Poor, Poor, Pitiful Colin Powell And The "Blot" That Will -- And Should -- Always Be Attached To Him

By Meteor Blades, cross-posted from Daily Kos

Former Bush era Secretary of State Colin Powell has a new book out May 22. As with so many political celebs, it's a book written "with" a professional person who does the actual writing. But it includes quotations from the guy who was once seen as potential presidential or vice presidential material. Based on uncorrected proofs released in advance, what we get once again is Powell lamenting the stain he can't get rid of because of the dead-wrong 85-minute speech he gave to the United Nations Feb. 5, 2003. There he declared convincingly that the United States had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Within five months, that claim had been convincingly refuted.

“Yes, a blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation,” the former U.S. secretary of state writes in a new book of leadership parables that draws frequently on his Iraq war experience. “I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.” Powell, 75, laments that no intelligence officials had the “courage” to warn that he was given false information that Iraq had such weapons during preparations for his February 2003 speech before the U.S. invasion the following month.

We've been hearing this crap from the guy for seven years now. It's tedious. It's sickening. It's self-serving. It's bullshit. It's the same old, same old.

Except, not quite. Because Powell keeps changing his story about his interactions in the White House. In 2005, he told Barbara Walters that he was "right there with" the president on the use of force in Iraq. In 2007, he told a group of heavyweights at a conference in Aspen, Colo., that he had spent two-and-a-half hours trying to talk Bush out of using force.

This latest iteration isn't the first time Powell has tried to lay the blame for his bogus U.N. speech on intelligence failures well down the chain of command. Not only has he never held his bosses to account for intentionally distorting what they knew to be untrue, he hasn't owned up to his own distortions.

For instance, he knew full well from his own intelligence source that the aluminum tubes Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice were claiming as proof of Saddam Hussein's intent to make a nuclear weapon couldn't be used for that purpose. But he didn't pass that information along in his U.N. speech. Or anywhere else.

Most of all, for somebody so concerned about his reputation now, he didn't resign in protest when he learned that what he had said at the U.N. was false. In fact he said in the Walters' interview:

"I'm not a quitter. And it wasn't a moral issue, or an act of a failure of an active leadership. It was knowing what we were heading into, and when the going got rough, you don't walk out."

Fabricating evidence to start a war is not a moral issue? Better to be the good soldier than to be good, eh? Hundreds of thousands dead or maimed, millions exiled, trillions of dollars spent. For lies. How about a lament for that from the secretary?

All we get from Powell is a rancid woe-is-me sidestep from responsibility. As he enters his dotage, he claims it was all due to the lack of courage on the part of lower-downs and the failure of his normally good instincts that caused him to make an uncharacteristically bad judgment call.

Stunningly laughable for a guy whose "instincts" led to this remarkable fantasy recounted in the new book:

Powell, who served as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, recalls a morning in 1988 when he went to see Reagan and described a problem that needed to be solved that day. Reagan gazed past him at squirrels picking up nuts he had put out for them in the morning by the Rose Garden. It was a lesson in delegating authority and trusting his team to make the right decision, Powell says. “The president was teaching me: ‘Colin, I love you and I will sit here as long as you want me to, listening to your problem. Let me know when you have a problem that I have to solve,’” Powell writes.

He can perhaps be excused for believing that a quarter-century ago. But knowing what we know now about the health of Reagan's brain, Powell's continuing view that he was being mentored by a squirrel-gazing president is as ludicrous as the rest of his tales about what put that unerasable blot on his reputation.

The 0% Doctrine: Obama Breaks New Ground When It Comes To War With Iran

By Tom Engelhardt, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock.  There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice.  The tagline was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.”

Those ads came to mind recently when President Obama commented forcefully on war, American-style, in ways that were remarkably radical.  Although he was trying to ward off a threatened Israeli preemptive air strike against Iran, his comments should have shocked Americans -- but just about nobody noticed.

I don’t mean, of course, that nobody noticed the president’s statements.  Quite the contrary: they were headlined, chewed over in the press and by pundits.  Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich attacked them.  Fox News highlighted their restraint.  (“Obama calls for containing Iran, says ‘too much loose talk of war.’”)  The Huffington Post highlighted the support for Israel they represented. (“Obama Defends Policies Toward Israel, Fends Off Partisan Critiques.”)  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pushed back against them in a potentially deadly U.S.-Israeli dance that might bring new chaos to the Middle East.  But somehow, amid all the headlines, commentary, and analysis, few seemed to notice just what had really changed in our world.

The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this country and a new war doctrine to go with it.  He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon -- and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States.  That should have been news.


Consider the most startling of his statements: just before the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, the president gave a 45-minute Oval Office interview to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.  A prominent pro-Israeli writer, Goldberg had produced an article in the September issue of that magazine headlined “The Point of No Return.” In it, based on interviews with "roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike," he had given an Israeli air attack on Iran a 50% chance of happening by this July.  From the recent interview, here are Obama’s key lines:

“I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff. I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”

Later, he added this chilling note: “I think it's fair to say that the last three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.”

The next day, in a speech meant to stop “loose talk about war” in front of a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying outfit, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the president offered an even stronger formula, worth quoting at length.  Speaking of seeing the consequences of his decisions to use force “in the eyes of those I meet who’ve come back gravely wounded,” he said:

“And for this reason, as part of my solemn obligation to the American people, I will only use force when the time and circumstances demand it... We all prefer to resolve this issue diplomatically. Having said that, Iran’s leaders should have no doubt about the resolve of the United States -- just as they should not doubt Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs. I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power... and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.
“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

An American president couldn’t come closer to saying that, should American intelligence conclude the Iranians were building a nuclear weapon, we would attack. The next day, again addressing an AIPAC audience, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set the president’s commitment in stone: “No greater threat exists to Israel, to the entire region, and indeed to the United States, than a nuclear-armed Iran... Military action is the last alternative if all else fails, but make no mistake: When all else fails, we will act.”

The Power of Precedents 

To understand what’s truly new here, it’s necessary to back up a few years.  After all, precedent is a powerful thing and these statements do have a single precedent in the atomic age (though not one the president would profess to admire): the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  After all, one clearly stated reason for the invasion was Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear program as well as one to produce biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In a series of speeches starting in August 2002, President George W. Bush publicly accused the Iraqi dictator of having an active nuclear program.  His vice president hit the news and public affairs talk show circuit with a set of similar accusations, and his secretary of state spoke of the danger of mushroom clouds rising over American cities. (“We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon... [W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”)

At the same time, the Bush administration made an effort -- now long forgotten -- to convince Congress that the United States was in actual danger of an Iraqi WMD attack, possibly from anthrax, in the immediate future.  President Bush suggested publicly that, with unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), Saddam might have the ability to spray East Coast cities with chemical or biological weapons.  And Congress was given fear-inducing classified private briefings on this.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, claimed that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."

