Is the United States going to attack Iran after all?
I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong.
In 2000, I thought there was no way American voters would let someone as obviously unintelligent and callow as George W. Bush anywhere near the White House. D'oh!
Though I was opposed to the Iraq war, I still assumed Saddam Hussein had WMD. D'oh!
In November 2004, I looked at a bunch of state polls, did what I thought was sound Electoral College math, and predicted a comfortable win for Sen. John Kerry. D'oh!
In 2007, I thought "Cavemen," the ABC sitcom based on characters that first appeared in GEICO car insurance ads, was so funny it was sure to catch on with viewers. D-d'oh-d-d'oh-d'oh!
And late last year, in this newspaper column, I wrote the following sentence:
"By saying that U.S. intelligence does not think Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, this NIE kicks the legs out from underneath White House officials and allies who've spent the last year marching in the direction of war with Iran."
I wasn't just wrong.
I was wrongtastically wrongitty-wrong-wrong. About something important.
My bogus analysis, quoted above, refers to last December's National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear program. It concluded Iran once had a nuclear weapons program, but halted it way back in 2003.
If the United States' own intelligence collective did not see a nuclear weapons threat from Iran, I didn't see how the Bush administration could convincingly argue to the public that Iran is a threat worthy of inspiring another pre-emptive American war.
NIEs are authored by a committee consisting of a high-level representative from each of the United States' 16 intelligence agencies. Because several competing bureaucracies sign an NIE, its conclusions are considered more meaningful and authoritative than any single report by any single agency. An NIE's conclusion holds sway in the government.
That's not to say NIEs are always correct. On the contrary, they've sometimes been spectacularly wrong.
The most famous recent example of NIE wrongness was September 2002's NIE report that claimed Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, an active nuclear weapons program, and was developing robotic aircraft for germ warfare. In fact, Saddam had neither WMD nor robots. A Roomba with a can of Lysol duct-taped to it is higher-tech germ warfare than anything Saddam Hussein's regime could have mustered.
What I failed to understand last December was that the Bush administration is too lusty for war with Iran to let anyone or anything cock-block it. NIE-be-damned, the Bush White House is going to do its darndest to foment war with Iran.
A new article by Seymour Hersh published in the New Yorker reveals that the Bush administration got $400 million from Congress last year to escalate covert military operations inside Iran.
Note the final four words of the previous sentence — "military operations inside Iran."
The Bush administration is already at war with Iran.
U.S special ops teams are apparently in Iran gathering information about the country's nuclear facilities. Many of these facilities are concrete bunkers, built deep underground, and surrounded by hidden anti-aircraft and anti-missile batteries. Destroying them would require more precise intelligence than U.S. spy satellites can provide.
The United States is stepping up funding numerous violent dissident groups within Iran, including a group called the Mujahideen-e-Khalq. Known in the Western press as the MEK, the group has been on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations for years.
In other words, we hate Iran because we say they're in league with terrorists. So we're paying terrorists to attack Iran.
In recent months, political violence in Iran has spiked. There's no way of knowing how much of that violence is funded and/or encouraged by U.S. operations, but Iranians have every right at this point to assume the Bush administration's war on them is already happening. Remember — the only secular, democratic government Iran ever had was overthrown in 1953 by a covert CIA operation.
The sad irony is that U.S. operations in Iran will only weaken the position of Iranian democrats eager to toss out the idiot theocrats who run the country. As we've experienced in the United States, outside attacks tend to increase the political influence of right-wing religious nuts.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2008.