A startling investigative report in The New Yorker titled The Iran Plan by Seymour Hersh claims President Bush is drawing up plans to take out Iran’s nuclear program and effect regime change. This comes on the heels of extremely provocative statements by Iran’s President, Mr Ahmedinejad, in which he claimed that the Holocaust never happened, that Israel should be wiped out, and that his government had succeeded in enriching uranium. Mr Hersh is a well known American investigative reporter with many controversial books and long articles to his credit. He is said to be both loved and hated by the American military-industrial establishment with whom he has close “connections”. Some of his scoops have hurt the establishment while others have served to promote its interests.
Mr Hersh now claims that the Bush administration has determined to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program, that it has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack, that US Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of Iranian targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups, including the Azeris in the north, the Baloch in the southeast, and the Kurds in the northeast, to stir up trouble when required. American military planning is seemingly premised on the belief that a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and provoke the public to rise up and overthrow the Ahmedinejad government. Ominously, Mr Hersh says that “ one of the military’s initial option plans calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.”
But Mr Hersh also tells us that the US military high command is not in favour of nuclear strikes. He quotes experts to the effect that hundreds of sites would have to be targeted and not just known nuclear enrichment plants. He says state department officials fear that even if such a military operation were successful it might actually reinforce the current regime (instead of undermining it as hoped) by unleashing violent anti-Americanism not just in Iran but all over the Muslim world. There might be more bad news for President Bush. The Brits and the Europeans are not likely to support such a pre-emptive American military adventure. There will doubtless be questions marks, too, over how Syria and Lebanon will react vis a vis Israel, and how Russia and China might censure the US in the UN Security Council. But most important of all, if Iran curtails production of its 4 million barrels of oil a day and blockades or mines the Straits of Hormuz, the 34r-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean, the price of oil would sky rocket. Indeed, if Iranian retaliation were to be focused on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, the price of oil would double or even triple in weeks. But it would not end there. Iran might try and light a fire in the southern half of Iraq with Shiite militias. Mr Ahmadinejad would then become the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. And the Americans would be in greater trouble than they are in Iraq right now.
But that’s not all. Violent anti-Americanism would erupt across the Muslim world and autocratic pro-America governments would face a relentless backlash that could lead to their overthrow and replacement by hard-line Islamist forces inimical to Western interests. Certainly, countries like Egypt, Algeria and Turkey would find themselves in the eye of a storm. The Musharraf regime in Pakistan, in particular, would be besieged and dictatorship and repression rather than greater democracy might follow, with adverse consequences for the economy. Inevitably, Muslim communities in the West, especially in America, Europe, Scandinavia and Australia, would then be considered security risks and hounded and persecuted. In effect, a veritable clash of civilizations would be unleashed by an American attack on Iran.
If all this is clear enough, some pertinent questions arise: why has this “plan” been leaked to Mr Hersh, why isn’t there any outrage at this erosion of the “national interest” and why haven’t heads rolled in the Bush administration? Is it possible that Mr Hersh has been “used” for some greater purpose? Is it possible that the idea may well be to lay the ground for an Israeli attack on a couple of Iranian sites, and then to wait for the Iranians to attack American ships and armed forces in the region, thereby justifying a full fledged American counter attack on Iran?
It is also possible that this story has been leaked to offset the tough and uncompromising stand taken by Mr Ahmedinejad, that it is in effect a retaliatory posture aimed at flexing muscle and improving America’s negotiating position. The problem with this approach is that the posturing could precipitate the very crisis it is meant to avert if a third non-state actor like Al-Qaeda with an autonomous mission statement is able to step in and push America over the brink as it did on 9/11.