The George W Bush administration has yet to decide on a clear plan B for Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But military planning is progressing to fill that policy vacuum and may create a momentum of its own, say former administration officials and political observers.
After the fall of Baghdad three years ago, United States marines completed an analysis for an amphibious assault on a radical, fictitious Middle Eastern theocracy called Karona, a thinly disguised version of Iran, according to William Arkin, a former army intelligence officer who writes on military affairs for The Washington Post online. In parallel with the marines’ plan, the Pentagon has ordered US central command to conduct an analysis of a full-scale war with Iran in the ”near term”.
In July 2004, US and British army planners met at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to play a war game code-named Hotspur 2004, fictitiously set in 2015 in the Caspian Sea, in which a British medium-weight brigade operated as part of a US-led force.
Most of the plans being worked on focus on suspected underground facilities scattered around Iran, where Tehran is believed to be building a covert nuclear weapons programme. Because those bunkers are thought to be built of thick concrete and buried deep below the surface, those plans also include nuclear options.
Arkin wrote: ”To think today that the gamers put nukes away is naive, and to think that nuclear weapons don’t play a role in the Bush administration’s strategy is wildly wrong.”
The plans are being honed by US strategic command in Omaha, Nebraska, as part of Global Strike, a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with suspected weapons of mass destruction held by ”rogue states” such as Iran and North Korea.
Interest in the military’s planning took on added urgency as Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced last week that Iran had joined the nuclear club by mastering a key part of the technology. This came within days of The New Yorker magazine disclosing that Bush was refusing to take off the table a nuclear strike on Iran’s research establishments. Ahmadinejad has said Iranian scientists are ”presently conducting research” on an advanced centrifuge that would quadruple the country’s capacity to enrich uranium.
The White House, for the past 15 months, has been engaged in plan A, the diplomatic route backed up, if necessary, by sanctions. But last week Iran once more rebuffed diplomatic overtures, and is unlikely to be troubled by sanctions if China and Russia do not participate.
That leaves the question of what the Bush administration would do next. Colonel Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel and expert on targeting at the National Defence University (NDU), said: ”I have a terrible feeling they are taking this one day at a time. They have a plan A, but not a plan B.”
The US State Department and the Foreign Office, in spite of public statements that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable, privately discuss what the Middle East landscape would look like if Iran acquires a nuclear bomb: there is a tacit acceptance of what may turn out to be the reality.
But the White House does not accept this. Gardiner said: ”At one time there was a paper floating around, produced by the NDU, on how to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. But they [the administration] are so negative about that. There is no serious discussion about it other than among academics.”
Flynt Leverett, formerly a Middle East specialist in Bush’s national security council, said: ”The policy line is that Iran should not have a fuel cycle and that the number of centrifuges [used to enrich uranium] should be zero. But they have ruled out direct diplomacy with Iran, or any kind of grand bargain that would encompass the nuclear issue.”
Gardiner, who oversaw an independent war game study for Atlantic Monthly magazine two years ago, found that the use of a military option rarely left the US in a better position, after likely retaliations and international reaction were taken into account. But, he said, it was the Pentagon’s job to think up war plans and pass them up the chain of command, gathering momentum along the way. At that level, the administration would have to factor in the scale and nature of Iranian retaliation, which Robert Baer, a former CIA covert agent in the Middle East, believes would be ferocious.
”The Iranians are smarter than anyone in this whole equation. Their intelligence service is very good. They know they could do an enormous amount of damage in Iraq, in Lebanon, in the whole region,” Baer said.
”The administration is realising that there are serious drawbacks with the military option,” Leverett said. ”If you strike at the nuclear infrastructure, the chance you’re not going to hit everything you need to hit is high. Second of all, you’re going to make Iranian decision-makers all the more determined to make a bomb. The blowback would be devastating. And if the US … may have to use nuclear penetrating warheads to get after the facilities then the international political blowback is enormous.”
Even more than over Iraq, the US would need allies. Many would question what Tony Blair would do if he received a call from Bush asking for support. While Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, says repeatedly that a military strike on Iraq is ”inconceivable”, Blair has preferred to leave the military option on the table. Number 10 has privately expressed irritation with Straw for categorically ruling out the military option.
There is also Israel to consider. That is a wild card as far as the Foreign Office is concerned. But Israel says it is inclined to leave the initiative in confronting Tehran to Washington.
Shimon Peres told Israel Radio: ”The United States has placed this issue at the top of its agenda. I do not recommend that we should be involved.”
Former White House officials doubt that the White House would ever acquiesce in Iran reaching the point where a weapon was within its reach.
”I think there has been an agreement formed in the administration … and the body politic of America — a nuclear armed Iranian leadership is unacceptable,” said Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff under the former secretary of state Colin Powell. — Â