Re: Mullen Wary of Israeli Attack on Iran
- From: NefeshBarYochai <lbitflex@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:57:00 -0700 (PDT)
On Mar 17, 12:16 am, "iconocl...@xxxxxxxxx" <coaster132...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Mullen Wary of Israeli Attack on Iran
by Ray McGovern
Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came home
with sweaty palms from his mid-February visit to Israel. He has been
worrying aloud that Israel will mousetrap the U.S. into war with Iran.
This is of particular concern because Mullen has had considerable
experience in putting the brakes on such Israeli plans in the past.
This time, he appears convinced that the Israeli leaders did not take
his warnings seriously -- notwithstanding the unusually strong
language he put into play.
Upon arrival in Jerusalem on February 14, Mullen wasted no time in
making clear why he had come. He insisted publicly that an attack on
Iran would be "a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a
great deal about the unintended consequences."
At a Pentagon press conference on February 22 Mullen drove home the
same point -- with some of the same language. After reciting the
usual boilerplate about Iran being "on the path to achieve nuclear
weaponization" and about its "desire to dominate its neighbors," he
included this in his prepared remarks:
"I worry a lot about the unintended consequences of any sort of
military action. For now, the diplomatic and the economic levers of
international power are and ought to be the levers first pulled.
Indeed, I would hope they are always and consistently pulled. No
strike, however effective, will be, in and of itself, decisive."
In answer to a question about the "efficacy" of military strikes on
Iran's nuclear program, Mullen said such strikes "would delay it for
one to three years." Underscoring the point, he added that this is
what he meant "about a military strike not being decisive."
No Glib Talk About War
Unlike younger generals such as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal,
Adm. Mullen served in the Vietnam War. It seems likely that this
experience prompted this gratuitous philosophical aside at the press
conference:
"I would remind everyone of an essential truth: War is bloody and
uneven. It's messy and ugly and incredibly wasteful, but that doesn't
mean it isn't worth the cost."
Although the immediate context for the remark was Afghanistan, Mullen
has underscored time and time again that war with Iran would be a far
larger disaster. Those with a modicum of familiarity with the
military, strategic, and economic equities at stake know he is right.
Firing ‘Fox'
Recall that one of Mullen's Vietnam veteran contemporaries, Adm.
William (‘Fox') Fallon was cashiered as CENTCOM commander in March
2008 for saying things like war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my
watch." Fallon openly encouraged negotiations with Iran as the only
sensible approach, and harshly criticized the "constant drum beat" for
war.
Fallon's attitude appears to be shared by the more politically
cautious -- and less rhetorically blunt -- Mullen, as the same war-
with-Iran drumbeat reaches a new crescendo today. Fallon abhorred the
thought of being on the receiving end of an order inspired by the
likes of then-Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy National Security
Adviser Elliott Abrams to send American troops into what would surely
be -- as Mullen would describe it -- a "bloody, uneven, messy, ugly
and incredibly wasteful" war.
How strong the pressure was within the Bush administration to attack
Iran -- and/or to give Israel "a green light" to go first -- can be
read between the lines of a Feb. 14 exchange between ABC News' "This
Week" host Jonathan Karl and former Vice President Cheney.
Karl: "How close did the Bush administration come to taking military
action against Iran?"
Cheney: "Some of that I can't talk about, obviously, still. I'm sure
it's still classified. We clearly never made the decision -- we never
crossed over that line of saying, ‘Now we're going to mount a military
operation to deal with the problem.' ..."
Karl: "David Sanger of the New York Times says that the Israelis came
to you -- came to the administration in the final months and asked for
certain things, bunker-buster bombs, air-to-air refueling capability,
over-flight rights, and that basically the administration dithered,
did not give the Israelis a response. Was that a mistake?"
Cheney: "I can't get into it still. I'm sure a lot of those
discussions are still very sensitive."
Karl: "Let me ask you: Did you advocate a harder line, including in
the military area, in those final months?"
Cheney: "Usually."
Karl: "And with respect to Iran?"
Cheney: "Well, I made public statements to the effect that I felt very
strongly that we had to have the military option, that it had to be on
the table, that it had to be a meaningful option, and that we might
well have to resort to military force in order to deal with the threat
that Iran represented. ... [But] we never got to the point where the
President had to make a decision one way or the other."
Renewed Pressures
Clearly, those pressures have again grown during the first 13 months
of the Obama administration. Today, it appears that Mullen has
replaced Fallon as the principal military obstacle to exercising the
war option against Iran.
