MILNET Brief: War Drums Beating for Iran

MILNET Brief
War Drums Are Beating For Iran, 9/27/2007

"...the President is not only authorized but bound to resist force by force. He does not initiate the war, but is bound to accept the challenge without waiting for any special legislative authority. And whether the hostile party be a foreign invader, or States organized in rebellion, it is none the less a war, although the declaration of it be 'unilateral.'

- Justice Grear, U.S. Supreme Court on Abraham Lincoln's military during the U.S. Civil War - A basis for the "Clear and Present Danger" policy in U.S. National Security.

Introduction

In the two years building up to the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, MILNET generated a series of articles that outlined the changes in the worldwide security and geo-political situation that inexorably led to that invasion of Iraq. For some time now, MILNET has warned that similar conditions are being seen not only by the U.S, but also Israel and Europe.

This is the first of the "Drums Beating" briefings for the nation of Iran. While we don't feel war is imminent (as in it is not likely to happen tomorrow), we do believe that the cycle of events leading to war has already begun. Indeed that cycle began with the adoption of the first U.N. sanctions against Iran that dealt with its uranium enrichment program. We feel that going to the U.N. is a necessary diplomatic step along the modern path to war.

The key element into our sounding the alarm today is the culmination of events that include a nearly weekly iteration of Iraq's interference in the insurgency in Iraq, and the U.S. military public statements dealing with Iran arming the insurgents as well as providing various weapons that are being used against U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq. Military officials rarely speak of such things publicly until they begin to build a case for war. This leads us to believe that the U.S. military is more than simply creating war scenarios to be placed on the shelf for later use, rather, they are dusting earlier scenarios off and putting together realistic war plans together should the President request them. In addition, when we hear public officials denying that was is coming, it sets off alarms...when a nonsense question like "Is the U.S. moving towards war with Iran" is given a sharp denial, then we pay attention. The usual method for dealing with nonsense questions is that they are not given the time of day. More often today, that is not the case with questions about a war with Iran. In fact, we are now hearing similar denials from the President of Iran.

Background

Iran has been a thorn in the side of western politics for several decades. Prior to the so called Iranian Revolution, Iran's geographical position in the Middle East has made it a fertile ground for strategic playbooking.

The U.S., hoping to foster a friend in the region, provided arms and technological assistance to the Shah of Iran, in return for the ability to use Iran as a watch tower over the Mideast.

When the Shah was overthrown by Islamic zealots during the Jimmy Carter administration, the Iranian Revolution signaled a major change in the body politic of the region and indeed a major change for U.S. Policy.    The virulent anti-American revolution led by anti-American zealots should not have been a surprise for U.S. planners. Propping up the Shah put American support at the top of the things the zealots hated.

As the U.S. was forced to find a new "friend" in the region to replace a fervently anti-American, anti Western Iran, the U.S. sealed bad relations with Iran by supporting Iraq. And then the Iran-Iraq war split Persia in half, creating today's regional animosity that has degraded into a Shiite vs Sunni insurgency in Iraq and Iran's ever increasing support for insurgents friendly with their clerics bach in Tehran.

While the American left wishes to blame all this on the Bush Administration, the reality is that the Shiite/Sunni chism goes back even further, back into ancient days and the splits between sects of Mohammed's followers. The current geo-political chism also has old history ties, however is exacerbated by western yearnings for colonization (Britain and the U.S.) and modern lust for oil (all major consumer nations). Clearly that had little to do with either Bush presidency. If one wants to find a scapegoat in the Executive Branch, the weak presidency of Jimmy Carter and the destruction of the intelligence community by Carter's CIA director are better and more likely figures.

Today's Iran is strongly divided, however, the moderates in that nation are essentially voiceless. By the nature of their religion, Iran's religious leaders, frequently referred to as "The Mullahs", exhibit an extraordinary influence on the Iranian government and its average citizen. Indeed, this is a historical influence that also harkens back to the years following Mohammed's life. While not necessarily rooted in Islamic Extremism, the modern Iranian people have been deeply effected by the propaganda of the Iranian Revolution and the emergence of radically inspired clergy and thus have become unwilling participants in the litany of crimes foisted on the world by the Iranian government since the revolution.

Human Rights Violations

Recently, the director of the U.N. Human Rights watchdog agency said that Iran's leadership could face prosecution under International Law for their human rights violations. Indeed, Iran is listed as one of the worst offenders in the Middle East.

