About six weeks ago, before the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran became public – but well after President Bush and his entourage knew about its content that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program – an event was held next door to the University of Denver where I teach entitled `Iran In The Crosshairs’. Well attended (maybe 250+ people in the room), it featured three profs of somewhat differing views and Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni. It was held at the Grand Hall of the Iliff School of Theology – one of the more prominent theological seminaries between Chicago and the West Coast - and the program was introduced by Dr. George Tinker, Native American scholar and theologian.

The idea of the forum was not to pack the panelists with people who shared the same view point – but to create the atmosphere for a genuine, and if possible, civil debate about the US plans to attack Iran. It featured a cast of intellectual stars (of sorts).
David Goldfischer who directs Homeland Security Masters’ program at the university’s Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) had, before the invasion of Iraq, supported that war. He had argued about the danger of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He seems to still believe the war itself was a good idea but that it is poorly run.
Paul Viotti, with decades experience in Air Force intelligence and as a prof at the Air Force Academy (he is now at GSIS) supported the first Gulf War back in 1991 but opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq
Alan Gilbert, author and chaired professor was against the Iraq war, openly opposed to US war plans against Iran.
Ibrahim Kazerooni, Executive Director of the Abrahamic Initiative, a Colorado-based interfaith dialogue and a former Iraqi political prisoner tortured at Abu Ghraib by Saddam and is now a joint phd candidate at the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver held views similar to Gilbert: that the US occupation of Iraq should end as soon as possible and that attacking Iran would be a terrible mistake both politically and on a human level.

The evaluations of the event my students did suggested that the event was a `success’, meaning that it was worthwhile and interesting. It alerted many in the audience - who seemed unaware of the mounting tension - of the danger of yet another Middle East War being unleashed by the Bush Administration. I felt likewise (that the event went well) although I was surprised in a way as all of the participants opposed the US attacking Iran. As a result, the debate shifted from whether or not attacking Iran is justified – all four agreed that it wasn’t – to whether or not the United States would proceed with its plans to do so. On this latter point, there were genuine and clearly articulated differences, differences that continue to play out today, after the publication of the NIE report.

Goldfischer stood out from the others. He argued that it would be insane for the US to attack Iran because the consequences would be so dire. At the base of his thinking is that politics works both on the level of rhetoric and vested interest and that rationally, whatever the Bush Administration was saying, that it makes no military or political sense to attack Iran and that we shouldn’t worry about it so much. In making his case, Goldfischer articulated a position I have heard from many friends, including many liberal Democrats who simply do not believe that even Bush would be so reckless and stupid as to risk the consequences of going to war with Iran.

Viotti, Gilbert and Kazerooni all basically predicted that a US attack on Iran sometime before the 2008 election is likely. They all pointed to neo-conservative strategy of placing ideological considerations before political rationalism, that Bush and Cheney’s goal is nothing short of reshaping the Middle East through whatever means, including military, and that not even the morass in Iraq, nor the dangers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling yet more out of control would stop Bush’s plans for war.

That Was Six Weeks Ago

In the Past Six Weeks...

In the past six weeks there have been two developments that have made people wonder if the momentum in the Middle East was perhaps shifting away from war making: the Annapolis Conference on restarting negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians (with the participation of 50 countries) and now the issuing of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran which appeared a few days ago.

In different ways both offered rays of hope in an otherwise grim Middle East landscape of unending war and human devastation. Yet both are, unfortunately, mostly illusions of peace, rather than the real thing.

- Nearly two weeks after its conclusion, Annapolis looks no more of a step towards peace than it did before the meeting. It was mostly a meeting for the US to strengthen its anti-Iranian alliance, although the degree to which this did or didn’t happen is yet to be publicly revealed.
- Since the conference, Israel’s position on negotiating with the Palestinian Authority has hardened (there is no hurry – nor is Washington pushing Israel to embrace serious negotiating quickly), the Israeli attacks against Gaza continue to intensify with warnings that Israel will cut off even more vital services in what is a mini version of the sanctions policy the US forced on Iraq before 2003.
- I continue to worry that a major devastating Israeli military offensive against Gaza is in the works and that the world’s silence of the atrocities Israel continues to commit in Gaza serve as a green light or seal of approval for the actions Israel will probably take.

