[NYTr] Chances of attacking Iran between slim and none

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Dave Muller - southnews

Seattle Post-Intelligencer - Nov 16, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/339833_iranwaronline18.html


Chances of attacking Iran between slim and none

By ALBERT R. HUNT
GUEST COLUMNIST

President Bush raises the specter of World War III if Iran goes
nuclear. Vice President Dick Cheney threatens military action.
Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz urges the U.S. to bomb the country.
And the Senate passes a resolution that critics say is a blank check
for war.

This is, in the phrase of the malaprop-prone former American baseball 
great Yogi Berra, "deja vu all over again."

Except it isn't. The military, economic and political climate for
action against Iran is infinitely less hospitable than five years ago,
when the U.S. was preparing for war with Iraq. The prospects for an
attack on Iran in the final 14 months of the Bush administration are
somewhere between slim and none.

"No one seriously argues that Iran will be capable of deploying a 
nuclear force within the next few years," says American defense scholar 
Anthony Cordesman. "Without that, there simply is not a case for going 
to war."

Yet the Senate approved a silly, politically inspired measure declaring 
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group. It was 
supported by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Her Democratic presidential 
opponents, acting equally silly, say she provided Bush with a 
justification for an attack.

If the U.S. should have deployed twice the roughly 150,000 troops it
has sent to Iraq to fight that war, just think what it would take for a
more powerful country with almost three times the population. The
American military is overstretched.

Thus, the most serious alternative discussed is a massive air strike by 
U.S. cruise missiles and jet fighters loaded with "smart weapons." They 
would destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, disrupt the country and 
perhaps, according to the most optimistic neoconservatives, spark a 
revolution.

If, as some suggest, this is the view of the Cheney camp, here's an 
inconvenient reminder: It was the vice president who assured Americans, 
unequivocally and repeatedly, that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction, and was on the verge of having a nuclear weapon, in 2002.

Cheney also was the hardheaded geopolitical realist who, according to 
Robert Draper's semi-authorized book on Bush, assured then-House 
Republican leader Dick Armey that the Iraqis are "going to welcome us. 
It'll be like the American army going through the streets of Paris. 
They're sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will
be so happy with their freedoms that we'll probably back ourselves out
of there within a month or two."

That may have been one of the most flawed assessments in modern
American history.

Most Iranian experts doubt any surgical strike would be effective 
against whatever the Iranians possess -- and there's little reason to 
think American intelligence is any better today than five years ago.
The attacks would have to be persistent and repeated; countless
civilians would be killed.

This would produce retaliation from Iran and its Hezbollah terrorists,
a more lethal and pervasive threat than al-Qaida; it would escalate 
anti-American tensions in the region and possibly destabilize several 
regimes.

Last month, the London-based Oxford Research Group issued a report on 
the problems facing the U.S. in Iraq and in the war on terrorists. 
"Going to war with Iran will make matters far worse, playing directly 
into the hands of extreme elements and adding greatly to the violence 
across the region," warned the author, Paul Rogers, a professor at the 
University of Bradford.

This analysis is shared by many leading American military, diplomatic 
and intelligence experts.

Among the retaliatory capabilities of the Iranians, American 
intelligence officials fear, would be the use of the 2,000 mines they 
are believed to possess, to cripple shipping through the Strait of 
Hormuz, where more than one-fifth of the world's oil shipments flow. If 
you think $100-a-barrel oil threatens the global economy, imagine what 
$200 might do. International financial guru Nouriel Roubini says that's 
precisely what would happen.

Conversations with several Republican members of Congress, a couple of 
current administration officials and former top national security 
advisers yield the same view. Indeed, it's not even clear the vice 
president is an advocate of action, as opposed to tough talk, on Iran.

Moreover, unlike 2002 when the neoconservative war hawks, led by the 
Pentagon and the vice president's office, were dominant, other leading 
figures in the administration -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
Admiral William Fallon, the head of Central Command for the Middle
East, and probably Condoleezza Rice all think military engagement with
Iran is a recipe for disaster.

Like all presidents in the homestretch, Bush thinks about his legacy
and would like to add some finishing touches; he has almost no domestic 
options, so foreign policy is the focus. Perhaps a deal with North 
Korea, maybe some progress in the Middle East and a few trade deals.

In our system, a major military action of choice isn't done without a 
consensus, and certainly not in the final months of a presidency. That 
reality is being ignored by even otherwise- smart analysts, such as 
Chicago economist David Hale, who last week suggested that if the 
Democrats win the election next November, the president will strike
Iran before he leaves office.

Instead, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, in a critical speech 
on the administration's Iranian policy, said: "One of the most 
significant and potentially lasting contributions that this president 
could leave the United States and the world would be to begin to
reverse the dangerous slide of America's global standing and influence."

That wouldn't be easy. Last year William F. Buckley Jr., the most 
influential American conservative during the past half- century, was 
asked about the Bush legacy: "Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune
that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq," he said. "If he'd
invented the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't get him out of his jam."

Neither would an ill-advised attack on Iran.