In response to these kinds of indictments, President Ahmadinejad has usually resorted to citing other nations imprisoning rapists or drug dealers. However, the level of abuse of human rights in Iran goes far beyond any such explanations, and the government of Iran does not appear to care much about what the rest of the world thinks of their activities.

In focus in recent months are the executions of homosexuals and horrendous torture and beatings of women in Iran, Ahmadinejad once again skirted an important security issue by claiming "women have a full range of freedoms in Iran" and that "there are no homosexuals in Iran." Of course, at the rate he is killing off homosexuals in Iran, he may soon be speaking the truth.

Yet while the U.N. is "seized" with the problems of human rights in Iran, there seems to be no hurry and no great effort to force Iran to comply to human rights standards. Indeed, in typical fashion, the U.N. makes empty threats, and those are usually backed up with nothing more a mere condemnation and never any steps that promise to take real action.

As the overly humanitarian U.N. cannot function militarily to force anyone to do anything, it is up to other nations to take that step...and currently it appears nations are beginning to line up to join an alliance to do just that.

Iranian Support of Terrorism

One of the greatest problems for the western nations (primarily Middle Eastern nations like Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq, but also felt keenly by the EU and the US) has been Iran's rapid expansion of terrorism support.    At the top of the terrorist organizations supported by Iran is Hezbollah. Hezbollah, today, is seen as the "wet works" arm of Iranian foreign policy, providing training, weapons, and funds even at the street level to terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Lebanon.

There are also well known weapons trading going on between Iran and Hamas, another particularly virulent terrorist group in the Middle East.

Not content with simply funding these groups, Iran also fields a force of intelligence agents who foster both havoc and chaos, but also act as intermediaries between the Iranian hard-liners with would-be terrorist sympathizers wherever they can be found.

It is no surprise then to find the government boldly declaring (remarkably through its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) that it is set on wiping Israel off the face of the map. And then in the same breath indicating that Israel's friends, like the U.S. and the U.K., are also destined for the same annihilation. And while Iran certainly indicates it will use all tools at its disposal to accomplish this goal, support for and direct execution of terrorism remains a center point of their strategy.

When U.S. forces led the invasion of Iraq, Iran quietly began moving weapons, personnel, and funding into Iraq. The current insurgency, while publicly claimed as an Iraqi insurgency, is fed by both Syria and Iran, with Iran being the major weapons provider. And again, it was Ahmadinejad who publicly claimed that if Iraq's bid for democracy were to fail, Iran would be quite willing and ready to fill in the void.

And while Europeans, hoping to show their independence from U.S. leadership have balked at the use of force, the capitals of the EU are becoming more and more worried about the Iranian influence in the region as well as Iranian sponsorship of terrorism.

Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program

In the realm of diplomacy, 100% sure is the benchmark, and thus, none to surprising, it is difficult to get more than a few nations to agree on intelligence findings, trends or even the interpretation of events...especially in the nuclear arena.

Thus it is no surprise that a humanitarian organization like the United Nations, which is fixated on the human condition rather than the political realties of national security, cannot adequately assess let alone protect against nations cynically intent upon obtaining nuclear weapons. And while the American Left is now, in this election season, taking credit for the turnaround of Libya and its abandonment of their nuclear program, it is quite clear that any nation could become a nuclear nation without the United Nations sounding a warning, let alone doing anything about it in a timely fashion.

The experience of American wishful thinking that built the framework intended to dismantle the North Korean nuclear weapons program has yet to sink in.   All nations should learn the lesson, yet few have. And indeed, American politicians are the worst in ignoring that lesson with many in the U.S. Congress blandly waving off Iranian nuclear developments precisely in the same manner as they did during the last few years of the North Korean program.    Instead of focusing on the unfortunate truth of nuclear weapons programs, the Left is focused on global warming -- one which will kill us in a few years, versus one that may never account for one death anywhere in the world. Such is politics in the U.S. and Europe.

The Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program is touted by President Ahmadinejad as a "peaceful" nuclear program, asking us to believe that the Iranian nuclear technologists are simply building uranium enrichment cascades in order to "break the western monopoly on nuclear fuel production."   Even if this were true, which it is not, the fact would remain that purchasing nuclear fuel from the many nations producing it would create an even more cost efficient economy in that market -- the prices, which are already far lower than that which building your own fuel enrichment and production cycle could produce -- would drop even further -- supply and demand at work.   Thus the rationale for Iran wanting to build its own nuclear fuel cycle is bogus from the start. Moreover, Ahmadinejad, again the spokesperson for Iranian defiance, says that Iran is only enriching below the 5% mark, making the Iranian program legal under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty.