Concerning Iran

In a similar manner, the public knowledge that a 130 page still secret intelligence report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, - the collective effort of 16 US intelligence agencies – that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program was greeted with widespread joy, if not jubilation, both here in the United States and abroad. This report destroys – nothing short of that – one of the main rationales for the Bush Administration’s preparations for attacking Iran.

Immediately from quarters far and wide it was announced that the military option is now dead in the water, off the table and isn’t that a wonderful thing. The Iranians were certainly pleased. Some peace activists here in the US thought similarly with some even arguing (in private) that it was in part the momentum of Annapolis that has now created new conditions for peace throughout the region. There is a growing sentiment that a US attack on Iran is much more unlikely now. (For an intelligent discussion of this view point read Jewish Voice for Peace's recent commentary)

And yes, it would be a wonderful thing if it were the case, but it isn’t.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

But before arguing that even after the publication of this report that not much concerning the US plans to attack Iran has changed, let’s give credit where credit is due. The publication of this report took a considerable amount of political courage and was a genuine contribution to putting a break on the Bush Administration’s momentum to going to war against Iran. It was nothing less than a body blow to Bush and Cheney’s war on terrorism. As Scott Ritter points out in an excellent article (to which I will refer to more later) `The…NIE puts to rest the notion that Iran represents any sort of imminent threat worthy of near-term pre-emptive military action.

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`The NIE puts to rest the notion that Iran represents any sort of imminent threat worthy of near-term pre-emptive military action '

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Imagine where it is that the county has come to when it is the intelligence agencies – whose hands are soaked in the blood and suffering of people all over the world for sixty years – has emerged, along with major elements of the US military as the left wing of the Bush Administration. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is simply the latest salvo in a long running bureaucratic war

Team B Antics

There is a long sordid story here going back to the 1970s when the Ford Administration, unhappy with the intelligence it was getting about the Soviet Threat (which the CIA suggested was already in bad shape) decided it needed to create a `Team B’, ie – intelligence to fit their ideological prejudices.

Although there is much that has been written on the subject, James Carroll’s epic The House of War contains much insightful information on this. Carroll’s father was the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was pushed out of his position for not providing Lyndon Johnson with the intelligence reports both on Soviet nuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam that he wanted.

It was Team-B analyses that prepared the groundwork for the major US military build up in the Reagan years based upon exaggerated estimates of Soviet military strength. The analyses of mainstream intelligence agencies (if we can call them that) – among them the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency – were shunted aside for more cooked stuff. Interestingly enough the Team `B’ key players included a cast of stars that only later would become more familiar – Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeldt.

Team-B has morphed over the years into different obscure bureaucratic shadow formations, the latest of which answers directly to Dick Cheney. These are the folks who created the myth of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and have worked assiduously to overstate Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ambitions.

The NIE on Iran: A Behind the Scenes Blow By Blow Struggle
The internal struggles around the publication of the NIE on Iran must have been fierce with the intelligence community battling with the Bush-Cheney neocons. Little hints of the intensity of it all comes through in the NY Times, Financial Times and other mainstream media outlets.

What is notable is how long this report took to come to fruition and to surface publicly – some 9-10 months – with the president and the vice president actively lobbying to strip it of its core content. There is some suggestion that it was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself that coaxed a public summary of the report to see the light of day, an indication of the open hostility felt in most branches of the military for opening another war front in the Middle East.

For all that, the idea that Bush and Cheney ‘s plan to attack Iran has been shelved is premature and probably, unfortunately, off the mark. People should not be so quick to draw this conclusion which could be little more than wishful thinking.