Driving the need to produce evidence, however fantastic or fabricated, of a possible threat to the U.S. was a radical new twist on war-making 101.  In the days after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed that even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty.  Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent doctrine.”  It may have been the rashest formula for "preventive" or "aggressive" war offered in the modern era.

Of course, the fact that Saddam’s Iraq had no nuclear program, no biological or chemical weapons, no functioning drones, and no way of reaching the East Coast of the United States proved strike three for critics of the Bush administration.  Missed was what was truly new in the invasion: not just the 1% doctrine itself, but the idea -- a first on planet Earth -- of going to war over the possibility that another country might be in possession of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.

Until then, such a concept hadn’t been in the strategic vocabulary.  Quite the opposite: in the Cold War years, nuclear weapons were thought of as “deterrence” or, in the case of the two massively nuclear-armed superpowers of that era, “mutually assured destruction” (with its fabulously grim acronym MAD).  Those weapons, that is, were considered guarantors, however counterintuitively, against an outbreak of war.  Their possession was a kind of grisly assurance that your opponent wouldn’t attack you, lest you both be destroyed.

In that spirit, between the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the Iraqi invasion of March 2003, seven countries -- the Soviet Union, England, France, China, Israel (though its large nuclear arsenal remains unacknowledged), India, and Pakistan -- all went nuclear without anybody suggesting that they be attacked simply for possessing such weapons.  An eighth country -- white-ruled South Africa -- actually assembled six nuclear weapons, and later became the only country to de-nuclearize itself.  South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil all had incipient nuclear programs, though none produced weapons.  Japan is today considered to be at a point the Iranians have not yet reached: “breakout capacity,” or the ability to build a nuclear weapon relatively quickly if a decision to do so were made.  In 2006, North Korea set off its first nuclear test and, within years, had become the ninth active nuclear power.

In other words, in 2003, the idea that the possession of nuclear weapons or simply of an "active" nuclear program that might one day produce such weapons was a casus belli represented something new.  And when it became clear that Saddam had no nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction at all, that explanation for American war-making, for what Jonathan Schell once dubbed “disarmament wars” -- so visibly fraudulent -- seemed to disappear into the dustbin of history.

War and the Presidential “I”

Until now, that is.

Whether he meant to or not, in his latest version of Iran war policy President Obama has built on the Bush precedent.  His represents, however, an even more extreme version, which should perhaps be labeled the 0% Doctrine.  In holding off an Israeli strike that may itself be nothing but a bluff, he has defined a future Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon as a new form of aggression against the United States.  We would, as the president explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, be committing our military power against Iran not to prevent an attack on the U.S. itself, but a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

And by the way, note that he didn’t say, “We don’t bluff.”  His formulation was: “I don’t bluff.”  And that “I” should not be ignored.  The Bush administration promoted a cult of presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a “unitary executive.” No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term “Global War on Terror,” but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified.

The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president’s private war.  In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or “targeted killings” as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric Holder has just claimed for the president the “authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation.”  In doing so, added Turley, “Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a ‘trust me’ pledge.”  With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other words, is increasingly becoming the president’s private preserve and strikes on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment.

It is no longer a matter of “we,” but of a presidential “I” when it comes to unleashing attacks in what has become a global free fire zone for those drones and special ops forces.  War, in other words, is increasingly lodged in the Oval Office and a commander-in-chief executive.  As the Libyan intervention suggested, like the American people, Congress is, at best, an afterthought -- even though this Congress would rubber-stamp a presidential act of war against Iran without a second thought.

The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of unprecedented extremity at a moment when there is no evidence that the Iranians are pursuing a bomb -- not yet at least.  The “supreme leader” of their theocratic state has termed the possession of nuclear weapons “a grave sin” and U.S. national intelligence estimates have repeatedly concluded that the Iranians are not, in fact, moving to build nuclear weapons.  If, however -- and it’s a giant if -- Iran actually got the bomb, if a 10th country joined the nuclear club (with others to follow), it would be bad news, and the world would be a worse place for it, but not necessarily that greatly changed.

What could change the world in a radical way, however, is the 0% doctrine -- and the trend more generally to make war the personal prerogative of an American president, while ceding to the U.S. military what was once the province and power of diplomacy.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been published.

Syria: A Human Security Approach

The key to any intervention is to combine upholding human rights inside Syria with de-escalation of the broader regional conflict. Far from being contradictory, these two goals – human rights and peace – reinforce each other. 

By Mary Kaldor, cross-posted from openDemocracy


The United Nations Human Rights Council has described the Syrian government’s repression of peaceful protests as ‘crimes against humanity’. Even the shocking number that is widely quoted of 7,000 people killed cannot convey the sheer horror of what is happening including shelling, torture, arbitrary detention, child-rape and other atrocities. Reports suggest some 50,000 people are missing, some 60,000 have been imprisoned, and a minimum of 15,000 (the number of refugees in Turkey) have been forced to leave their homes.

The scale of violence gripping Syria today has long crossed the line of a domestic issue. The international community is obliged both morally and legally to intervene to stop the violence – to protect Syrian civilians and to establish conditions for peaceful political change. The question is what form should such an intervention take?

What began as an inspiring non-violent protest is degenerating into something that has all the hallmarks of what I call a ‘new war’ ^↑ . The Assad regime is showing many of the characteristics of a weak state. The economic sanctions imposed by the west are beginning to take their toll. The regime cannot rely on the army. Reportedly it has been unable to call up more than 60% of the reserves.

When army units are sent to repress protestors there are usually many defections. Instead the regime relies on the Republican Guard, the intelligence agencies and some extremist militias known as Shabbiha, all of whom act with great savagery. The regime has been engaged in fomenting sectarian conflict, distributing weapons and sandbags to the Alawite community and spreading horrendous stories of ethnic hatred on the part of the majority Sunnis. It has also, reportedly begun to release criminals from gaol, a practice pioneered by Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi. Indeed Assad has talked of creating ‘another Afghanistan’.



