Shock and Awe

What a way to wake up to the day, lying in bed and firing up the laptop to RawStory:



You can bet that this is going to be all over the blogosphere in the next few days: The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh has a story in next week's issue that asserts the BushCo Gang is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, which would include bunker-busting nuclear bombs.

The RawStory story points to an advance piece by AFP (Agence France Presse), but it looks like the New Yorker decided to rush next week's issue to the Web to take advantage of the coverage (I think new issues typically go up on late Sunday/early Monday). So here's the Hersh article in full, with highlights below:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

[...]

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

[...]

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

[...]

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.”

[...]

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface.

There's much, much more--definitely give it a full read. Daily Kos diarist weldon berger (also cross-posted at his BTC blog site) has some thoughts on the article, which tie into some other recent activities:

The story also adds significance to news of Pentagon plans to detonate a .6 kiloton bomb in a test, codenamed "Divine Strake," to be carried out in the Nevada desert. The Pentagon says the test is aimed at exploring the effectiveness of non-nuclear bunker-busters, but taken in tandem with the revelations from Hersh, the size of the bomb — 700 tons, many times the capacity of even our largest cargo planes to deliver — suggests instead that the military are using it to circumvent the ban on nuclear testing. (We talked about Divine Strake in conjunction with British attempts to foment anti-Iranian sentiment in the UK, here.)

The details of Hersh's story as described by AFP ring true; for one, Saddam was often compared to Hitler in the runup to the Iraq invasion. The comparison was obscene and overblown then and even more so now: Iran's Ahmadinejad has nowhere near the absolute authority enjoyed by Hitler and Saddam, and unlike Nazi Germany and Iraq, Iran has no history of military aggression against its neighbors and, absent a threat from the US, no compelling reason to adopt a militant posture now.

Objections from skeptics regarding the possibility of a US attack on Iran generally arise from one or both of two mistaken assumptions: first, that an attack on Iran is precluded because it would involve heavy use of US ground forces, which simply aren't available; and second, that the Bush administration have learned humbling lessons from the invasion of Iraq. But as I have repeatedly said, it wouldn't and they haven't. It appears, rather, that at least some of them have sunk so far into delusion that they seriously believe a massive bombing attack on Iran would, as I jokingly suggested yesterday, cause the Iranian public to rise up and embrace the US.

[UPDATE] ThinkProgress has some more chatter on the nuke Iran chatter that Seymour Hersh has been hearing:

Hersh’s account is consistent with other recent reports. This week, the former deputy director at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Wayne White, told Forward Magazine:

In recent months I have grown increasingly concerned that the administration has been giving thought to a heavy dose of air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sector without giving enough weight to the possible ramifications of such action.

Joseph Cirincione, a respected non-proliferation expert who decribed himself as “the last remaining person in Washington who believed President George W. Bush when he said that he was committed to a diplomatic solution,” wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine last week that senior administration officials had already made up their mind about to attack Iran:

[C]olleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran…What I previously dismissed as posturing, I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.