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Hawkish Group Report Pushes for Military Action Against Iran
Report: U.S. must do "whatever it takes" to stop a nuclear Iran
A report released today from the neoconservative Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Project calls for stepped-up rhetoric and military actions against Iran.
Report states U.S. must make clear "its willingness to use force" (photo: REUTERS/Stringer) The report (pdf), co-authored by a 13-member bipartisan task force including John Hannah, Former National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, General (ret.) Charles Wald,
Former Deputy Commander of U.S. European Command, Mortimer Zuckerman, and Ambassador Eric Edelman, Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under George W. Bush, is skeptical of talks with Iran and doubts the effectiveness of sanctions. The group states that the U.S. must do "whatever it takes" to stop a nuclear Iran and encourages Israel beefing up its military capabilites.
Reuters reports today:
There is little evidence to suggest that U.S. President Barack Obama has any significant interest in the possibility of a military strike against Iran, though his administration has repeatedly said that all options are on the table.
To a lesser degree there has also been debate about a U.S. attack, an idea advocated by former Pentagon defense planner Matthew Kroenig in his recent Foreign Affairs Magazine article, "Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option."
The BPC report repeats the drumbeat for war with its report today. From the executive summary:
Unless the United States soon takes a more assertive leadership role, Iran could develop nuclear weapons capability in 2012 and Israel is likely to feel compelled to take unilateral military action against Iran. We must stop the clock.
Doing so will require demonstrating resolve to do whatever it takes to prevent a nuclear Iran. While we hope for a peaceful settlement, we recognize that additional leverage is required to enable it. For that reason we endorse the triple-track approach called for in previous BPC reports: diplomacy, robust sanctions, and credible, visible preparations for a military option of last resort. To augment the latter we call on U.S. leaders to enhance Israeli military capabilities so as to put additional pressure on the Iranian regime. At this late date, it is only the threat of force, combined with sanctions, that affords any realistic hope of an acceptable diplomatic resolution.
The group is skeptical of any benefits of sanctions:
With the impact of additional sanctions questionable, additional pressure on the Iranian regime to negotiate in good faith can come from the credible threat of military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Realistically, that threat can come only from the United States or Israel. Regrettably, senior Obama administration officials have suggested that there is little or no likelihood that the United States would ever actually use force, and they have conveyed opposition to an Israeli strike as well.
The group foresees military action like this:
Should these measures – in conjunction with diplomatic and economic pressures already being pursued – not compel Tehran to terminate its nuclear program, the U.S. military is capable of launching an effective surgical strike against Iran’s nuclear program. An air campaign would last several weeks and target both key military and nuclear installations. It would not target civilian facilities, and ought to initiallylimit ground troops to Special Forces. Such action would only set back Iranian nuclear development, but not destroy Iranian nuclear knowledge. Still, it might persuade Tehran that the costs of continuing its nuclear program are too high. The fallout of Israel’s strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 may be instructive; although it was estimated that the attack would set back Iraq’s nuclear program three years, Baghdad never rebuilt the reactor, though it did continue a covert nuclear program. Thus, taking military action would require continued vigilance in the years that follow, both to retain the ability to strike previously undiscovered sites and to ensure that Iran does not revive its military nuclear program.
Writing on Al Jazeera today, Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, writes:
...the international discourse on nuclear weapons is so distorted that it is a rarity to encounter criticism of its discriminatory application, its double standards as between nuclear and non-nuclear states, and its geopolitical style of selective enforcement. In this regard, it should be appreciated that the threat of military attack directed at Iran resembles reliance on the so-called Bush Doctrine of preventive war that had been used to justify aggression against Iraq in 2003, and represents a blatant geopolitical override of international law.
20 Comments so far
Show AllUsually a person espousing acts of terrorism gets arrested in the USA. Obviously then, the people publishing such demands since they are NEVER arrested are above the law somehow; so, I guess it's up to us to put them out of circulation--and that holds true for the large number of banksters and fraudsters untouched by Obama/Holder, as well as BushCo members.