For its part, the opposition is fragmented. The Syrian National Council leadership is based in Paris. Coordinating Committees have been established inside Syria . The Free Syria Army with leadership based in Anatakya, Turkey, is composed of defecting soldiers who seem to have established their own independent brigades such as the Hamza Al-Qatib Brigade or the Salaheddine Al-Ayoubi brigade called after victims of the repression or historical figures. The SNC has sought to control the FSA including through the establishment of the FSA Military Council led by a higher ranking officer than the leader of the FSA. But it has met stiff resistance and the FSA seems to operate rather independently. Although in an agreement with the Syrian National Council they declared that their strategy was ‘defensive protection of civilians’, there have been a number of high profile offensive operations, such as the attack on the air force headquarters or the assassination of the head of the military hospital in Damascus just yesterday (though the FSA did not take responsibility for this). Al Qaeda ^↑ has also announced support for the opposition and may have been responsible for spectacular bomb attacks in Damascus and Aleppo.

New wars have a tendency to spread and to last a long time. Opponents of external intervention warn of the potential of igniting protracted conflict with catastrophic regional spillovers but this is even more likely to happen in the absence of any intervention, if the  current violence in Syria today is left unchecked.

The events in Syria take place at the intersection of two contravening dynamics.  On the one hand, the Arab Spring is sweeping away decades-old authoritarian regimes and threatening to upend the geopolitical status quo far beyond the region. It is creating unfamiliar and uncomfortable uncertainties from Moscow to Washington and from Bejing to Tel Aviv. On the other hand, the escalating confrontation with Iran over its quest to acquire nuclear weapons appears to be a classic case of old geopolitics. Actors are sorted into an Iran/ Syria/ Hezbollah axis with Russia and China not far behind and an Israel/US axis with Europe not far behind. Should this polarization spill into an open conflict, it would put an end to the Arab Spring’s democratic tide, turning the region into a proxy battlefield for an old/new cold war between global players.  This may be one reason why a series of apparently unrelated developments seem to be moving us inexorably towards this scenario. But the new cold war would not end in the restoration of ‘order and stability’; rather it might mean ongoing persistent violence over ever greater swathes of territory.

Up to now, outside efforts on Syria have been ineffectual. Sanctions may have weakened the economy but they do not seem to have affected the determination of those targeted. The Arab League did succeed in sending civilian monitors in in December although there were not enough of them; they did not protect civilians, and they were led by a Sudanese indicted war criminal. Nevertheless, violence does seem to have abated while they were present. But they have been withdrawn and the Arab League turned to the UN. Russia and China vetoed the UN Security Council resolution proposed by the Arab League that called on Assad to step down and hand over power to his Vice President to supervise a transition to democratic elections, giving Assad a sense of impunity. Within hours the regime had attacked the city of Homs; hence the horrific violence that we are witnessing now.

What’s next?

The next step being proposed is a UN Arab League civilian monitoring mission or peace-keeping force or both. Saudi Arabia has turned to the General Assembly which can act when blocked by the Security Council through a Uniting for Peace resolution. This would be combined with talks on a political transition. Opposition groups are suggesting more robust action. The coordinating committees propose that civilian monitors should be accompanied by armed guards. The Syrian National Council has proposed the establishment of a safe haven in the Northern province of Idlib where much of the FSA is based. The safe haven would be declared an international protectorate but would be defended by the FSA backed by western air power.

From the beginning of the uprising over a year ago a dichotomy emerged between those calling for the internationalisation of the conflict and those suggesting that it should be left to the Syrians to resolve it through dialogue. It is clear today that the latter is no longer an option.  Indeed it would be morally reprehensible to allow the slaughter to continue unchecked. The key to any intervention is to combine upholding human rights inside Syria with de-escalation of the broader regional conflict.  Far from being contradictory, these two goals – human rights and peace – reinforce each other. On the one hand, an intervention in Syria which takes account of Russian and Chinese concerns is likely to allow for a more consensual approach to Iran’s nuclear issue. Likewise, de-escalation of the conflict with Iran should reduce opposition in Moscow and Beijing to a solution that involves the removal of the Assad regime.

There is also supposed to be a dichotomy between political or diplomatic approaches or military approaches. The problem is that political or diplomatic approaches usually refer to talks with the regime and those who are committing crimes against humanity and may effectively legitimate and entrench their political role. On the other hand military approaches tend to mean war-fighting rather than the defensive use of force. The problem with this kind of military intervention is that it can easily escalate and sharpen polarisation and it may end up killing those it is supposed to protect. It can be argued that in Libya, effectively, the west intervened in a war on the side of the rebels rather than being focused on civilian protection and this may or may not have been the right thing to do. But if this were tried in Syria, it could result not in a victory for the rebels but in a widening regional conflict.

A human security approach brings together peace and human rights and involves both political intervention, broadly defined, combined with efforts to directly affect what is happening on the ground. The latter may involve the use of force but not in war fighting ways. This could mean:

- A UN-Arab League civilian monitoring mission, which would establish a presence throughout the contested parts of Syria.
- An international or regional peace force that would establish safe havens under UN/Arab League protection connected by humanitarian corridors so as to affect the reality on the ground.
- Political negotiations aimed at the removal of the Assad regime and an orderly transition to democracy
- De-escalation of the conflict with Iran over nuclear weapons. 

Such an approach would focus on minimising violence and creating conditions for peaceful and inclusive political processes as well as broader geo-political efforts to build consensus.

Attacking Iran: Lessons From The Iran-Iraq War

Military action against Iran, and even the continuing threat of attack, is likely to give the Islamic Republic a new lease on life.

 By Annie Tracy Samuel, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The presumed aim of an attack by the United States and/or Israel on Iranian nuclear and military facilities would be to weaken the Islamic Republic, particularly by hindering its ability to build a nuclear weapon. However, the history of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 calls into question the contention that an attack will weaken the regime in Tehran. Iran’s security policies, and its policy outlook more generally, have been shaped enormously by the country’s experience in the Iran-Iraq War. As the Iranians themselves continuously point to the lessons of the war and their bearing on the present day, it behooves policymakers to follow suit.

The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 was a movement of several different groups that were united most strongly in their opposition to the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah. Following the ouster of the Shah in February 1979, the union of those groups began to break down. In invading Iran, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein assumed that the divided Iranians and their dilapidated armed forces would be unable to put up much of a fight. He was wrong. Iranians responded to the invasion by uniting against him and under their current leadership, even though many opposed the direction the revolution had taken. Iran’s leaders quickly resurrected the armed forces by halting military trials and purges and enforcing conscription.

