Archive for February 26th, 2008
Generals to quit if US strikes Iran
Generals to quit if US strikes Iran
Some senior US military commanders are prepared to resign if President Bush orders a military strike against Iran, a new report says.
“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” The Sunday Times quoted a source with close ties to British intelligence.
“There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible,” the source added.
If proven true a revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented because ‘American generals usually stay and fight until they get fired,” said a Pentagon source.
Robert Gates, the defense secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is believed to represent the view of his senior commanders.
Iran has announced that in face of any aggression it will respond like a ‘tsunami’.
MT/DT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=44700§ionid=351020101
US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack
SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.
“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”
A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.
“There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations.”
A generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented. “American generals usually stay and fight until they get fired,” said a Pentagon source. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is believed to represent the view of his senior commanders.
The threat of a wave of resignations coincided with a warning by Vice-President Dick Cheney that all options, including military action, remained on the table. He was responding to a comment by Tony Blair that it would not “be right to take military action against Iran”.
Iran ignored a United Nations deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment programme last week. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted that his country “will not withdraw from its nuclear stances even one single step”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran could soon produce enough enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs a year, although Tehran claims its programme is purely for civilian energy purposes.
Nicholas Burns, the top US negotiator, is to meet British, French, German, Chinese and Russian officials in London tomorrow to discuss additional penalties against Iran. But UN diplomats cautioned that further measures would take weeks to agree and would be mild at best.
A second US navy aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS John C Stennis arrived in the Gulf last week, doubling the US presence there. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander of the US Fifth Fleet, warned: “The US will take military action if ships are attacked or if countries in the region are targeted or US troops come under direct attack.”
But General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said recently there was “zero chance” of a war with Iran. He played down claims by US intelligence that the Iranian government was responsible for supplying insurgents in Iraq, forcing Bush on the defensive.
Pace’s view was backed up by British intelligence officials who said the extent of the Iranian government’s involvement in activities inside Iraq by a small number of Revolutionary Guards was “far from clear”.
Hillary Mann, the National Security Council’s main Iran expert until 2004, said Pace’s repudiation of the administration’s claims was a sign of grave discontent at the top.
“He is a very serious and a very loyal soldier,” she said. “It is extraordinary for him to have made these comments publicly, and it suggests there are serious problems between the White House, the National Security Council and the Pentagon.”
Mann fears the administration is seeking to provoke Iran into a reaction that could be used as an excuse for an attack. A British official said the US navy was well aware of the risks of confrontation and was being “seriously careful” in the Gulf.
The US air force is regarded as being more willing to attack Iran. General Michael Moseley, the head of the air force, cited Iran as the main likely target for American aircraft at a military conference earlier this month.
According to a report in The New Yorker magazine, the Pentagon has already set up a working group to plan airstrikes on Iran. The panel initially focused on destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and on regime change but has more recently been instructed to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq.
However, army chiefs fear an attack on Iran would backfire on American troops in Iraq and lead to more terrorist attacks, a rise in oil prices and the threat of a regional war.
Britain is concerned that its own troops in Iraq might be drawn into any American conflict with Iran, regardless of whether the government takes part in the attack.
One retired general who participated in the “generals’ revolt” against Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war said he hoped his former colleagues would resign in the event of an order to attack. “We don’t want to take another initiative unless we’ve really thought through the consequences of our strategy,” he warned.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1434540.ece
The threat of a wave of resignations coincided with a warning by Vice-President Dick Cheney that all options, including military action, remained on the table. He was responding to a comment by Tony Blair that it would not “be right to take military action against Iran”.
Can NATO take a tough line when Putin shows up at its summit?
Can NATO take a tough line when Putin shows up at its summit?
By John Vinocur
February 25, 2008
PARIS: Why is NATO inviting Vladimir Putin as a guest-intruder to its summit meeting in Bucharest this April?
It’s not as if Putin, up close and personal, could make himself any clearer on Russia’s opposition to a U.S. missile shield in Europe, independence for Kosovo, and expanding NATO’s membership, all the while insisting on what, so far, is his view of the peaceful intentions of Iran’s nuclear drive.
Take this most recent two-week slice out of the reign of Vladimir I while he switches sovereign titles (can you bear the suspense of that presidential election without him Sunday?) from chief of state to prime minister:
On Feb. 12, the same day he accepted NATO’s invitation, Putin warned Ukraine that it could become a target of Russia’s nuclear missiles if it joined the alliance. Last Friday, his official onlooker at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Dmitri Rogozin, struck the same compliant note.