From his recent demeanor, as well as his many statements since he
became the country's most senior officer in October 2007, it is
apparent that Mullen does not believe that a "preventive war" against
Iran would be worth the horrendous cost.
Washington rhetoric, echoed by the stenographers of the Fawning
Corporate Media (FCM) over the past eight years, has brought a veneer
of respectability to the international crime of aggressive war, as
long as it is launched or sanctioned by the United States. With
nodding approval from the FCM, Bush and Cheney sold the notion that
such attacks can be justified to "prevent" some future hypothetical
threat to the United States or its allies. This provided a thin, fig-
leaf rationale for invading Iraq seven years ago this month.
The Obama administration has not fully backed away from such thinking.
While in Qatar on Feb. 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
expressed concern over what she called "accumulating evidence" of an
Iranian attempt to pursue a nuclear weapon, not because it "directly
threaten[s] the United States, but [because] it directly threatens a
lot of our friends" - read Israel.
Mullen, for his part, seems acutely aware that the Constitution he has
sworn to defend makes no provision for the kind of war he might be
sucked into in order to defend Israel. When he studied at the Naval
Academy, his professors were still teaching that the Constitution's
Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that treaties
ratified by the Senate become the "supreme law of the land."
It would be, pure and simple, a flagrant violation of a supreme law of
the land, the Senate-ratified United Nations Charter, for the United
States to join in an unprovoked assault on Iran without the approval
of the U.N. Security Council, which surely would not go along -- just
as it did not go along on attacking Iraq.
Moreover, Adm. Mullen appears to be one of the few Americans aware
that there is no mutual defense treaty between the United States and
Israel and, thus, the U.S. has no legal obligation to jump to Israel's
defense if it ignites war with Iran. In other words, in a strictly
juridical sense, Israel is not our "ally."
Sorry, you can't create an ally by just repeating the word over and
over.
Now you may scoff. "Everyone knows," you will say, that political
realities in America dictate that the U.S. military must defend Israel
no matter who started a conflict.
Still, there was a time -- after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war when Israel
first occupied the Palestinian territories -- that the U.S. did take
soundings regarding the possibility of a mutual defense treaty, in the
expectation that this might introduce more calm into the area by
giving the Israelis a greater sense of security.
But the Israelis turned the overture down cold. Such treaties, you
see, require internationally recognized boundaries and Israel did not
want any part of parting with the territories it had just seized
militarily.
Besides, mutual defense treaties usually impose on both parties an
obligation to inform the other if one decides to attack a third
country. Israel wanted no part of that either.
This virtually unknown background helps to explain why the lack of a
treaty of mutual defense is more than a picayune academic point.
Why Is Mullen Worried?
If Adm. Mullen is an old hand at reining in the Israelis, why is he so
visibly worried at present? He is used to reading the riot act to the
Israelis. What could be so different now?
Last time, in mid-2008, Cheney and Abrams were arguing for an
aggressive military posture toward Iran but lost the argument to
Mullen and his senior commanders, who -- in the final days of the Bush
administration -- won the backing of the President.
When former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seemed intent on starting
hostilities with Iran before Bush and Cheney left office, Bush ordered
Adm. Mullen to Israel to tell the Israelis, in no uncertain terms,
don't do it. Mullen gladly rose to the occasion; actually, he outdid
himself.
We learned from the Israeli press that Mullen went so far as to warn
the Israelis not to even think about another incident at sea like the
Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, which left 34
American crew killed and more than 170 wounded. With Bush's full
support, Mullen told the Israelis to disabuse themselves of the notion
that U.S. military support would be knee-jerk automatic, if Israel
somehow provoked open hostilities with Iran.
Never before had a senior U.S. official braced Israel so blatantly
about the Liberty incident, which was covered up unconscionably by
Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, the Congress, and by the Navy
itself. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Navy Vet Honored, Foiled Israeli
Attack."]
The lesson the Israelis took away from the Liberty incident was that
they could get away with murder, literally, and walk free because of
political realities in the United States. Never again, said Mullen. He
could not have raised a more neuralgic issue.
So, once more, what's different about today? How to account for
Mullen's decision to keep expressing his worries about "unintended
consequences"? I believe the admiral fears that things are about to
spin out of control. Whether there will be war does not depend on
Mullen -- or even Obama. It depends mostly on Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. And Mullen does well to be worried.