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), which was established following the revolution to serve primarily as an internal security force, transformed into a second military and rushed to confront the invading forces. Thousands of volunteers were incorporated into both the IRGC and the regular military. They were driven to defend the country, the revolution, and the Islamic Republic by a potent combination of nationalism, revolutionary mission, and religious zeal that was stoked by the foreign threat. Their dedicated and determined defense, combined with the Iraqi forces’ poor performance, caused the invaders to stall and then retreat. The IRGC and the Basij remain today as the Islamic Republic’s most devoted defenders. They have a substantial interest in the survival of the regime, and can therefore be expected to vigorously confront attacking forces, just as they did when the Iraqis invaded.

An attack on Iran by the United States or Israel will likely add to the ranks of the regime’s supporters. Just as a divided population came together to confront the Iraqi invasion, Iranians of all stripes will unite in opposition to an attack. The upshot will be a stronger, more cohesive, and more militant Islamic Republic. In the wordsof Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s reformist former president and a harsh critic of some of Iran’s current leaders and policies, “If there should one day be any military interference in Iran, then all factions, regardless of reformists or non-reformists, would [unite] and confront the attack.” Iranians interviewed by Reuters, Radio Farda, and the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran made the same argument. “A war will unite the regime, and it will also force many to unite behind a regime they don’t even support” said a 56-year-old woman living in Tehran. “What else should we do, [cheer] for Israel, which would kill our countrymen working in the nuclear sites?” Similarly, a Tehran-based journalist who said he sympathized with the opposition Green Movement wrote that, “[Iranian] society will not welcome any country that attacks its soil.”


An attack on Iran will not only bring Iranians together under the current regime; it will also unite them in support for a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Even if it targeted Iranian nuclear facilities and was limited in scope, an attack will most likely be interpreted by Iranians as a declaration of war, an attempt at regime change, and a determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear technology or enrichment capability of any nature. It will also convincethem that acceleratingthat drive and ultimately possessingnuclear weapons is the only wayto safeguardtheir regime and their country from future attack. Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently put forward this view. “I don't think you can convince anyone to give up an atomic programme through the threat of violence,” he stated. “Rather, it will cause them to move even faster on it, in order to defend themselves. ... If the decision to build a bomb has not yet been taken, a military strike would ensure more than ever that it is.”

While the regime may increase its strength in the wake of an attack by winning new supporters, it may also be able to capitalize on an attack to eliminate its internal enemies. That is precisely what happened following the 1980 Iraqi invasion. Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies used the war to strengthen their control over the state along the war-making state-making nexus, followingthe pattern of revolutionary elites in other countries. Throughout the war Khomeini used the conflict to discredit and eliminate his internal rivals. By keeping the people mobilized for the war and focused on Iran’s external enemies, he was able to consolidate his power with fewer constraints and less debate.

Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and the powerful IRGC would be able to achieve similar results in the case of a strike on Iran. The Revolutionary Guards have long warned of the dangers posed by Iran’s external enemies and have characterized internal opposition as the work of external forces. An attack on Iran will seemingly vindicate the IRGC’s position and enable them to increase repression and their own power. Iranians favoring any sort of softer line will be undermined and suppressed. Hossein Ghazian, an Iranian sociologist who was jailed in Iran and is now a visiting scholar at Syracuse University, said that, in the case of an attack, the regime would have “enough legitimacy, excuses, and reasons to repress those opposed to it.”

Similarly, in a 2005 op-ed in The New York Times, Iranian human rights activists Shirin Ebadi and Hadi Ghaemi put forward “The Human Rights Case Against Attacking Iran.” They argued that, “for human rights defenders in Iran, the possibility of a foreign military attack on their country represents an utter disaster for their cause.” The authors also drew a parallel with the Islamic Republic’s behavior following the 1980 Iraqi invasion. The “threat of foreign military intervention will provide a powerful excuse for authoritarian elements to uproot [independent human rights organizations] and put an end to their growth,” they argued. “Human rights violators will use this opportunity to silence their critics by labeling them as the enemy’s fifth column. In 1980, after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and inflamed nationalist passions, Iranian authorities used such arguments to suppress dissidents.”

In a report released by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran in November 2011, Ghaemi, writing as the president of that organization, emphasized that the parallel is still valid. In summarizing the views of Iranians interviewed by the Campaign, Ghaemi wrote that, “an attack would further militarize the state, exacerbate the human rights crisis in Iran, and undermine Iranian civil society and the pro-democracy movement. ... A military strike would likely lead to an upsurge of political violence, threatening all those considered enemies of the government. Given the mass executions of numerous political prisoners during the Iran-Iraq War, strong fears were expressed about the fate of hundreds of current political prisoners in the event of a conflict with the United States.”

Military action against Iran, and even the continuing threat of attack, is likely to give the Islamic Republic a new lease on life. Its devoted supporters will be strengthened and mobilized, and it will enjoy the additional support of those who will join in condemning and retaliating for an attack. Threats of a possible strike, and certainly a strike itself, substantiate and animate the security narrative Iranian leaders have been propagating for years: that the West is determined to raze the Islamic Republic. They have mastered the art of using the threat of attack, signs of Western hostility towards Iran, and even invasion to consolidate their power. Further, the more likely an attack appears, the more determined Iranians will be to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. The policy of attacking and threatening Iran has served as the lifeblood sustaining the Islamic Republic. We have yet to see how the regime might sustain itself without it.

Hormuz-Mania

Glenn Greenwald reminds us of Candidate Obama's pledge to negotiate without precondition with the leaders of Iran and other countries, a far-sighted position that caused him to be labeled naive by many in the the punditocracy.  Unfortunately, President Obama refuses to engage meaningfully with Iran through direct negotiations or diplomacy, leaving increasingly harsh sanctions as the only available course.  As Michael Klare writes below, this misguided policy is making the Strait of Hormuz "the most combustible spot on the planet, the most likely place to witness a major conflict between well-armed adversaries."  -- Lovechilde

By Michael T. Klare, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Ever since December 27th, war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond.  On that day, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would block the strait and create havoc in international oil markets if the West placed new economic sanctions on his country.

“If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports,” Rahimi declared, “then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.”  Claiming that such a move would constitute an assault on America’s vital interests, President Obama reportedly informed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Washington would use force to keep the strait open.  To back up their threats, both sides have been bolstering their forces in the area and each has conducted a series of provocative military exercises.

