James Bamford has a new, rather lengthy, article in the latest edition of Rolling Stone (the new home of investigative journalism) titled “Iran: The Next War” which is well worth the time and effort needed to read it. In it he untangles all of the various connections among neocons in the Bush administration, the Pentagon and AIPAC with respect to our policy toward Iran. Here’s how it begins:
… FBI agents watched as Larry Franklin, an Iran expert and career employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, drove up to the Ritz-Carlton hotel across the Potomac from Washington. A trim man of fifty-six, with a tangle of blond hair speckled gray, Franklin had left his modest home in Kearneysville, West Virginia, shortly before dawn that morning to make the eighty-mile commute to his job at the Pentagon. Since 2002, he had been working in the Office of Special Plans, a crowded warren of blue cubicles on the building’s fifth floor. A secretive unit responsible for long-term planning and propaganda for the invasion of Iraq, the office’s staffers referred to themselves as “the cabal.” They reported to Douglas Feith, the third-most-powerful official in the Defense Department, helping to concoct the fraudulent intelligence reports that were driving America to war in Iraq.
Just two weeks before, in his State of the Union address, President Bush had begun laying the groundwork for the invasion, falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had the means to produce tens of thousands of biological and chemical weapons, including anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. But an attack on Iraq would require something that alarmed Franklin and other neoconservatives almost as much as weapons of mass destruction: detente with Iran. As political columnist David Broder reported in The Washington Post, moderates in the Bush administration were “covertly negotiating for Iran to stay quiet and offer help to refugees when we go into Iraq.”
Franklin—a devout neoconservative who had been brought into Feith’s office because of his political beliefs—was hoping to undermine those talks. As FBI agents looked on, Franklin entered the restaurant at the Ritz and joined two other Americans who were also looking for ways to push the U.S. into a war with Iran. One was Steven Rosen, one of the most influential lobbyists in Washington. Sixty years old and nearly bald, with dark eyebrows and a seemingly permanent frown, Rosen was director of foreign-policy issues at Israel’s powerful lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Seated next to Rosen was AIPAC’s Iran expert, Keith Weissman. He and Rosen had been working together closely for a decade to pressure U.S. officials and members of Congress to turn up the heat on Tehran.
Over breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton, Franklin told the two lobbyists about a draft of a top-secret National Security Presidential Directive that dealt with U.S. policy on Iran. Crafted by Michael Rubin, the desk officer for Iraq and Iran in Feith’s office, the document called, in essence, for regime change in Iran. In the Pentagon’s view, according to one senior official there at the time, Iran was nothing but “a house of cards ready to be pushed over the precipice.” So far, though, the White House had rejected the Pentagon’s plan, favoring the State Department’s more moderate position of diplomacy. Now, unwilling to play by the rules any longer, Franklin was taking the extraordinary—and illegal—step of passing on highly classified information to lobbyists for a foreign state. Unable to win the internal battle over Iran being waged within the administration, a member of Feith’s secret unit in the Pentagon was effectively resorting to treason, recruiting AIPAC to use its enormous influence to pressure the president into adopting the draft directive and wage war against Iran.
Frankly, Bamford’s article should have been front page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post, if those papers had been diligent in their pursuit of the Bush administration’s machinations regarding Iraq and Iran, but thankfully Rolling Stone has stepped up to the plate. The tale Mr. Bamford tells is both harrowing and familiar. One can no longer be shocked by revelations that our foreign policy is in the hands of megalomaniacs itching to “bring it on” to Iran, but still, each time new revelations such as these come to the fore, I can’t help feeling the sense that none of this is real; that we are all experiencing some crazed Dali-esque nightmare from which we shall shortly awaken to the clear light of sanity.
(cont.)
