Next stop: Iran
Daily News
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Originally published on January 17, 2005
WASHINGTON - U.S. commandos are hunting for secret nuclear and
chemical weapons sites and other targets in Iran, and have a plan
to turn the hard-line Islamic country into the next front in the
war on terrorism.
"It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're
doing it," an ex-intelligence official tells this week's issue of
The New Yorker.
Since at least last summer, the U.S. teams have penetrated
eastern Iran, reportedly with Pakistan's help, the magazine
said.
"Iraq is just one campaign," the official told investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh. "The Bush administration is looking at
this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian
campaign."
The aim is to rid America and its allies of a major state
sponsor of terrorism, Hersh writes.
"We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are
the enemy," the official tells Hersh. "This is the last hurrah -
we've got four years and want to come out of this saying we won
the war on terrorism."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom President Bush has
asked to stay on in his second term, has been jockeying for more
power to conduct covert ops without nagging congressional
oversight.
"It's a global free-fire zone," said one Pentagon adviser.
Iran has fought tooth and nail demands that it open its
nuclear energy program for inspection, fueling suspicion that the
charter member of President Bush's "axis of evil" is up to no
good.
That same secrecy also has heightened tensions with another
axis member with nuclear ambitions, North Korea.
Pentagon neoconservatives - hard-liners who include Rumsfeld
and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz - believe that surgical strikes on
a small list of military targets will minimize civilian
casualties and may spark an uprising by reformers against the
ruling fundamentalist mullahs, current and ex-officials said.
Hersh told CNN that if targets are lined up by this summer,
U.S. attacks could soon follow.
They "want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military
infrastructure as possible," a Pentagon consultant told
Hersh.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that, just as with some
Soviet-bloc countries, "the minute the aura of invincibility the
mullahs enjoy is shattered ... the Iranian regime will collapse,"
the consultant said.
Yet Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.) of the House International
Relations Committee said, "I wouldn't assume the Iranian regime
will just collapse."
With combat operations still raging in Afghanistan and Iraq,
where the hunt for weapons of mass destruction came up empty,
Bush would have to explain fully a new call for military action
against Iran, King said.
"He'd have to get the people behind it," King told the Daily
News. "But you'd have to factor in that the American public would
be somewhat suspicious."
But Bush aides are "compulsively optimistic" that the mullahs
have a fragile hold on power, and they are sure to strike soon,
predicted defense analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.
"I think they're going to do it," he told The News. "I'm
skeptical that diplomacy will succeed."
While presidential counselor Dan Bartlett complained that
Hersh's story was "riddled with inaccuracies," he notably did not
outright deny any of it.
"No President at any juncture in history has ever taken
military options off the table," Bartlett told CNN's "Late
Edition." "What President Bush has shown [is] that he believes we
can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are under way right
now."
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