All of a sudden, the Strait of Hormuz has become the most combustible spot on the planet, the most likely place to witness a major conflict between well-armed adversaries.  Why, of all locales, has it become so explosive?

Oil, of course, is a major part of the answer, but -- and this may surprise you -- only a part.

Petroleum remains the world’s most crucial source of energy, and about one-fifth of the planet’s oil supply travels by tanker through the strait.  “Hormuz is the world’s most important oil chokepoint due to its daily oil flow of almost 17 million barrels in 2011,” the U.S. Department of Energy noted as last year ended.  Because no other area is capable of replacing these 17 million barrels, any extended closure would produce a global shortage of oil, a price spike, and undoubtedly attendant economic panic and disorder.

No one knows just how high oil prices would go under such circumstances, but many energy analysts believe that the price of a barrel might immediately leap by $50 or more.  “You would get an international reaction that would not only be high, but irrationally high,” says Lawrence J. Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation.  Even though military experts assume the U.S. will use its overwhelming might to clear the strait of Iranian mines and obstructions in a few days or weeks, the chaos to follow in the region might not end quickly, keeping oil prices elevated for a long time.  Indeed, some analysts fear that oil prices, already hovering around $100 per barrel, would quickly double to more than $200, erasing any prospect of economic recovery in the United States and Western Europe, and possibly plunging the planet into a renewed Great Recession.

The Iranians are well aware of all this, and it is with such a nightmare scenario that they seek to deter Western leaders from further economic sanctions and other more covert acts when they threaten to close the strait.  To calm such fears, U.S. officials have been equally adamant in stressing their determination to keep the strait open.  In such circumstances of heightened tension, one misstep by either side might prove calamitous and turn mutual rhetorical belligerence into actual conflict.


Military Overlord of the Persian Gulf

In other words, oil, which makes the global economy hum, is the most obvious factor in the eruption of war talk, if not war.  Of at least equal significance are allied political factors, which may have their roots in the geopolitics of oil but have acquired a life of their own.

Because so much of the world’s most accessible oil is concentrated in the Persian Gulf region, and because a steady stream of oil is absolutely essential to the well-being of the U.S. and the global economy, it has long been American policy to prevent potentially hostile powers from acquiring the capacity to dominate the Gulf or block the Strait of Hormuz.  President Jimmy Carter first articulated this position in January 1980, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  “Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” he told a joint session of Congress, “and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

In accordance with this precept, Washington designated itself the military overlord of the Persian Gulf, equipped with the military might to overpower any potential challenger.  At the time, however, the U.S. military was not well organized to implement the president’s initiative, known ever since as the Carter Doctrine.  In response, the Pentagon created a new organization, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and quickly endowed it with the wherewithal to crush any rival power or powers in the region and keep the sea lanes under American control.

CENTCOM first went into action in 1987-1988, when Iranian forces attacked Kuwaiti and Saudi oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, threatening the flow of oil supplies through the strait.  To protect the tankers, President Reagan ordered that they be “reflagged” as American vessels and escorted by U.S. warships, putting the Navy into potential conflict with the Iranians for the first time.  Out of this action came the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew members, all of whom died when the plane was hit by a missile from the USS Vincennes, which mistook it for a hostile fighter plane -- a tragedy long forgotten in the United States, but still deeply resented in Iran.

Iraq was America’s de facto ally in the Iran-Iraq war, but when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 -- posing a direct threat to Washington’s dominance of the Gulf -- the first President Bush ordered CENTCOM to protect Saudi Arabia and drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.  And when Saddam rebuilt his forces, and his very existence again came to pose a latent threat to America’s dominance in the region, the second President Bush ordered CENTCOM to invade Iraq and eliminate his regime altogether (which, as no one is likely to forget, resulted in a string of disasters).

If oil lay at the root of Washington’s domineering role in the Gulf, over time that role evolved into something else: a powerful expression of America’s status as a global superpower.  By becoming the military overlord of the Gulf and the self-appointed guardian of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Washington said to the world: "We, and we alone, are the ones who can ensure the safety of your daily oil supply and thereby prevent global economic collapse."  Indeed, when the Cold War ended -- and with it an American sense of pride and identity as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in Europe and Asia -- protection of the flow of Persian Gulf oil became America’s greatest claim to superpowerdom, and it remains so today.

Every Option on Every Table

With the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the one potential threat to U.S. domination of the Persian Gulf was, of course, Iran.  Even under the U.S.-backed Shah, long Washington’s man in the Gulf, the Iranians had sought to be the paramount power in the region.  Now, under a militant Shiite Islamic regime, they have proven no less determined and -- call it irony -- thanks to Saddam’s overthrow and the rise of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, they have managed to extend their political reach in the region.  With Saddam’s fate in mind, they have also built up their defensive military capabilities and -- in the view of many Western analysts -- embarked on a uranium-enrichment program with the potential to supply fissile material for a nuclear weapon, should the Iranian leadership choose someday to take such a fateful step.

Iran thus poses a double challenge to Washington’s professed status in the Gulf.  It is not only a reasonably well-armed country with significant influence in Iraq and elsewhere, but by promoting its nuclear program, it threatens to vastly complicate America’s future capacity to pull off punishing attacks like those launched against Iraqi forces in 1991 and 2003.

While Iran’s military budget is modest-sized at best and its conventional military capabilities will never come close to matching CENTCOM’s superior forces in a direct confrontation, its potential pursuit of nuclear-arms capabilities greatly complicates the strategic calculus in the region.  Even without taking the final steps of manufacturing actual bomb components -- and no evidence has yet surfaced that the Iranians have proceeded to this critical stage -- the Iranian nuclear effort has greatly alarmed other countries in the Middle East and called into question the continued robustness of America’s regional dominance.  From Washington’s perspective, an Iranian bomb -- whether real or not -- poses an existential threat to America’s continued superpower status.

How to prevent Iran not just from going nuclear but from maintaining the threat to go nuclear has, in recent years, become an obsessional focus of American foreign and military policy.  Over and over again, U.S. leaders have considered plans for using military force to cripple the Iranian program though air and missile strikes on known and suspected nuclear facilities.  Presidents Bush and Obama have both refused to take such action “off the table,” as Obama made clear most recently in his State of the Union address.  (The Israelis have also repeatedly indicated their desire to take such action, possibly as a prod to Washington to get the job done.)