Unfortunately, the enrichment process is not a single ended, single pass process. One can easily pass the enriched product back through the cascades again and again and thus continue to enrich to any level desired. And just like the disaster with efforts to stop North Korea's program, further development can be hidden. In the Iranian case, enrichment could quite easily be hidden in other cascades until it is too late -- hidden until the first Iranian nuclear weapon is tested.

Clearly, the Iranians are on a path that could create a nuclear weapon from indigenous weapons grade materials. It also quite clear that they have built the expertise to build the remainder of the weapon's components. And if all that is missing is the weapons grade nuclear materials, then their friends in North Korea or Russia could easily supply them with small shipments over time to "hurry up" the test schedule for the first Iranian nuclear weapon. It is both naive and dangerous to accept the (always wrong!) IAEA's assessment of where Iran might be in a weapons development process.

Why?

So why would Iran want a nuclear weapon? Who would they use it on? And are they really crazy or cruel enough to use such a weapon?

The answers to these there questions were answered by former P.M. of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. His take is that Iran has clearly stated that it will wipe Israel off the map, and that Israel's friends will meet the same fate. Iran needs the weapon because their military is clearly not on par with Israel's nor most of its neighbors. And while Iran has begun to slowly make major upgrades to their weapons systems, complaining all the time at sanctions put in place after the Iranian revolution, the simply could not march across the nations sitting between Iran and Israel.   And the Iranian Air Force is wholly incapable of attacks from the air. Even the long range missiles carrying conventional warheads would only be weapons of terror against the Israeli people, doing no significant damage to humans or infrastructure. However, nuclear, biological or chemical warheads on those same missiles would change the impact considerably.

So are the Iranians that crazy? Would they use NBC weapons against Israel? For that matter, would they use such weapons against western nation currently involved on the ground in the Middle East? The answer should be apparent. Again, as Benjamin Netanyahu said recently, "He (Iranian President Ahmadinejad) says he will wipe Israel off the map. I take him at his word." And the only way for Iran to make that promise come true is through the use of NBC weapons.

With all this public rhetoric, none of which is funny or meant to provoke humor, is practically laughed at by the United Nations. Trivialized and ignored, Iran's goals for Israel and her friends is rarely the hot topic in the organization that is supposed to help all the world avoid war.

In the past, when the United Nations has failed to recognize or act against security threats, nations have made decisions to ignore the U.N. and proceed with their own plans for security. Indeed there are numerous examples of ineffective "action" by the U.N. has led to not only escalation of the tensions that lead to war, but to practically incite it through bumbling, inaction, or both.

The Drums' First Soundings

Thus we arrive today at the current state of affairs. Here is the situation, identified in a numbered list to make it easy to read as well as for us to articulate:

Iran is defying the U.N.'s security council and continuing to develop a nuclear weapons program
Iran is defying the U.N.'s human rights watchdog organization by not continual non-compliance with human rights standard and treaties they have signed.
Iran is contributing (is the largest contributor) to instability and violence in several Middle Eastern nations (for example, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel) through its national support of several terrorist groups and their own indigenous terrorist cells reporting to their intelligence organization.
Iran has threatened Israel, the U.S., and the U.K. with destruction by whatever means possible
Iran is supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons and explosives that are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
Iran is supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons and explosives that are being used to kill Iraqis.
The nations of the world cannot afford to wait much longer before forceful action must be taken.

Thus Iran has become a clear and present danger, not only to Israel, Lebanon, the U.K., and the U.S., but to the entire world of nonbelievers in Iran's Extremist Islamic beliefs. Moreover, the Iranian situation detracts from the focus on destroying Islamic terrorist groups not associated with Iran, groups such as al-Qaeda to name just one. In U.S. law, when actions of another nation are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent, then the Congress must act. The same holds true for the Executive Branch. Therefore, as time goes on and Iran continues to act in a manner which is a clear and present danger to the United States, then the United States President and Congress, regardless of their political bias, will have no choice but to act. Clearly, that time is approaching quickly.

No nation can rely upon the United Nations to act in a timely or suitably forceful fashion to protect the world's security and certainly we cannot rely on the United Nations to protect the U.S. and thus time for the United Nations to act is also running out.

The U.S., if not every neighbor in the Middle East and all of the countries in Europe who have a stake in peace for the Middle East, have realized that Iran presents this clear and present danger. It is only a matter of time before many of those nations will cease rigorous diplomatic efforts, and begin moving pieces on the chessboard toward war with Iran.

Listen closely, Iran. The Drums are beating.