Bamford goes on to describe the 5 year mission of a select group of neoconservatives, who called themselves the “Cabal” (now we know where Lawrence Wilkerson came up with that term) to push the Bush administration toward a war with Iran. Their membership was often fluid, but one name stands out as the mentor (or as Bamford calls him the “Guru’) of the group: Michael Ledeen. Ledeen has previously been written about on several occasions by BooMan, most recently here. Suffice it to say that Ledeen has a long history with Iran, dating back to the Iran-Contra scandal, when he was intimately involved with Iranian arms dealer, and Ledeen’s self described “friend”, Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Bamford describes how Douglas Feith brought Ledeen into the administration in 2001 to help with plans regarding regime change in Iran, and to exploit his past Iranian connections. Bamford goes on to describe in some detail Ledeen’s now infamous meeting in Rome in December 2001 with his old friend, Ghorbanifar to discuss intelligence Ghorbanifar claimed to have about Iranian plots to kill Americans. At that meeting the two men also discussed how the Iranian regime might be toppled with American help, and a new, more US friendly government installed in its stead.
The Rome meeting also included Larry Franklin and
“…Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen who has been called the “theoretician of the neocon movement.” A specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and Farsi, Rhode had experience with shady exiles like Ghorbanifar: He was close to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident whose discredited intelligence helped drive the Bush administration to invade Baghdad. According to UPI, Rhode himself was later observed by CIA operatives passing “mind-boggling” intelligence to Israel, including sensitive information about U.S. military deployments in Iraq.
Nicolo Pollari, director of Italian military intelligence, and the source of the forged “Niger uranium” documents which were the basis of the notorious “16 words” in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, was also in attendance. At the meeting, Ghorbanifar suggested using hundreds of millions of dollars from a cache hidden by Saddam Hussein to finance an overthrow of the Iranian regime. It was also at this meeting that Ledeen and his fellow Americans first proposed joining forces with Mujahedin-e Khalq (or MEK), a terrorist organization based out of Iraq dedicated to the overthrow of Iran’s ruling mullahs.
I’ve written about MEK before, especially with regards to their use by the Pentagon to obtain intelligence regarding Iran’s nuclear program. MEK is also reportedly engaged in terrorist activity inside Iran on behalf of our government. It’s more than a bit discomfiting to see that the basis of our “alliance” with a known terrorist organization dates back to Ledeen’s meeting in Rome in late 2001. Obviously, in the “War on Terror” there are good terrorists (i.e., the ones we employ) as well as bad ones.
Ghorbanifar has continued to provide intelligence to Ledeen and others in the Bush government regarding Iranian intentions. As Bamford notes, his value to the neocons wasn’t in the accuracy of the information he provided to them, but in their ability to use it to push their own program of Iranian regime change through war with the United States. And they have been at least partially successful. Rumsfeld had been brought on board with their desires by 2003, as demonstrated by this:
In November 2003, Rumsfeld approved a plan known as CONPLAN 8022-02, which for the first time established a pre-emptive-strike capability against Iran. That was followed in 2004 by a top-secret “Interim Global Strike Alert Order” that put the military on a state of readiness to launch an airborne and missile attack against Iran, should Bush issue the command. “We’re now at the point where we are essentially on alert,” said Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force. “We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes in half a day or less.”
All this has been accomplished by a relatively small band of neoconservative ideologues in the Bush administration. The fact that it is now the conventional wisdom in conservative circles that the United States must, and should, go to war with Iran, despite the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that limit our military’s ability to wage further wars, is the product of the joint efforts of these committed fanatics over the last 5 years. A group that has multiple loyalties, both to Israel and to their own dream of an American Empire in the Middle East imposed by the blood sacrifice of our soldiers and the deaths of thousands of Muslims.
Please, I urge you to read the entire article by James Bamford. Much of what it discusses has been reported before, but never in such detail, and never with such a compelling narrative. Bamford brings into focus just how much of our foreign policy has been hijacked by these ideologues on the right, and also makes clear just how dangerous and disastrous their influence has been for America’s interests.