Most serious analysts have concluded that military action would prove extremely risky, probably causing numerous civilian casualties and inviting fierce Iranian retaliation.  It might not even achieve the intended goal of halting the Iranian nuclear program, much of which is now being conducted deep underground.  Hence, the consensus view among American and European leaders has been that economic sanctions should instead be employed to force the Iranians to the negotiating table, where they could be induced to abandon their nuclear ambitions in return for various economic benefits.  But those escalating sanctions, which appear to be causing increasing economic pain for ordinary Iranians, have been described by that country’s leaders as an “act of war,” justifying their threats to block the Strait of Hormuz.

To add to tensions, the leaders of both countries are under extreme pressure to vigorously counter the threats of the opposing side.  President Obama, up for re-election, has come under fierce, even hair-raising, attack from the contending Republican presidential candidates (except, of course, Ron Paul) for failing to halt the Iranian nuclear program, though none of them have a credible plan to do so.  He, in turn, has been taking an ever-harsher stance on the issue.  Iranian leaders, for their part, appear increasingly concerned over the deteriorating economic conditions in their country and, no doubt fearing an Arab Spring-like popular upheaval, are becoming more bellicose in their rhetoric.

So oil, the prestige of global dominance, Iran's urge to be a regional power, and domestic political factors are all converging in a combustible mix to make the Strait of Hormuz the most dangerous place on the planet. For both Tehran and Washington, events seem to be moving inexorably toward a situation in which mistakes and miscalculations could become inevitable.  Neither side can appear to give ground without losing prestige and possibly even their jobs.  In other words, an existential test of wills is now under way over geopolitical dominance in a critical part of the globe, and on both sides there seem to be ever fewer doors marked “EXIT.”

As a result, the Strait of Hormuz will undoubtedly remain the ground zero of potential global conflict in the months ahead.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.

Robot Airplanes With Wings Of Clay

What a Busted Robot Airplane Tells Us About the American Empire in 2012 and Beyond

 By Nick Turse, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

The drone had been in the air for close to five hours before its mission crew realized that something was wrong.  The oil temperature in the plane’s turbocharger, they noticed, had risen into the “cautionary” range. An hour later, it was worse, and it just kept rising as the minutes wore on.  While the crew desperately ran through its “engine overheat” checklist trying to figure out the problem, the engine oil temperature, too, began skyrocketing.

By now, they had a full-blown in-flight emergency on their hands.  “We still have control of the engine, but engine failure is imminent,” the pilot announced over the radio.

Almost two hours after the first signs of distress, the engine indeed failed.  Traveling at 712 feet per minute, the drone clipped a fence before crashing.

Land of the Lost Drones

The skies seem full of falling drones these days.  The most publicized of them made headlines when Iran announced that its military had taken possession of an advanced American remotely piloted spy aircraft, thought to be an RQ-170 Sentinel.

Questions about how the Iranians came to possess one of the U.S. military’s most sophisticated pieces of equipment abound.  Iran first claimed that its forces shot the drone down after it "briefly violated" the country’s eastern airspace near the Afghan border.  Later, the Islamic Republic insisted that the unmanned aerial vehicle had penetrated 150 miles before being felled by a sophisticated cyber-attack.  And just days ago, an Iranian engineer offered a more detailed, but as yet unsubstantiated, explanation of how a hack-attack hijacked the aircraft.

For its part, the United States initially claimed that its military had lost the drone while it was on a mission in western Afghanistan.  Later, unnamed officials admitted that the CIA had, in fact, been conducting a covert spy operation over Iran.

The drone crash that led this piece did occur in Afghanistan -- Kandahar, to be precise -- in May of this year.  It went unreported at the time and involved not a sleek, bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, but the older, clunkier, if more famous, MQ-1 Predator, a workhorse hunter/killer machine of the Afghan war and the CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

A document detailing a U.S. Air Force investigation of that Predator crash, examined by TomDispatch, sheds light on the lifecycle and flaws of drones -- just what can go wrong in unmanned air operations -- as well as the shadowy system of bases and units scattered across the globe that keep those drones constantly in the skies as the U.S. becomes ever more reliant on remote-controlled warfare.

That report and striking new statistics obtained from the military offer insights into underexamined flaws in drone technology.  They are also a reminder of the failure of journalists to move beyond awe when it comes to high-tech warfare and America’s latest wonder weapons -- their curious inability to examine the stark limitations of man and machine that can send even the most advanced military technology hurtling to Earth. 


Numbers Game

According to statistics provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, Predators have flown the lion’s share of hours in America’s drone wars.  As of October 1st, MQ-1’s had spent more than 1 million hours in the air, 965,000 of those in “combat,” since being introduced into military service.  The newer, more heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, by comparison, has flown 215,000 hours, 180,000 of them in combat.  (The Air Force refuses to release information about the workload of the RQ-170 Sentinel.)  And these numbers continue to rise.  This year alone, Predators have logged 228,000 flight hours compared to 190,000 in 2010.

An analysis of official Air Force data conducted by TomDispatch indicates that its drones crashed in spectacular fashion no less than 13 times in 2011, including that May 5th crash in Kandahar.

About half of those mishaps, all resulting in the loss of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or more, occurred in Afghanistan or in the tiny African nation of Djibouti, which serves as a base for drones involved in the U.S. secret wars in Somalia and Yemen.  All but two of the incidents involved the MQ-1 model, and four of them took place in May.

In 2010, there were seven major drone mishaps, all but one involving Predators; in 2009, there were 11.  In other words, there have been 31 drone losses in three years, none apparently shot down, all diving into the planet of their own mechanical accord or thanks to human error.

Other publicized drone crashes, like a remotely-operated Navy helicopter that went down in Libya in June and an unmanned aerial vehicle whose camera was reportedly taken by Afghan insurgents after a crash in August, as well as the December 4th loss of the RQ-180 in Iran and an even more recent crash of a MQ-9 in the Seychelles, are not included in the Air Force’s major accident statistics for the year.

Group Effort

The United States currently runs its drone war from 60 or more bases scattered across the globe.  They range from sites in the American southwest with lines of trailers where drone pilots “fly” such aircraft via computer to those far closer to the battlefield where other pilots -- seated before a similar set up, including multiple computer monitors, keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches -- launch and land the drones.  On other bases, aspiring drone pilots are trained on simulators and the planes themselves are tested before being sent to distant battlefields.

