Perhaps the spate of meticulously sourced and suspiciously timed articles about American plans to launch military attacks, possibly using nuclear weapons, against Iran’s nuclear facilities is a psychological war game meant to bring Tehran to heel.
Or perhaps this is the opening of the Bush administration propaganda campaign to bring us to apocalyptic war.
Either way, Iran’s bold announcement that it has quickened the pace of its uranium enrichment is no sign of success. Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, declared Iran to be on the “pathway of defiance.” That is, the same path on which Saddam Hussein tread.
Americans want, badly, to disbelieve the reports of plans for military strikes and the loose talk of using nuclear bunker-busters to hit Iran’s underground factories. The particular weapon reportedly being discussed for use has about twice the force of the one dropped upon Hiroshima, scientists say.
It would kill “from thousands to more than a million” if detonated in an urban area, the National Academy of Sciences reported to Congress last April. Casualties would be lower – “as few as hundreds” but possibly “hundreds of thousands” – in a more isolated location. It depends on the winds.
“It’s a big bomb,” says Robert Nelson, a visiting scientist at Princeton University who studies weapons policy.
“It would throw up a huge crater of radioactive dirt, particles.” If the U.S. used a nuclear bunker-buster to strike the underground centrifuge facility at Natanz – a fairly remote site reported by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker as a likely target – the radioactive plume would likely blow east, toward Afghanistan. Or in summertime, says Benn Tannenbaum, a security specialist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the wind would carry the fallout west, toward Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.
The president has declared the Hersh article and others to be “wild speculation.” An unnamed “senior administration official” told The Washington Post that reports of military plans for Iran are “ill-informed.” But the administration hasn’t denounced the stories as false. Or even inaccurate.
Unnamed officials told the Post that the work of envisioning scenarios for Iran’s reaction to a U.S. military strike – almost certainly the unleashing of a terrorism campaign against Americans and other Westerners – is “consuming a lot of time” in the intelligence apparatus. Would they so consume themselves if political leaders had not asked them to? The nuclear option is not really an option. It is a catastrophe of unspeakable proportion. We must try to believe that not even George W. Bush would be the first person in history to use nuclear weapons for an offensive strike in an undeclared war. Such hope must be held up against the unnerving report by Hersh that when the military brass urged the White House to take the nuclear option out of contingency plans, it refused.
Our hopes must also stand against the brutal facts of recent history.
This administration does not believe in rattling sabers for the purpose of bringing tyrants to the diplomatic table. In the run-up to the Iraq conflict, the president insisted he did not want a war but merely wanted Saddam to comply with the demands of the U.N. to reveal everything about his presumed weapons of mass destruction, and to let inspectors in to search the premises. Inspectors went in. They were finding nothing. Then the United States told them to get out, and launched the war.
We are at that moment when the cooler, saner heads in and out of our government are warning privately and publicly of the consequences of still another Middle East conflict. Iran would use its sophisticated global terror network against us, they say. It would cause more havoc in world oil markets. It would use Shiite surrogates in Iraq to attack U.S. troops and foment more violence. The entire world would condemn us.
Look back, now, to the warnings – from many of these same cooler, saner heads – before the invasion of Iraq. The White House was told that Iraq could easily degenerate into sectarian civil war. That an attack on a Muslim nation would be seen as an imperialist thrust, aimed at securing oil and humiliating Islam. That Iraq would become a spawning ground for terrorists.
The cooler, saner heads were ignored. This is the history. The public has nothing but blind hope to hold up against it.
