[Peace] Hersh on US plans to attack Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From the current New Yorker, and eliciting much comment. 
AWARE should decide what we're going to do about it.  --CGE]
	
   THE IRAN PLANS
   by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
   Would President Bush go to war 
   to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
   Issue of 2006-04-17
   Posted 2006-04-10

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy
in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has
increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified
planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former
American military and intelligence officials said that Air
Force planning groups are drawing up lists of 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. The
officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the
Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program,
planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

American and European intelligence agencies, and the
International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran
is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear
weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long
that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military
action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its
research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or
deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United
States military, and in the international community, that
President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation
with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and
said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others
in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a
former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name
they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and
threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian
leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely
convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not
stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do
“what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future,
would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going
to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive
issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military
planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing
campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and
lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He
added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What
are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March
by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director
for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as
Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons
program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue,
therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this
Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.”
However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to
America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that
he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks
we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with
Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would
prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities,
such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be
prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the
Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

One military planner told me that White House criticisms of
Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities
amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to
be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer
said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get
Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has
been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view,
if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way
along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for
comment, the White House said that it would not comment on
military planning but added, “As the President has indicated,
we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department
also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic
channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that
there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not
specify them.)

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking
diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and
there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes
it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of
Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle
East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a
similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to
solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran,
and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that
“it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way
to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A
military conflict that destabilized the region could also
increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the
adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered
one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a
Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here
comes Al Qaeda.”

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series
of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members
of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member
of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part
in the meetings but has discussed their content with his
colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,”
because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re
doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really
objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing
are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most,
questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites
at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is
building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from
Congress” not to take military action, the House member added.
“The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do
it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The
most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating
Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft,
operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying
simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending
maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last
summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian
coastal radars.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East
security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst
who taught at the National War College before retiring from
the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be
needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from
satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner
estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be
hit. He added:

I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop
there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We
would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range
ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer
to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft.
. . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to
hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping.
That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian
diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too
difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S.
will have to use Special Operations units.

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to
the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use
of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the
B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is
Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred
miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under
I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to
hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and
workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the
surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough
enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year.
(Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of
its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but
claims that none of its current activity is barred by the
Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be
a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the
conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure
the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth
and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground
bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties,
the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet
government began digging a huge underground complex outside
Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was
designed for “continuity of government”—for the political and
military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are
similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the
American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and
much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. “The
‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the ventilator shafts, some of
which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official
told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only
nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American
intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the
Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a
similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts,
he said.

A former high-level Defense Department official told me that,
in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go
in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear
infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The former defense official
said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them
that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their
infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready
to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down all of their
air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really
work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the
ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad
stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according
to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’
You’ve got to know what’s underneath—to know which ventilator
feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And
there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable
intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of
totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider
the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in
the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the
former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the
key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision.
But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training
and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re
talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and
contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear
test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit.
These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody
tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re
shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious
misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he
added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late
this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the
nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without
success, the former intelligence official said. “The White
House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came
from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some
in the Administration were looking seriously at this option,
which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical
nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy
circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.”
He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were
considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong
sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear
weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This
goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive
point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give
President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are
strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran.
“The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,”
the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express
their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then
it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical
nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the
Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are
selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re
telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast
and less radiation,” he said.

The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William
Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan
Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared
to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear
forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy,
a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended
treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the
U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions
when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority
targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional
weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent
members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley,
the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert
Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security.

The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The
Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well,
and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could
even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many
others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of
attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the
world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack
Iran?”

With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may
inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush
Administration official, who is also an expert on war
planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against
an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target”
than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing
to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across
the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot
of other problems.”

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the
Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran
but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with
proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to
operate”—that the Administration can achieve its policy goals
in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been
supported by neoconservatives.

If the order were to be given for an attack, the American
combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to
mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing
accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early
winter, I was told by the government consultant with close
ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working
with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the
north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the
northeast. The troops “are studying the terrain, and giving
away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting
scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant said.
One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting a line from
“Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader
aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions”
and undermine the regime.

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the
role of the military in covert operations, which was made
official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review,
published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A.
operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have
to be reported to key members of Congress.

“ ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior
intelligence official told me. He was referring to the
Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be
broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting
troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are
therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys in
the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties
in Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in
Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened
his determination to confront Iran. This view has been
reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a
special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986,
may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late
eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography
in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to
Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the
deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine
barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security
chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of
most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and
elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his
Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are
capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at
Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel
Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got
to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason
to back off.”

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded
their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the
end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants
with their own members. One former senior United Nations
official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the
turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the
West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others
are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late.
These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since
the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration
of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To
hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is
considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than
Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European
diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary
Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but,
ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The
Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program,
and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing
Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have
nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too
dangerous.” He added, “The whole internal debate is on which
way to go”—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is
possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally
renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action.
“God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is
that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem
is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear
state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something
bad is going to happen.”