This is the second time in a year that a major intelligence report critical of Bush Administration’s Middle East policies has been published. The first one was the Baker-Hamilton Commission project – the Iraq Study Group Report – which called for dramatic changes in US policy towards Iraq with an eye on a US withdrawal from that country. Although hailed at the time as a move in the right direction (ie – ending the Occupation), a year later it is little more than a dead letter, forgotten as the US draws up plans for unending permanent military presence in that country, all but destroyed by the 2003 invasion and occupation. The Bush Administration absorbed the criticisms, ignored them and has moved on with its war against Iraq as if the report were not even written.

Unless there is concerted Congressional action, expect more or less the same thing with the NIE on Iran.

Bush and Cheney have invested an inordinate amount of political capital into planning an attack on Iran to be deterred by another critical report. True, one of the main arguments for going to war – that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons – has been greatly undermined. The conclusion of the report: that Iran does not have a program to develop nuclear weapons – could not be clearer.

But already last summer, perhaps in anticipation of the publication of the NIE on Iran itself, the Bush Administration was shifting gears concerning pretexts. Before the shift there were press articles speculating on just how much support Bush would need from the American people to launch an air attack with the necessary figure bandied around as low as 33%, ie – if polls showed that a mere 1/3 of the American people supported the effort, that was enough for going to war.

As this spacious line of reasoning evaporated, a different tact began: play down the nuclear issue as it was gaining traction either domestically or worldwide and play up imaginary (for that is what they are) connections between Iran and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq. There was a shift in emphasis from Iran as `a nuclear threat’ to `Iran supporter of terrorism in Iraq’.

It is yet another variation on what was done before the invasion of Iraq when the Bush Administration claimed ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. As Ritter succinctly put it once again `The nuclear and terror issues are simply vehicles for implementing a policy of regime change. Take away the nuclear issue and the policy remains’.

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`The nuclear and terror issues are simply vehicles for implementing a policy of regime change. Take away the nuclear issue and the policy remains’.

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Given that the evidence of Iranian support for terrorism in Iraq makes no sense politically (it is in Iranian interest for the situation in Iraq to stabilize politically) and the fact that there is, once again, scant evidence of any actual Iranian military involvement, one has to wonder why the change?

While admittedly the US (and it seems also the Israeli) public are against any attack on Iran and that the NIE complicates Bush's program, many signs remain that the NIE on Iran has NOT changed US policy and that the plans to attack Iran remain in tact and active. Among them are:

1. The Bush Administration has used the publication of the report (for which they were obviously prepared) to launch an orchestrated p.r. offensive to argue the very opposite of the report’s conclusion: that Iran remains a threat
2. As Ritter points out – key Democrats who have bought into Bush’s assessment of the Iranian threat – have not changed their position one iota since the report’s publication. Hillary Clinton, with her close ties to AIPAC, continues to define Iran as an imminent threat to which `all options’ are still on the table. Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker – who could encourage the introduction of to restrict the president’s use of military force against Iran given the report’s conclusions – has done nothing of the kind. No motion there.
3. The Bush Administration to a pathetically pliant international community (EU, UN) continues its policies to aggressively isolate Iran with more sanctions having achieved an apparent victory on this front with China cutting some of its extensive trade ties with Iran recently
4. Last but not least – the Israelis, who as much as any force in the US – rejected the NIE outright as irrelevant. They continue to actively push the Bush Administration to engage Iran militarily as do AIPAC and the Conference on Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations here in the USA which continue their unending efforts to get the US to attack Iran.

It is going to take more than the NIE to stop Bush’s momentum towards attacking Iran. Again Ritter goes to the heart of the matter in claiming that the NIE `is but an empty document void of meaning unless life is breathed into its findings by an Executive rededicated to formulating policy founded on fact, not on ideology, or a Congress awakened to its long-dormant status as a separate but equal branch of government.

Congress could act immediately to pass legislation limiting Bush’s ability to go to war against Iran. But so far there appears to be no interest in this august and brain-dead body to do so. Without such blocking legislation springtime in Iran could very well be deadly.