What the bombing did was delay the Iraqi nuclear program and force a switch from plutonium to uranium. Iraq kept this new and expanded program going for an additional 10 years after the bombing till the end of the First Gulf War whereupon they stopped the development.
Like most things, it was a success and a failure at the same time.
Iran is, maybe. pursuing the enriched uranium route so they are already dispersed and hardened more than Osirak ever was.
Iraqis involved estimate that the Plutonium reactor would have yielded enough Pu for one bomb where the U development would have produced enough material for 6 bombs in the same time period.
The real success of the raid was in Israel proving to Iraq and all the other Arab countries that it could strike militarily at them with impunity. In that regard it was a huge success (along with the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the destruction of the Syrian Air Force the next year) and heralded a sharp decrease in military operations against Israel.
Is this guy living on another planet? The Israels ALWAYS instigate things! If peace talks are looming they'll do an assasination to subvert them, just to give one example. They DO NOT WANT PEACE, - they want continuing tension becasuse THAT allows them to continue their brutality, racism and theiving ways!
The Israelis have learned well the lesson of Joeseph Geobbels - tell THE BIG LIE often enough and with consistency and eventually it will APPEAR to be the truth! Thus to the Israeli government, Lies are truth, aggression is self-defense, terrorists are settlers, children are terrorists, assassinations are reprisals, and it goes on an on.
Only in America are people deluded by this. Even the Israeli street considers their government's pronouncements propaganda, and they wonder in Israel how it is exactly that the American main-stream media manage to keep a lid on the truth so effectively over here. Well the answer can be seen in the persons of Zuckerman and Edelman of the group who issued this agitprop report, and also in a very, very minor way in the person of John Shade - a hasbara practicing shill!
For over ten years now, beginning with the Patriot Act, the United States has been steadily losing legitimacy, which Francis Fukuyama considers one of the two cornerstones of political order.
Once any remaining legitimacy has been lost, will the empire collapse?
Manysummits
=======Also, we are not really dealing with a specifically US empire anymore but a global corporate empire behind the mask of the US govt. I'm wondering what that means, exactly. It means at a minimum that super wealthy elites and corporations based in the US, Britain, Israel, and some NATO countries like France and Germany, now endeavor to control the planet in the interests of 'stability' for themselves (global capital).
From my perspective, the US govt. has already long since lost any legitimacy it had, back with the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, the events of 911, the so-called 'war on terror' and the dismantling of our civil liberties, the invasion of Iraq, etc. So, if people in the US are not already awakened to the fact that they live under totalitarianism, I really don't know what WOULD awaken them? It seems the agenda of the PTB is to maintain the US as a global police force. The American middle class it to be systematically impoverished, in order to serve as the new 'cheap labor' for emerging markets like China's middle class. Galtung has hypothesized that the next US president might be more fascistic than Obomber (hard to believe), but that by 2016 we will get our 'Gorbechov.'
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2012/0201/August-surprise-Iran-could-have-fuel-for-bomb-before-US-election-study-says
August surprise? Iran could have fuel for bomb before US election, study says.
Iran could have 85 kg of low-enriched uranium by June, the report says. If Iran is willing to take a 'break-out' step, that quantity could be converted into enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel a nuclear bomb by late August.
By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer posted February 1, 2012 at 7:28 pm EST Washington
Iran could have enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel one nuclear bomb with a 15-kiloton yield by the end of August, about the time the US presidential race will kick into high gear, according to a new report.
And if anything is likely to replace “jobs, jobs, jobs” at the top of the list of campaign issues, it’s the arrival of a nuclear-capable Iran.
The report, the result of research by the Critical Threats Project at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, is careful to underscore that its findings assess “technical feasibility” only and do not delve into the question of Iran’s motivations behind its advancing nuclear program.
The report “does not assess Iran’s intentions to weaponize or to pursue break-out scenarios,” says Maseh Zarif, the Critical Threat Project’s Iran team leader. “It is intended solely to inform the policy community and the American public about the nature and progress of the Iranian nuclear program.”
