"What are they smoking?"

With only a couple of years left of his lame-duck presidency, President George Walker Bush has little time to introduce democracy to the people of the Middle East, while at the same time keeping America safe from the "evil doers". After watching freedom marching through the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the next obvious target is Iran.

[The New Yorker: 10th April 2006]

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.

This article quotes many sources, who seem to be in the position to evaluate the policies of the current US administration. If what they say is true, than the situation is even worse than I thought.

Here are some of the quotes and my comments:

"Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler", a former senior intelligence official said.

Why must they compare every single dictator to Hitler? It's just ridiculous. WTF does potential Adolf Hitler mean? Is Ahmadinejad going to make a deal with Putin and take over Poland? Is he going to have concentration camps? Is he going to have a foreign or economic policy like that of the Third Reich? Why can't they just use a Bushism and call him an "evil doer"? This guy is not even a dictator, he does not even have the absolute power in his country.

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?’ ”

Whatever they are smoking, they should be manufacturing and selling it in large quantities. Damn. This is just about the silliest plan ever, historically these types of plans are introduced by someone in the air force. It was going to work for Goering in England, and it was going to work for Harris in Germany. If you want regime change you need troops on the ground. When people get bombed, they don't tend to attack their leaders, they tend to stop thinking about politics and concentrate on survival.

Clawson [deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy] said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

Quebec? In a different situation I would think of this as a silly comparison, but keeping in mind the current administration, I am not so sure. They do speak French over there, perhaps they also think of them as cheese eating surrender monkeys. In any case last time when US attacked Canada (in 1812), it was no cakewalk.

“People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.”

That makes sense. During Clinton administration, I felt that there was at least an attempt to repair relations with Iran. Bush, on the other hand, already in 2002, in his State of the Union speech, pigeon holed Iran into the axis of evil.

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation.

Well, that makes sense. If you are going to attack a country without any provocation, you might as well completely immobilise it, to make sure it can't defend itself.

As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast.

This is the familiar setup which we have already seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. After all, generals do tend to fight the last war. It's nice to see that Kurds are involved, after all this effort they better get an independent state of their own. Otherwise perhaps Slate's Timothy Noah will start up his "Kurd Sellout Watch" column again.

The article illustrates well the problem of the present situation. US administration is convinced that those ruling Iran are irrational (those with "perverted sense of justice"), so the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine cannot be applied. From this it logically follows that under no circumstances must they get the nukes.

The problem with this assumption of insanity is that it does not matter whether Iranians would get the bomb in 3 years or 20 years, it does not even matter if they would never be able to complete this project or if they promise to abandon the use of nuclear power altogether, even for peaceful purposes. If they are insane, one cannot take a chance. From this it follows that the only way out of this situation is to have the regime change.

The Iranian government understands this problem and realises that the only way for them to stop the unavoidable US attack is to get the nukes ASAP. Only with the nukes would the be able to get the same kind of comparative safety enjoyed by North Korea.

So even though the official policy of the current US administration is to work this one out through diplomacy, their belligerent stance is actually encouraging Iranians to accelerate the production of the bomb.

But in any case, I think it's encouraging to know that

the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”'