While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there
is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and
what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government
expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School
of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on what I
know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a
deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a
covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not
stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions,
I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it”—bomb
Iran—“without being able to show there’s a secret program,
you’re in trouble.”

Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency,
told the Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years
away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that
point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a
technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli
intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s
duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside
Iran—the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate
operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards.
Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but
Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard
Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term,
told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I
believe it, but I don’t know it.”

In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S.
new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the
Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house
arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market
in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit
to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent
interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s
weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. “The
picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ ” the former senior
intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also
confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The
concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has
credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the
neoconservatives what they want to hear”—or what might be
useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under
pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.

“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence
official said. “I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the
smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding
us information on the time line, and targeting information is
coming in from our own sources— sensors and the covert teams.
The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to
the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all
new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve
got enough.’ ”

The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its
history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web
site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the
director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration
strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful
campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:

The vice president of the United States gives a major speech
focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle
East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same
nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of
Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global
terrorism.

Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about
Iran “questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to
him, he asked, “What do we know? What is the threat? The
question is: How urgent is all this?” The answer, he said, “is
in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A.” (In August,
the Washington Post reported that the most recent
comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that
Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)

Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials
on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s
weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s
laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of
technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post
reported that there were also designs for a small facility
that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks
about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the
Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to
note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also
quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared
to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read,
“RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”

I was told in interviews with American and European
intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more
suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The
Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by
German and American intelligence operatives, working together.
The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans
kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian
counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today.
Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and
handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was
a classic “walk-in.”

A European intelligence official said, “There was some
hesitation on our side” about what the materials really
proved, “and we are still not convinced.” The drawings were
not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but had the
character of sketches,” the European official said. “It was
not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”

The threat of American military action has created dismay at
the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s
officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear
weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a
parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking
diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the
Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb.
“But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will
make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national
pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk
assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust
the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”

In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier
this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s
director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and
Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control.
Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot
have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct
threat to the national security of the United States and our
allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an
understanding that you will not say anything publicly that
will undermine us. ”

Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said,
since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard
stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors are angry at being
misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership
are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally certified nuts,” the
diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is
that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the
neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At the end of the
day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to
the Iranians.”

The central question—whether Iran will be able to proceed with
its plans to enrich uranium—is now before the United Nations,
with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose
sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official
told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing
the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome.
American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they
announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them.
It’s a dead end.”

Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take
the risk of going to war against that kind of target without
giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we
can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on
the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar
distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He
said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an
inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can only bomb.”

There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush
Administration or among its European allies. “We’re quite
frustrated with the director-general,” the European diplomat
told me. “His basic approach has been to describe this as a
dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re
the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting
Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is
ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious
proliferation risk.”

The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing
perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney
believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real
goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about the
Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,” a
European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans
have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose
between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going
along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their
policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the
Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”

“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a
former National Security Council staff member who is now a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center,
told me, “but they’re really worried we’re going to do it.”
The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British
Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but
that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult
to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British
“are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the
Iranians, with no compromise.”

The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran,
given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but
“to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at
the point where they could successfully run centrifuges” to
enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy
was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in
its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line
approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the
American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more
likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve
seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the
moment they back off.”

The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this
is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to
impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses.
It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity
in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is
sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on
the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t
work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military
option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most
dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of
financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack
Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military
action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more
circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take
options off the table.

Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about
the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian
economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape
politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He
will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it,
but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said,
would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be
sympathetic to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone
Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and
books, and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm
offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the
long run.”

Another European official told me that he was aware that many
in Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he
said, with a resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy
is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”

A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel,
whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any
attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no
return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s
interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country,
which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor
in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In
a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted
Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat.
It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear,
I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to
protect our ally Israel.”

Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would
have to consider the following questions: “What will happen in
the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to
reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria
and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do
to our already diminished international standing? And what
does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”

Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a
day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the
world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of
Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle
Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the
recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic
consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy
could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and
putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s impossible to block
passage,” he said. The government consultant with ties to the
Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be
managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its
strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days.
However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less
optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per
barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a
hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on
the duration and scope of the conflict.

Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and
former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian
retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
“They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could begin the
real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world.”

Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and
elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the
Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such
attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at U.S. intelligence
agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained
neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the
Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This
will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove
Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran,
Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis
take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When I asked
the government consultant about that possibility, he said
that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel
and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)

The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will
light up like a candle.” The American, British, and other
coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack
from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on
instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite,
has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A
retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight
thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could
take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”

“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna,
“Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world,
but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the
bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”

The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who
would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still
banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful
thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.”

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