Netanyahu's Impression of Obama
It is altogether likely that Netanyahu has concluded that Barack Obama
is -- in the vernacular -- a wuss. Why, for example, does the
President keep sending an endless procession of the most senior U.S.
officials to Tel Aviv to plead with their Israeli counterparts,
Please, pretty please, don't start a war with Iran.
Loose-cannon Vice President Joe Biden arrives on Monday, hopefully
with clearer instructions than when he blithely told ABC on July 4,
2009 that Israel is a "sovereign nation" and thus "entitled" to launch
a military strike on Iran, adding that Washington would make no effort
to dissuade the Israeli government.
Will Biden be able to keep his foot out of his mouth this time, or
will his four decades of experience in the Senate -- learning how to
position himself politically with respect to Israel -- again reassert
itself?
It is a safe bet that Netanyahu is wryly amused at such obsequious
buffoonery. But his impression of Obama's backbone -- or lack thereof
-- is key. The Israeli Prime Minister must be drawing some lessons
from Obama's aversion to leveraging the $3 billion a year the U.S.
gives to Israel. Why doesn't Obama simply pick up the phone and warn
me himself, Netanyahu might well be thinking.
Is Obama so deathly afraid of the powerful Likud Lobby that he cannot
bring himself to call me? Is the President afraid his chief of staff,
Rahm Emanuel, might listen in, and then leak the conversation to
neoconservative pundits like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank?
Benjamin Netanyahu has had ample time to size up our President. Their
initial encounter in May 2009 reminded me very much of the disastrous
meeting in Vienna between another young American president and Nikita
Khrushchev in early June 1961. The Soviets took the measure of
President John Kennedy, and one result was the Cuban missile crisis,
bringing the world as close as it has ever come, before or since, to
nuclear destruction.
The Israeli Prime Minister has found it possible to thumb his nose at
Obama's repeated pleas for a halt in construction of illegal Israeli
settlements in the occupied territories -- without consequence.
Moreover, Netanyahu has watched Obama cave in time after time -- on
domestic, as well as international issues.
Netanyahu styles himself as sitting in the catbird's seat of the
relationship, largely because of the Likud Lobby's unparalleled
influence with U.S. lawmakers and opinion makers -- not to mention the
entrée the Israelis enjoy to the chief executive himself by having one
of their staunchest allies, Rahm Emanuel, in position as White House
chief of staff. In the intelligence business, we might call that an
"agent of influence."
Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, was born in Jerusalem and served
in the Irgun, the pre-independence Zionist guerrilla organization.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel, then in his early 30s,
traveled to Israel as a civilian volunteer to work with the Israeli
Defense Forces. He served in one of the IDF's northern bases.
Mullen's Worries
Netanyahu is supremely confident of the solidity of his position with
the movers and shakers in Congress, Washington opinion makers, and
even within the Obama administration. And he gives off signs of being
singularly underwhelmed by the President.
These factors enhance the possibility Netanyahu will opt for the kind
of provocation that would confront Obama with a Hobson's choice
regarding whether to join an Israeli attack on Iran.
And so Mullen continues to worry -- not only about "unintended
consequences," but about intended consequences, as well. The most
immediate of these could involve mousetrapping Obama into committing
U.S. forces to war provoked with Iran.
And for those fond of saying that "everything is on the table," be
advised that this would go in spades in this context.
Very little seems outlandish these days. Remember Seymour Hersh's
report about Cheney's office conjuring up plots as to how best to
trigger a war with Iran?
"The one that interested me [Hersh] the most was why don't we build --
we in our shipyard -- build four or five boats that look like Iranian
PT boats. Put Navy Seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one
of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up."
In other words, another Tonkin Gulf-type incident, like the one that
President Johnson used to justify a massive escalation in Vietnam.
A modern-day Gulf of Tonkin-like incident in the Strait of Hormuz
could be even more problematic, given the waterway's vital role as a
supply route for oil tankers necessary for maintaining the world's
economy.
The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz is narrow, and things often
go bump in the night without even trying. For example:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - On the evening of January 8, 2007,
a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine collided with a Japanese oil tanker
in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's oil
supplies travel, officials said. The collision between the USS
Newport News and the Japanese-flagged motor vessel Mogamigawa occurred
at approximately 10:15 in the evening (local time) in the Strait of
Hormuz while the submarine was transiting submerged.
