Will President Bush bomb Iran?*

By Tim Shipman in Washington
Last Updated: 12:17am BST 02/09/2007
Page 1 of 3

In a nondescript room, two blocks from the American Capitol building, a
group of Bush administration staffers is gathered to consider the
gravest threat their government has faced this century: the testing of a
nuclear weapon by Iran.

George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Will president Bush bomb Iran?
President Bush dramatically stepped up his war of words with the Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The United States, no longer prepared to tolerate the risk that Iranian
nuclear weapons will be used against Israel, or passed to terrorists,
has already launched a bombing campaign to destroy known Iranian nuclear
sites, air bases and air defence sites. Iran has retaliated by cutting
off oil to America and its allies, blockading the Straits of Hormuz, the
Persian Gulf bottleneck, and sanctioned an uprising by Shia militias in
southern Iraq that has shut down 60 per cent of Iraq's oil exports.

The job of the officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and
the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy, who have gathered in an
office just off Massachusetts Avenue, behind the rail terminus, Union
Station, is to prevent a spike in oil prices that will pitch the world's
economy into a catastrophic spin.

The good news is that this was a war game; for those who fear war with
Iran, the less happy news is that the officials were real. The
simulation, which took four months, was run by the Heritage Foundation,
a conservative think tank with close links to the White House. Its
conclusions, drawn up last month and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, have
been passed on to military and civilian planners charged with drawing up
plans for confronting Iran.

News that elements of the American government are working in earnest on
how to deal with the fallout of an attack on Iran come at a tense moment.

On Tuesday, President Bush dramatically stepped up his war of words with
the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom the US government
accuses of overseeing a covert programme to develop nuclear weapons. In
a speech to war veterans, Mr Bush said: "Iran's active pursuit of
technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region
already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear
holocaust."

He went on to condemn Iranian meddling in Iraq, where America
increasingly blames the deaths of its soldiers on Iranian bombs and
missiles. Mr Bush made clear that he had authorised military commanders
to confront "Iran's murderous activities".

This was widely taken to mean that he is set on a confrontation with
Iran that will culminate in a bombing campaign to destroy Iranian
nuclear facilities, just as Israel bombed Saddam Hussein's Osirak
reactor in 1981.

The president's intervention came just weeks after leaks from a White
House meeting suggested that Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is
understood to favour the use of force, has regained the upper hand over
the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert
Gates, who both advocate diplomacy and sanctions to isolate Iran. Mr
Cheney reacted with fury when the State Department suggested that
negotiations might continue past January 2009, when Mr Bush leaves the
White House.

So the question is: did Mr Bush last week set America inexorably on a
path to the next war?

Washington officials, with close links to the Pentagon, the State
Department and the National Security Council, say that the speech was
designed as a threat not just to Iran, but to America's Western allies,
along with Russia and China, who have been slow to support - or who have
opposed - UN sanctions against Iran. James Phillips, a Middle East
expert at the Heritage Foundation, who helped devise the war-game
scenario, said: "It is simultaneously a shot across Iran's bows and an
appeal for the international community to do more to stop or slow Iran's
nuclear programme."

A former White House aide added: "If this creates in the Iranians' mind
a state of fear such that they back off, that helps your diplomacy. Bush
is a political poker player. To play poker, you have to know when to bluff."

Mr Bush had another reason for speaking out, too. With General David
Petraeus due before Congress on September 11 to report on progress on
his "surge" in Iraq, Mr Bush wanted to make the case that a withdrawal
from Iraq would boost Iranian influence there - in the hope that this
would increase domestic support for his policies.

In Teheran, Mr Ahmadinejad was also quick to make the Iraq connection,
but as an impediment, not impetus, to American adventurism. "We have an
expression in Farsi which says, 'Bring up the one that you have given
birth to first, then go for another one'," he said. "Let them do what
they started in Afghanistan and Iraq then think of other countries." He
dismissed threats of military action as "more of a propaganda measure
than factual".

But European observers, and some in the American government, believe
that Mr Bush has resolved to "do something" about Iran before he leaves
office. A State Department source said: "If we get closer to the end of
this administration and we are not seeing suitably tough diplomatic
action at the UN, and other members of the P5 [the five permanent
members of the Security Council] are still resistant to anything
amounting to more than a slap on the wrist to the Iranians, then people
will start asking the question: how do we stop our legacy being a
nuclear-armed Iran?"

Mr Bush's escalation of the rhetoric was deliberate. A former White
House aide said that the reference to a "nuclear holocaust" was a
precise attempt to bracket Mr Ahmadinejad's quest for nuclear weapons
and stated desire to wipe Israel off the map with Hitler's destruction
of the Jews.

"By using that word 'holocaust', Mr Bush has provided a moral reason to
allow the Jewish state to do what it needs to do," said the former aide.
"He is reinvoking the notion of 'never again'. If you believe that there
could be another Holocaust, it becomes morally indefensible to stand
back. It is a powerful and loaded term. Those people in Europe who
believed that the neo-cons have gone away and shrunk under a rock had
better wise up fast."

British and American military officials believe that Mr Bush's ideal
scenario is to bring about regime change in Iran, whose mullahs
humiliated the US government during the hostage crisis, 28 years ago.
"Unless you live here, it is difficult to understand how much the
hostage crisis - is burnt into the psyche of Washington," said a Western
diplomat in Washington. "They were made to look weak and the people who
did it are still in power."

