge numbers of radiation victims,
far exceeding the 20,000 civilian casualties experts have calculated
would ensue from conventional bombing of Iran.

Meanwhile, Special Forces troops would be trying to stoke up tribal and 
regional uprisings.

Some are already in Iran distributing what is called "walk around"
money to the people who might help stimulate rebellion, whether the
cash is used to recruit tribal chiefs, scouts or even shepherds.

But Iran will not sit idly by as all this goes on. Since the 1979 
Islamic revolution, Iran has been a major state sponsor of terrorism, 
reaching out through surrogates as far away as Argentina where Jewish 
and Israeli targets have been attacked.

In response to the attacks, Iran will step up its support for Shiite 
insurgents in Iraq, perhaps contributing manpower as well as the 
sophisticated weaponry already supplied.

One U.S. officer said: "If we go [to war against Iran], the southern 
half of Iraq will light up like a candle."

He added that ten Mullahs simply armed with a loudspeaker truck to call 
locals to action could take Basra from the tiny force left there by the 
British. The Iranians could also stoke up their fellow Shias in Saudi 
Arabia and Afghanistan.

They will also play the Hezbollah card, activating one of the most 
deadly terrorist organisations in the world. This would result in 
Hezbollah attacking targets in the West which its operatives are
already known to have "pinged" - that is, targets they have already
recced and checked for vulnerability.

Iran will encourage the Palestinian Hamas to strike at Israel from
Gaza. And while the U.S. will insist Israel does not respond - just as
in the first Gulf War when Saddam's rockets fell on Israeli cities -
this time they might easily react to such provocation.

In the meantime, the U.S. might attack Syria, too, in a 
two-for-the-price-of-one deal - for like Iran, Syria is an egregious 
state-sponsor of terrorism.

The risk of terrorism everywhere would increase. Western intelligence 
has no idea whether Iranian spies have established covert "black 
stations" to carry out terrorist atrocities in our cities, but such 
attacks are all too likely.

They do not know either what the Iranians might do with hundreds of al 
Qaeda operatives, including two sons of Osama Bin Laden, whom they
claim to have under housearrest in Tehran.

What if Iran threw its weight behind al Qaeda?

An al Qaeda assisted with the resources of a major state is a more 
terrifying prospect than an al Qaeda financed as it is by millionaire 
Gulf Arabs or the chickenfeed it rakes in peddling jihadist videos 
outside Pakistani mosques and madrassas.

War against Iran would be disastrous and long-lasting. So we should be 
encouraged by the fact that, instead of going down this route to an 
unknown destination, Gordon Brown has called for enhanced sanctions, a 
step the Tories have been advocating for some time.

The international community has already imposed sanctions on
individuals and organisations - notably the Revolutionary Guard, which
was branded a terrorist organisation by the U.S.

But these can be bolstered by restrictions on Iran's access to 
international capital markets and to the refined petroleum which, 
paradoxically, it requires despite being one of the world's major 
oil-rich nations.

Existing sanctions have so downgraded Iran's refineries that it has to 
import 40 per cent of its petrol.

Harsh secondary sanctions could be introduced against Western firms 
which continue to trade with Iran - their greed is effectively helping 
to ratchet up the possibility of war.

Sanctions are not something the Iranians will take lying down either, 
although blocked bank accounts will elicit a different response from
the Iranians than Western bombing raids. At a time when oil prices are 
nudging $100 a barrel, the Iranians may curb oil exports, or at least 
redirect them away from the West.

While Britain, France and Germany import little Iranian oil, we would, 
nevertheless, be affected by higher global oil prices. Other countries 
such as Japan and Italy - which respectively import 12 and nine per
cent of their oil from Iran - and would be even harder hit.

Moreover, these enhanced sanctions depend on the Chinese and Russians 
playing ball at the UN Security Council. Both countries will, of
course, want to cause the over-mighty Americans maximum embarrassment.
The hope is that Putin's own concerns about Iran's capacity to cause
mischief among the Muslim populations of southern Russia and its
neighbouring countries might encourage him to put political power-play
aside for the sake of global stability.

Sanctions may be slow and imperfect, but the existing ones against Iran 
are already having a political effect.

Opposition to Iran's President Ahmadinejad has spread beyond the 
students in Iran to conservative "traitors" who feel he is taking their 
country over a precipice, or are embarrassed by his pronouncements
about wiping out Israel.

Such "traitors" are influential individuals and include two former 
presidents as well as the country's top nuclear negotiator, who this 
week resigned abruptly over policy differences with the President.

If these rifts are the result of the pressure the West has peacefully 
applied, then it seems insane to further inflame Iranian - and Syrian - 
hackles through a war that will be launched because of suspicions about 
Iran's nuclear intentions rather than certainties, and which will hence 
be illegal in the eyes of the UN.

Besides, yesterday's International Atomic Energy Agency report
indicates that Iran has begun to play ball with the inspectors.

Unpopular as it might sound, it is very difficult to argue that Iran 
should be denied nuclear power for use in a civic capacity. They want
it to underline Persian cultural superiority over the neighbouring
Arabs and to sell more of their lucrative oil by generating electricity
from atomic power.

Both Russia, and now the Gulf states, have already offered to supply 
Iran with enriched uranium, from plants based in either Russia or 
Switzerland.

Of course, I acknowledge that some elements of Iran's current regime 
undoubtedly also want a bomb, although they would need 200 of them to 
match Israel's nuclear capacity.

But, if it was possible to hammer out a deal with North Korea's Kim 
Jong-Il to abandon his quest for a bomb, it must be possible to find a 
diplomatic solution that enables Iran to generate electricity from 
nuclear power while abandoning a project that will immediately trigger 
an Arab nuclear arms race from Cairo to Riyadh.

For other countries in the Middle East are not going to tolerate much 
longer the major unintended result of the Iraq war, namely Iran's 
emergence as the regional big power.

The possibility that Iran might be reintegrated into the international 
community in return for abandoning its suicidal quest for nuclear 
weapons is exactly the strategy Gordon Brown should explore before the 
West ends up plunging yet another part of the Muslim world into the 
chaos from which terrorism flows.

Every option needs to be exhausted before anyone contemplates a war 
whose effects will make the aftermath of the Iraq war look like a walk 
in the park.

[Michael Burleigh's Blood And Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism 
will be published in February.]