With his hands full in Iraq and his attention focused on the Social Security debate on the domestic front, President Bush has moderated his rhetoric regarding regime change in Iran.
But while Bush has said that the United States has no immediate plans to confront Iran militarily, he remains adamant in his resolve to prevent the Iranian government from obtaining nuclear weapons and has insisted that the military option will remain open.
Pundits and policy-makers have kicked around the idea of a U.S. plan to strike Iranian nuclear facilities since well before the invasion of Iraq. The diverted troop strength and security problems resulting from that war, however, have dissuaded many from accepting an Iranian conflict as a possibility in the near future.
This possibility was raised most publicly in a controversial article written by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh in New Yorker magazine last January. Hersh reported that the U.S. government had been conducting intelligence operations within Iran since at least last summer and that top officials viewed diplomacy with Iran as an ineffective prelude to an inevitable military conflict.
Hersh and others, such as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, have envisioned a military strike on Iran as primarily airborne, with strategic and political aims different from those pursued in Iraq. One scenario – which Bush himself didn’t rule out in a press conference last February – involves a joint campaign between the United States and Israel to strike suspected nuclear facilities.
Silvan Shalom, the Israeli Foreign Minister, said in an interview last February that “Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.” Other top Israeli officials, as well as neoconservatives in the Bush administration, have been making similar statements for years.
The Washington Post reported last week that the Iranian government has taken steps to acquire high-tech small arms and other military equipment from technically-advanced western nations. Such a move obviously worries the Bush administration and also suggests that Iran is taking the threat of a military confrontation seriously.
If European diplomacy fails to dissuade Iran from their nuclear ambitions, newly-appointed U.N. Ambassador John Bolton will likely ask the U.N. Security Council to impose economic sanctions against Iran some time early this summer. Given that Russia, the main supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, has a permanent veto on the Council, the sanctions strategy has a high potential for failure.
According to the administration’s current policy, such a failure of diplomacy would leave the military option wide open.
Whether or not the suggestion that Bush has made up his mind to attack Iran belongs to the realm of conspiracy theory, the possibility of a military conflict seems closer and more likely than many Americans realize.
The details may be sketchy, and the hard evidence elusive, but the strategic goals remain obvious; one need only look at a map of the Middle East to see that the only anti-Western, potentially nuclear-capable nation left standing between Iraq and Afganhistan is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