There are credible reports that the US has stepped up clandestine
activities in Iran over the past 18 months, using special forces to
gather intelligence about military targets - nuclear infrastructure and
air bases, and Revolutionary Guard command centres from which Iran could
coordinate attacks in Iraq.

The Pentagon has made contact with a Kurdish group called the Party for
Free Life in Kurdistan, which has been conducting cross-border
operations in Iran, and with Azeri and Baluchi tribesmen in northern and
south-eastern Iran, who oppose the theocratic regime. By using military
special forces, rather than the CIA, the administration does not have to
sign a Presidential Finding, required for covert intelligence activity,
or report to oversight committees in Congress.

Information on US targets has leaked from the Pentagon. B2 bombers and
cruise missiles would strike up to 400 sites, only a few dozen of which
are linked to the nuclear programme. B61-11 bunker-busting tactical
nuclear weapons would be the ultimate weapon against the heavily
fortified installations; first in the crosshairs would be the main
centrifuge plant at Natanz, 200 miles south of Teheran.

A Pentagon source said: "We have a targeting list and there are plans,
but then there are also plans for repelling an invasion from Canada. We
don't know where everything is but we do know where enough is to cause
them enough damage to set back the programme."

But there are grave doubts that bombing would work. Davoud Salhuddin, a
US dissident and Muslim convert living in Iran, said: "The US will not
have the ability to change the regime here. Iran's supreme leader
Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has been preparing himself for a US attack
for the past 30 years. If they attack Iran, the problem of terrorism
that they are trying to solve will get 100 times bigger than it is now…
Americans will not feel safe in their own homes."

The other problem is that the CIA, apparently, does not have enough
intelligence to guarantee that the nuclear programme could be
permanently crippled, and little way of knowing after the event how much
time they have bought with a raid. International estimates of how long
it would take Iran to get a bomb vary between a year and 10 years.

The latest polls show that just one in five Americans would support the
bombing of Iran now, but about half would do so if their government
considered it necessary: clearly a position from which Mr Bush could
build a case for war. Three out of four voters want to prevent Iran from
acquiring nuclear weapons.

Just as crucially, US government officials say that the CIA has failed
to come up with a "smoking gun" that would persuade the international
community to back military action. Last autumn, the CIA told the White
House that while it believes Iran is running a clandestine nuclear
weapons programme, it does not have conclusive proof. Radioactivity
detection devices placed near suspect facilities did not find the
expected results. Stung by criticism of their performance over Saddam
Hussein's weapons programmes, CIA bosses warned Mr Bush and Mr Cheney
that this did not prove that Iran had successfully concealed the
programme from inspectors.

The diplomatic case against Iran suffered another blow when the
International Atomic Energy Agency last week gave an upbeat assessment
of Iranian co-operation with weapons inspectors. It found that Iran
continued to enrich uranium - necessary for a bomb, but also for civil
nuclear power - in violation of UN Security Council demands, but at a
slower rate than was expected.

A State Department source said a new push would be made to advance the
case for sanctions this autumn, but the hopes of progress were mixed.
"The Russians and Chinese are still stonewalling, and the Europeans
don't want to get involved," he said.

The one bright light for American hawks was a speech from the French
President Nicolas Sarzoky, fast becoming Washington's favourite
European, who, while ruling out French involvement in air strikes, did
warn that Iran could face military action unless it abandoned the
enrichment programme, presenting the world with a "catastrophic choice"
between "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran".

Complicating everything is President Bush's weak ratings in public
opinion and on Capitol Hill, and the fact that some of his closest
allies, including the political strategist Karl Rove and Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales, have jumped ship.

Only Congress has the power to declare war, and Mr Bush would need
Congressional approval for military action against Iran within 60 days.
Some think he might struggle to win that approval. "I don't think there
is any real fight left in this White House. And no one in Congress wants
to help them," said one Republican.

But critics fear that if Mr Bush cannot advocate confrontation with
Iran, he might yet seek to provoke it. Joseph Cirincione, of the Centre
for American Progress, accuses Mr Bush of "taunting Iran". He said:
"Like the similar campaign for war with Iraq, this effort seems to be
designed to find a casus belli, perhaps by provoking Iran into some
action that could justify a military assault."

In the meantime, administration officials are studying the lessons of
the recent war game, which was set up to devise a way of weathering an
economic storm created by war with Iran. Computer modelling found that
if Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, it would nearly double the world
price of oil, knock $161 billion off American GDP in a single quarter,
cost one million jobs and slash disposable income by $260 billion a quarter.

The war gamers advocated deploying American oil reserves - good for 60
days - using military force to break the blockade (two US aircraft
carrier groups and half of America's 277 warships are already stationed
close to Iran), opening up oil development in Alaska, and ending import
tariffs on ethanol fuel. If the government also subsidised fuel for
poorer Americans, the war-gamers concluded, it would mitigate the
financial consequences of a conflict.

The Heritage report concludes: "The results were impressive. The policy
recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes from
the blockade."

James Carafano, a former lecturer at West Point, the American military
academy, who led the war game, said: "It's not about making the case for
war. I have yet to meet a government official who says: 'I've just come
from a fierce debate about whether to bomb Iran'."

But in Teheran they are waiting. Abbas Abdi, one of the US embassy
hostage takers in 1979, now a reformist political activist, said: "The
style of the Americans is that they go forward with the political
dialogues, get a couple of resolutions and then they wait to see what
the circumstances are. They have no problems in attacking Iran, for sure."
# Additional reporting by Kay Biouki in Teheran