If NATO “breaches its mandate” in Kosovo, Rogozin said, or if the European Union reaches a unified position on the issue – subtext: don’t you dare – then, “We too would have to proceed from the view that in order to be respected we must use brute force, in other words, armed force.”
Raúl Castro becomes Cuban presidentA painful past sparks concern about Obama’s safetyIn Argentina, no assistance from region on gas needsAccording to David Kramer, who’s in charge of the State Department’s Russian affairs section, Russia does not want a military confrontation on Kosovo and won’t send troops to bolster its ally in Serbia. But Moscow, he says, does want to demonstrate its power to the world and stoked the mood leading to the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade.
So why the invitation to Putin? Because it’s a yearly practice that’s been going on since the creation in 2002 of a NATO-Russia Council. Over the years, Putin never said yes.
Now, for the first time, Putin has accepted the invitation, and NATO is stuck with a convention that no longer fits Russia’s increasingly aggressive tone and its threats to the alliance’s members, or those who would join it.
Putin is coupling his trip to Bucharest on April 2-4 with a proposal to George W. Bush that he fly on afterwards to Sochi on the Black Sea for one-on-one conversations. The White House has not publicly acknowledged the invitation nor made known its response.
Sure, it’s wise and reasonable to keep talking to your antagonists even if they’ve resumed sending bomber patrols, Cold War-style, to Iceland or over a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Sea of Japan.
But on recent experience, Putin does not come to the West’s parlor to be publicly conciliatory.
His speech a year ago in Munich described the United States as the world’s biggest problem – an attack surprising for its brutality, and shocking for how little tough response there was to it from his host, Angela Merkel, or, for that matter, the White House.
If Putin sounded strong then and the West weak, there was a reason for it: No common will existed among NATO members to say that Russia had devolved into a serious problem, its democratic inklings strangled, and its bullying of neighbors or energy clients hardened into an inescapable pattern.
That silence risks continuing.
In Bucharest, Putin could choose softer language, but in the view of one NATO analyst, he will go on seeking to split the organization on whether it should accept Ukraine and Georgia as applicants for membership.
Putin seems to think that the alliance, overwhelmed by its Russia/Kosovo and Afghanistan concerns, can be pushed into taking a pass.
NATO’s counter to this is small-scale and tactical. The agenda for the summit meeting has been arranged so that the alliance’s meeting with Putin comes last. Discussions of enlargement and Afghanistan will be complete by the time he speaks.
That’s not much of an answer to Putin’s trying to delimit NATO’s prerogatives. In shutting up, it would look like an organization holding tight to a framework for relations that has progressively lost most of its meaning since 2002.
What NATO, with one voice, well might do instead is to call Putin out on a couple of big issues beyond Kosovo or the missile shield.
1. Energy supply. It’s pretty much forgotten now, but the 2006 Group of 8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg – the one Senator John McCain wanted to boycott because it would not regulate fair relations between purchasers and suppliers – actually ended with a declaration that has some clear, useful language on the subject.
The issue has become an obvious strategic concern for NATO. In Bucharest, the alliance could broaden and strengthen the 2006 language, and put it to Putin to accept – a marker that would challenge his strong-arm policy on oil and gas supply.
2. Iran. Simulations of centrifuges currently used by Iran to enrich uranium, performed by the European Union’s Joint Research Center, have produced a scenario (presuming 100 percent efficiency of the devices) which gives Iran the material necessary for a bomb by the end of the year. As reported by Spiegel Online, a second simulation, based on just 25 percent efficiency, would put the date at the end of 2010.
Many of the leaders at the NATO summit meeting have heard directly from Putin that he does not want an Iran with nuclear weapons. But in answer to private questions from some of them about what he will do to stop Iran’s nuclear drive, he has never given either a precise or reassuring reply.
Putin’s fudge continues to turn on his assertion that nothing indicates the mullahs’ nuclear activities are anything but peaceful.
A NATO that has backed an American antimissile shield for Poland and the Czech Republic to guard Europe against an attack from Tehran can surely muster the courage in Bucharest to publicly ask Putin what he will do to stop an Iranian bomb.
Or so you would think.
As much as talks between the West and Russia on an expert level remain a necessity, it’s a perverse reality in 2008 that NATO is giving Putin a bully pulpit for what’s certain to be his first strategic valedictory to the world.
Is anyone out there on the NATO side preparing to take the floor and set the record straight?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/25/america/politicus.php?page=2