Top 4 threats against America: the good and bad news
Iran insists that its uranium enrichment program is aimed at producing fuel and materials for civilian power and medical research purposes. But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Western powers, including the United States, suspect that Iran’s recent acceleration of uranium enrichment to about 20 percent purity suggests Tehran could be planning to “break out” as a nuclear weapons power.
In his report, Mr. Zarif says Iran would need 85 kilograms of about 20-percent low-enriched uranium to deliver the 15 kilograms of 90-percent high-enriched, or weapons-grade, uranium to build a bomb.
Using information gleaned from IAEA reports and other technical sources, Zarif says Iran could have the needed amount of 20-percent low-enriched uranium, which it is producing at two known facilities, Natanz and Fordow, by June. To convert that into the 15 kg of weapons-grade uranium needed for a bomb, would then take about another 10 weeks.
That is, if Iran decided to take such a “break-out” step. So far it is only known to be producing the 20-percent enriched uranium.
The Zarif report differs from the conclusions of other nuclear experts, some of whom have estimated Iran to be at least a year away from amassing enough fuel to provide the basis for an eventual nuclear weapon. Others have put a “break-out’ date even farther off, based on Iran’s known and repeated technical difficulties – not to mention the certain and virulent international reaction that any signs of a shift to producing high-enriched uranium would trigger.
But some researchers estimate that Iran could be even closer to the nuclear threshold than Zarif concludes.
Gregory Jones, in a December report for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said that an “all-out effort” by Iran could result in a bomb within two to six months.
Shifting from a technical appraisal to an analysis of “intentions,” Mr. Jones predicted that Iran would avoid that kind of reaction-causing “all-out effort” but would instead “continue on its current course, producing an ever growing stockpile of enriched uranium and carrying out additional research to produce non-nuclear weapons components.”
Jones also concluded that the debate over Iran’s intentions may be moot. “Though it could be many years before Iran becomes an overt nuclear weapon state,” he said, “it is already close enough to obtaining a nuclear weapon to be considered a de facto nuclear country.”
Zarif doesn’t make that kind of judgment in his report. But he does offer one conclusion that could resonate as US policymakers wrestle with the Iran issue over the coming months.
He says that all the measures taken by known and unknown actors against Iran since 2009 – economic sanctions, targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers, and computer viruses that have sent Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges spinning out of control – “have not significantly derailed the Iranian enrichment program.”
If only Merkan liberals had demanded that their relatives at the holiday table take off their brownshirts in 2002, Merkan liberals would not have the blood of one million innocent Iraqis on their hands today. But they did write the blank checks, knowing the disaster would propel them into the whitey house, where they could bask in the power privilege. Ehh?
The reason it's so important to call them a devilish group instead of a hawkish group is because their associating themselves with hawks, instead of devils, stymes the left's argument in the debate between good(left) and evil(right). Hawks, the birds, do not organize themselves into armies to conquer lands and other animals, and excute mass enslavements, and extinctions.
When the left agrees to use the right's dishonest associations, the left agrees to accept the right's philosophy of evil. When the left accepts the philosophy and then tries to argue against it, people recognize that inconsistency, and promptly discount the left's argument, and the left itself. And in classic Merkan fashion, nobody talks about it, so not only are the Merkan left marginalized, by evil people with evil agendas, but massive confusion is sown. Meanwhile, elites dangle the petro-opiate baits, and amid the confusion and ugliness of the scenario, many Merkans just get stoned, and forget reality. So, language matters. They are not hawks. They are devils.
They could be removed once an international treaty had been negotiated establishing the Middle-East as a nuclear-free zone.
But we wouldn't hear any of this chest-thumping, crowing and arrogant triumphalism out of this bunch if they believed their precious asses were in danger of being charcoaled! Yessir! They'd be much more conciliatory! Especially Edelman and Zuckerman, when they realized just ONE intermediate range MIRVED missile would be sufficient to deal with precious Israel, permanently! I'd love to hear their squeals of anguished horror!
All this hegmonistic bullying of Iran is likely to make them MORE determined to develop a nuclear deterrent, not LESS!