[THS] Gareth Porter: The Real Aim of Israels Bomb Iran Campaign

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26051.htm

The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign

By Gareth Porter

July 30, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Reuel Marc Gerecht's screed justifying
an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening of  the new Israel lobby
campaign marked by the introduction of House Resolution 1553 expressing full
support for such an Israeli attack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security
policy