[A-List] Fwd: The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

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Date: Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:20 PM
Subject: The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign
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http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/07/31/the-real-aim-of-israels-bomb-iran-campaign/

Antiwar.com

                        July 31, 2010

The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign

Posted By Gareth Porter

Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on
Iran coincides with the opening of the new Israel lobby campaign
marked by the introduction of House Resolution 1553 expressing full
support for such an Israeli attack.

What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of
Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to
support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn
into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel
cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel
needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel
wants to start.

Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the
Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. "If
Khamenei has a death-wish, he’ll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the
strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf," writes Gerecht. "It might
be the only thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran
militarily…." Gerecht suggest that the same logic would apply to any
Iranian "terrorism against the United States after an Israeli strike,"
by which we really means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle
East. Gerecht writes that Obama might be "obliged" to threaten major
retaliation "immediately after an Israeli surprise attack."

That’s the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is
not going to be "obliged" to join Israeli aggression against Iran
unless he feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too
strong to resist. That’s why the Israelis are determined to line up a
strong majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose
Obama’s options.

In the absence of confidence that Obama would be ready to come into
the war fully behind Israel, there cannot be an Israeli strike.

Gerecht’s argument for war relies on a fanciful nightmare scenario of
Iran doling out nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists all over the
Middle East. But the real concern of the Israelis and their lobbyists,
as Gerecht’s past writing has explicitly stated, is to destroy Iran’s
Islamic regime in a paroxysm of U.S. military violence.

Gerecht first revealed this Israeli-neocon fantasy as early as 2000,
before the Iranian nuclear program was even taken seriously, in an
essay written for a book published by the Project for a New American
Century. Gerecht argued that, if Iran could be caught in a "terrorist
act," the U.S. Navy should "retaliate with fury." The purpose of such
a military response, he wrote, should be to "strike with truly
devastating effect against the ruling mullahs and the repressive
institutions that maintain them."

And lest anyone fail to understand what he meant by that, Gerecht was
more explicit: "That is, no cruise missiles at midnight to minimize
the body count. The clerics will almost certainly strike back unless
Washington uses overwhelming, paralyzing force."

In 2006-07, the Israeli war party had reason to believed that it could
hijack U.S. policy long enough to get the war it wanted, because it
had placed one of its most militant agents, David Wurmser, in a
strategic position to influence that policy.

We now know that Wurmser, formerly a close adviser to Benjamin
Netanyahu and during that period Vice President Dick Cheney’s main
adviser on the Middle East, urged a policy of overwhelming U.S.
military force against Iran. After leaving the administration in 2007,
Wurmser revealed that he had advocated a U.S. war on Iran, not to set
back the nuclear program but to achieve regime change.

"Only if what we do is placed in the framework of a fundamental
assault on the survival of the regime will it have a pick-up among
ordinary Iranians," Wurmser told The Telegraph. The U.S. attack was
not to be limited to nuclear targets but was to be quite thorough and
massively destructive. "If we start shooting, we must be prepared to
fire the last shot. Don’t shoot a bear if you’re not going to kill
it."

Of course, that kind of war could not be launched out of the blue. It
would have required a casus belli to justify a limited initial attack
that would then allow a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. In
2007, Cheney acted on Wurmser’s advice and tried to get Bush to
provoke a war with Iran over Iraq, but it was foiled by the Pentagon.

As Wurmser was beginning to whisper that advice in Cheney’s ear in
2006, Gerecht was making the same argument in the Weekly Standard:

"Bombing the nuclear facilities once would mean we were declaring war
on the clerical regime. We shouldn’t have any illusions about that. We
could not stand idly by and watch the mullahs build other sites. If
the ruling mullahs were to go forward with rebuilding what they’d
lost–and it would be surprising to discover the clerical regime
knuckling after an initial bombing run–we’d have to strike until they
stopped. And if we had any doubt about where their new facilities were
(and it’s a good bet the clerical regime would try to bury new sites
deep under heavily populated areas), and we were reasonably suspicious
they were building again, we’d have to consider, at a minimum, using
special-operations forces to penetrate suspected sites."

The idea of waging a U.S. war of destruction against Iran is obvious
lunacy, which is why U.S. military leaders have strongly resisted it
both during the Bush and Obama administrations. But Gerecht makes it
clear that Israel believes it can use its control of Congress to pound
Obama into submission. Democrats in Congress, he boasts, "are mentally
in a different galaxy than they were under President Bush." Even
though Israel has increasingly been regarded around the world as a
rogue state after its Gaza atrocities and the commando killings of
unarmed civilians on board the Mavi Marmara, its grip on the U.S.
Congress appears as strong as ever.

Moreover, polling data for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have
already been manipulated into supporting war against Iran – in large
part because more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the
impression that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are
apparently hoping to exploit that advantage. "If the Israelis bomb
now, American public opinion will probably be with them," writes
Gerecht. "Perhaps decisively so." Netanyahu must be feeling good about
the prospects for pressuring Barack Obama to join an Israeli war of
aggression against Iran. It was Netanyahu, after all, who declared in
2001, "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very
easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way."

Read more by Gareth Porter

Leaked Reports Make Afghan War Policy More Vulnerable – July 27th, 2010
Sources: Amiri Told CIA Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Program – July 19th, 2010
Clues Suggest Amiri Defection Was an Iranian Plant – July 15th, 2010
McChrystal Probe of Afghan Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses – July 6th, 2010
Outgoing UN Nuclear Inspector Pushed Dubious Iran Nuclear Weapons
Intel – July 2nd, 2010

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