The May 5th Predator crash about a half-mile short of a runway at Kandahar Air Field drives home just how diffuse drone operations have become, with multiple units and multiple bases playing a role in a single mission.

That Predator drone, for example, was an asset of the 3rd Special Operations Squadron, which operates out of Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, and ultimately is part of Air Force Special Operations Command, based at Hurlburt Field in Florida.  When it crashed, it was being flown by an in-country pilot from the 62nd Expeditionary Squadron at Kandahar Air Field, whose parent unit, the 18th Reconnaissance Squadron, makes its home at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, ground zero for the military’s drone operations.  The crewman operating the sensors on the drone, on the other hand, was a member of the Texas Air National Guard based at Ellington Field in Texas.

The final leg of the doomed mission -- in support of elite special operations forces -- was being carried out by a pilot who had been operating Predators for about 10 months and had flown drones for approximately 51 hours over the previous 90 days.  With less than 400 total hours under his belt, he was considered “inexperienced” by Air Force standards and, during his drone launch and recovery training, had failed two simulator sessions and one flying exercise.  He had, however, excelled academically, passed his evaluations, and was considered a qualified MQ-1 pilot, cleared to fly without supervision.

His sensor operator had been qualified by the Air Force for the better part of two years, with average or above average ratings in performance evaluations.  Having “flown” a total of 677 hours -- close to 50 of them in the 90 days before the crash -- he was considered “experienced.”

The fact that the duo were controlling a special operations drone highlights the increasingly strong and symbiotic relationship between America’s two recently ascendant forms of warfare: raids by small teams of elite forces and attacks by remote-controlled robots.

The Life and Death of American Drones

During the post-crash investigation, it was determined that the ground crew in Afghanistan had been regularly using an unauthorized method of draining engine coolant, though it was unclear whether this contributed to the crash.  Investigation documents further indicate that the drone’s engine had 851 hours of flight time and so was nearing the end of the line.  (The operational lifespan of a Predator drone engine is reportedly around 1,080 hours.)

Following the crash, the engine was shipped to a California test facility, where technicians from General Atomics, the maker of the Predator, carried out a forensic investigation.  Significant overheating had, it was discovered, warped and deformed the machinery.

Eventually, the Air Force ruled that a cooling system malfunction had led to engine failure.  An accident investigator also concluded that the pilot had not executed proper procedures after the engine failure, causing the craft to crash just short of the runway, slightly damaging the perimeter fence at Kandahar Air Field and destroying the drone.

The clear conclusion reached by accident investigators in this crash stands in stark contrast to the murkiness of what happened to the advanced drone now in Iranian hands.  Whether the latter crashed thanks to a malfunction, was shot down, felled by a cyber-attack, or ended up on the ground for some other reason entirely, its loss and that of the special ops drone are reminders of just how reliant the U.S. military has become on high-tech robot planes whose major accidents now exceed those of much more expensive fixed-wing aircraft.  (There were 10 major airborne mishaps involving such Air Force aircraft in 2011.)

Robot War: 2012 and Beyond

The failure to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with a perceived success in the Libyan war -- significantly fought with airpower including drones -- has convinced many in the military not to abandon foreign wars, but to change their approach.  Long-term occupations involving tens of thousands of troops and the use of counterinsurgency tactics are to be traded in for drone and special forces operations.

Remotely piloted aircraft have regularly been touted, in the press and the military, as wonder weapons, the way, not so long ago, counterinsurgency tactics were being promoted as an elixir for military failure.  Like the airplane, the tank, and nuclear weapons before it, the drone has been touted as a game-changer, destined to alter the very essence of warfare.

Instead, like the others, it has increasingly proven to be a non-game-changer of a weapon with ordinary vulnerabilities.  Its technology is fallible and its efforts have often been counterproductive in these last years.  For example, the inability of pilots watching computer monitors on the other side of the planet to discriminate between armed combatants and innocent civilians has proven a continuing problem for the military’s drone operations, while the CIA’s judge-jury-executioner assassination program is widely considered to have run afoul of international law -- and, in the case of Pakistan, to be alienating an entire population.  The drone increasingly looks less like a winning weapon than a machine for generating opposition and enemies.

In addition, as flight hours rise year after year, the vulnerabilities of remotely piloted missions are ever more regularly coming to light.  These have included Iraqi insurgents hacking drone video feeds, a virulent computer virus infecting the Air Force’s unmanned fleet, large percentages of drone pilots suffering from "high operational stress," increasing numbers of crashes, and the possibility of Iranian drone-hijacking.
While human and mechanical errors are inherent in the operation of any type of machinery, few commentators have focused significant attention on the full spectrum of drone flaws and limitations.  For more than a decade, remotely piloted aircraft have been a mainstay of U.S. military operations and the tempo of drone operations continues to rise yearly, but relatively little has been written about drone defects or the limits and hazards of drone operations.

Perhaps the Air Force is beginning to worry about when this will change.  After years of regularly ushering reporters through drone operations at Creech Air Force Base and getting a flood of glowing, even awestruck, publicity about the glories of drones and drone pilots, this year, without explanation, it shut down press access to the program, moving robotic warfare deeper into the shadows.

The recent losses of the Pentagon’s robot Sentinel in Iran, the Reaper in the Seychelles, and the Predator in Kandahar, however, offer a window into a future in which the global skies will be filled with drones that may prove far less wondrous than Americans have been led to believe.  The United States could turn out to be relying on a fleet of robots with wings of clay.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. This article is the fourth in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation

Iran And America: Components Of Crisis

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The Arab awakening of 2011 has to a degree refocused international attention away from Iran. A number of current developments, most prominently the allegation that a high-level official in Tehran was involved in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, is now exposing Iran's regime to renewed scrutiny. The suspicion and hostility that marks the political relationship between Iran and the United States mean that this shift may have very serious implications.

The indictment issued on 11 October 2011 by a federal court in New York against two men - Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American (and US citizen, arrested on 29 September), and Gholam Shakuri, a senior figure in the elite Qods Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] - states that the murder plan originated in Iran and got as far as approaching (and paying a first instalment to) a would-be assassin linked to a Mexican drug-cartel. The belief, drawing on the testimony of Arbabsiar, is that the perpetrators intended (inter alia) to explode a bomb in a restaurant where the target was dining, which would almost certainly have killed other people.