AP, March 20, 2009: "The USS Hartford nuclear submarine and the
amphibious USS New Orleans collided in the waters between Iran and the
Arabian peninsula today. Fifteen sailors were slightly injured aboard
the Hartford...the New Orleans suffered a ruptured fuel tank, spilling
25,000 gallons of diesel....The ships were on routine security patrols
in a busy shipping route."
Think back also to the bizarre accounts of the incident involving
swarming Iranian motorboats and U.S. naval ships in the Strait of
Hormuz on Jan. 6, 2008.
Preventing Preventive War
The Persian Gulf would be an ideal locale for Israel to mount a
provocation eliciting Iranian retaliation that could, in turn, lead to
a full-scale Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear-related sites.
Painfully aware of that possible scenario, Adm. Mullen noted at a July
2, 2008 press conference, that military-to-military dialogue could
"add to a better understanding" between the U.S. and Iran.
If Mullen's worries are to be taken as genuine (and I believe they
are), it would behoove him to resurrect that idea and formally propose
such dialogue to the Iranians. He is the U.S. government's senior
military officer and should not let himself be stymied by
neoconservative partisans more interested in regime change in Tehran
than in working out a modus vivendi and reduction of tension.
The following two modest proposals could go a long way toward avoiding
an armed confrontation with Iran -- whether accidental, or provoked by
those who may actually wish to precipitate hostilities and involve the
U.S.
1 - Establish a direct communications link between top military
officials in Washington and Tehran, in order to reduce the danger of
accident, miscalculation, or covert attack.
2 - Launch immediate negotiations by top Iranian and American naval
officers to conclude an incidents-at-sea protocol.
A communications link has historically proven its merit during times
of high tension. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 underscored the
need for instantaneous communications at senior levels, and a "hot
line" between Washington and Moscow was established the following
year. That direct link played a crucial role, for example, in
preventing the spread of war in the Middle East during the six-day war
in early June 1967.
Another useful precedent is the "Incidents-at-Sea" agreement between
the U.S. and the Soviet Union, signed in Moscow in May 1972. That
period was another time of considerable tension between the two
countries, including several inadvertent naval encounters that could
well have escalated. The agreement sharply reduced the likelihood of
such incidents.
It might be difficult for American and Iranian leaders alike to oppose
measures that make such good sense. Press reports show that top U.S.
commanders in the Persian Gulf have favored such steps. And, as
indicated above, Adm. Mullen has already appealed for military-to-
military dialogue.
In the present circumstances, it has become increasingly urgent to
discuss seriously how our two countries might avoid a conflict started
by accident, miscalculation, or provocation. Neither the U.S. nor
Iran can afford to allow an avoidable incident at sea to spin out of
control.
With a modicum of mutual trust, these common-sense actions might be
able to win wide and prompt acceptance by both governments.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing ministry of the
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was in Moscow in
1972 during President Richard Nixon's first visit to Russia, when the
U.S.-Soviet Incidents-at-Sea agreement was signed together with
several key arms control agreements. A 27-year veteran analyst at the
CIA, he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.
To make a long story short Mullen is full of nasty shit. Israel does
not need to attack Iran. Ahmadinejad has no intention of using
nuclear weapons (even if he had them) against anyone. But even if
Netanyahu attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities and is successful in not
permitting Iran to become a nuclear power what difference is the
justification of such an attack as happened in Iraq when Israel
destroyed their ability to make nuclear war? At the time of the Iraqi
attack most of civilization was condemning Israel, then after 9/11 the
same nations that condemned her were praising her for have the insight
to act and act correctly by destroying the Iraqis capability to make
nuclear war.
Even if the Muslim nations acquire nuclear weapons, they won’t use
them. They’re not a bunch of idiots. Unless Islam becomes a major
decision, making body in the free world the Muslims will never resort
to nuclear war because they know they’d be obliterated if they use
nuclear weapons in war. But say Israel and the USA end up being the
only two predominant Judeo Christian nations left on earth and all the
others become Muslim majorities (way in the future) then the Muslims
might nuke the USA and Israel. The Muslim countries won’t try any
nuclear hanky panky unless they become stronger then Christianity and
Jusiaism.
In the meantime someone might happen or someone might come along or
something might be invented that will cause all peoples on earth to
live in peace. If the Jews are ever successful in rebuilding the
Temple where the Dome of the Rock is there will be peace all over the
earth because HaShem will again dwell among His people Israel. When
all the peoples on earth hear of His majesty and Presence in Jerusalem
not even the devil worshippers will deny His Sovereignty as King of
the Universe.
.
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