The Barack Obama administration has reacted to the news by calling for intensified United Nations sanctions against Iran, on top of those already imposed on account of Tehran's nuclear-energy programme and the uncertainties over its exact purpose. The secretary of state Hillary Clinton describes the operation as "a dangerous escalation of the Iranian government's longstanding use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism". Iran strenuously denies any role in what it regards as based on a fiction concocted by the country's adversaries. The affair is thus already becoming another episode in an enduring pattern of enmity between the two states.

There is as yet little substantive detail on an investigation that US federal agencies had apparently been pursuing for four months. Some of the alleged plot elements are odd, not least an amateurish approach that is untypical of the IRGC - as in the supposed hiring of a drug-gang associate who turned out to be a federal informant (see Joby Warrick, "Investigators initially doubted plot had Iran ties", Washington Post 12 October 2011).



The logic of confrontation

Washington shows every degree of confidence that it can justify the charge of senior Iranian participation in an actual operation. If the available information proves to be accurate, this raises two questions: how senior were those in Tehran behind the plan, and what does this and their involvement reveal about the current political context in Iran?

Iran's power-structures are factional and rivalrous. There has for some years been regular jockeying for position and prestige, a situation that long preceded the presidential election of 2009 which gave rise to huge street-protests. The regime's crackdown on the reformist tendencies that came to prominence then has now been followed by a new phase of barely concealed intra-elite manouevring between the various camps (see Nasrin Alavi, "Iran: an elite at war", 27 May 2011).

The IRGC, which established its reputation during the destructive Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), is a vital part of the regime's armoury. It is close to being "a state within a state", in that it both has powerful and autonomous economic interests activities and is determined to present itself ideologically as the truest guardian of the revolution of 1979. This image is becoming harder to uphold in a situation where millions of young Iranians have little interest in distant heroics and are more concerned with the difficult realities of their present.

The Revolutionary Guards need an enemy to justify their purpose and project their legitimacy. The Americans filled this role with the abrasive rhetoric of the George W Bush administration against Iran following 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave Tehran no reason to change its attitude. A number of mini-crises in the years since, especially over Iran's nuclear plans, has always found the IRGC among the most combative of Iran's power-centres.

Yet the regional environment is changing, and with accelerating speed. Most US troops are now leaving Iraq; several Arab regimes hostile to Iran have collapsed in the face of largely non-violent uprisings, and others (including Iran's ally, Syria) are threatened; Iran's Shi'a co-religionists are at the forefront of protest (and the prime targets of repression) in Bahrain; of the Arab states only Saudi Arabia, now also determined to subdue dissent among the Shi'a of the eastern region, presents a strong diplomatic challenge to Iran (as does Turkey).

This combination - the IRGC's rooted sense of self-interest and destiny, and a new geopolitical context where many strategic calculations are under review - suggests that what may underlie the Washington plot is the desire of elements within the IRGC to justify its own continued importance and relevance. A serious crisis, one that might even spill over into war, would certainly satisfy that requirement.

The Washington plot may thus turn out to be a deliberate provocation intended to incite a US response. There is an echo here of the argument of some analysts that al-Qaida conducted the 9/11 attacks in order to lure the "far enemy" into Afghanistan, and then mire it in an unwinnable war (as the Soviet Union had been in the 1980s). How far ahead the IRGC has calculated, if this is indeed part of its logic, it is at present impossible to say.

The new ingredients

But irrespective of the validity of this analysis, three further substantial points need to be factored in. The first is that the more hawkish foreign-policy voices and figures in Washington have alighted on the assassination plot with enthusiasm, for two reasons. It confirms their critique of Iran as the leading regional foe of the US - the pivot of the "axis of evil"; and the timing is very good in electoral terms.

The presidential-election campaign for 2012 is gathering pace. There will be great pressure on Republican candidates to take a very hard line against Iran, and the contenders will be drawn to outbid each other over what robust action is needed. Indeed, a political sense of the need to appear patriotic and not be outflanked may well inform the Obama administration's reaction to the plot.

The second point, which applies to both sides in the domestic American debate, is the growing US concern over the independence of Nouri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad. This does not automatically translate into excessive Iranian influence, for the Iraqis are conscious of their own distinct religious history and not amenable to manipulation (see Tim Arango, "Vacuum is Feared as U.S. Quits Iraq, but Iran's Deep Influence May Not Fill It", New York Times, 9 October 2011). But it is troubling to Washington that the Iraqi prime minister and his foreign-affairs officials have offered support to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus, effectively siding with the Iranians on this issue (see Joby Warrick, "Iraq, siding with Iran, sends essential aid to Syria's Assad", Washington Post, 9 October 2011).

It is relevant here that a signal if unacknowledged aim of terminating the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 was to establish a pro-American order in Iraq in parallel with a similarly pliant government in Kabul. These, along with the US navy's fifth fleet, would (it was believed) constrain Iran. Instead, the overall outcome of the decade's intervention for Iran - for all the latter's internal problems - has been to strengthen rather than weaken its regional position. Iraq's support for al-Assad is a specific example.

The third point concerns Iran's nuclear programme. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has in recent weeks been more forthright in its concern over Iran's nuclear programme; the IAEA's former deputy director, Olli Neinonen, says that Iran could reach a state of "breakout" with enough highly enriched uranium by the end of 2012 (see "The Iranians 'Tricked and Misled Us'", Spiegel Online, 10 October 2011). This would not in itself entail a direct nuclear-weapons capability, but it would mean that the potential for that can be realised within months.

Neinonen does not advocate a military strike; neither, as far as can be judged, does the Obama administration. But other influential voices in Washington, and some senior figures in Israel, do (see "Israel vs Iran: the risk of war", 11 June 2010).

The next phase

The alignment of the murder plot, the nuclear issue, international sanctions, and the changing regional enviroment suggests that a move is underway towards another period of potential clash of arms with Iran.

In such periods, crises can quickly erupt and escalate in uncontrollable fashion. The possibility of a military confrontation between the United States (or Israel) and Iran is one such danger (see "The next Iran war" [16 February 2006]; "America and Iran: the spark of war" [20 September 2007]; and "Iran, America, Israel: the nuclear gamble" [2 October 2009]).

If a significant group within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps really has been preparing a violent and brutal attack within the United States, knowing that its action will make outright war a real prospect, then this danger will be harder than ever to contain. All the more reason for the US not to give the group what it wants. This will require astute and far-sighted leadership in Washington. In the event of a real crisis in the coming months, a persuasive argument for a constructive and peaceful resolution that avoids the catastrophe of a new war must be made at the highest level.