Can We Stop the War With Iran?

By: Ray McGovern

Wednesday 5 September 2007

This time next year, I fear the USA is likely to be at war with Iran — and the thousands of real terrorists Iran can field around the globe.

It is going to happen, folks, unless we put our lawn chairs away, take part in some serious grassroots organising and take action to prevent a wider war — while we still can.

President George W Bush’s speech last week lays out the Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran and how the intelligence is being ‘fixed around the policy,’ as was the case before the attack on Iraq.

It’s not about putative Iranian ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for US reverses in Iraq and the White House’s felt need to create a casus belli by provoking Iran in such a way as to ‘justify’ armed retaliation — eventually including air strikes on its nuclear-related facilities.

Bush’s 28 August speech to the American Legion comes five years after a very similar presentation by Vice President Dick Cheney. Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars on 26 August 2002, Cheney set the meretricious terms of reference for war on Iraq.

Sitting on the same stage that evening was former commander of the US Central Command General Anthony Zinni, who was being honoured at the VFW convention. Zinni later said he was shocked to hear a depiction of intelligence (Iraq has WMD and is amassing them to use against us) that did not square with what he knew. Although Zinni had retired two years before, his role as consultant had enabled him to stay up to date on key intelligence findings.

‘There was no solid proof that Saddam had WMD. I heard a case being made to go to war,’ Zinni told Meet the Press three and a half years later.

(Zinni is a straight shooter with considerable courage, and so the question lingers: Why did he not go public? It is all too familiar a conundrum at senior levels; top officials can seldom find their voices. My hunch is that Zinni regrets letting himself be guided by a misplaced professional courtesy and/or slavish adherence to classification restrictions, when he might have prevented our country from starting the kind of war of aggression branded at Nuremberg the ‘supreme international crime.’)

Zinni was not the only one taken aback by Cheney’s words in 2002. Then-CIA director George Tenet says Cheney’s speech took him completely by surprise. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, Tenet wrote, ‘I had the impression that the President wasn’t any more aware than we were of what his Number 2 was going to say to the VFW until he said it.’

Yet, just five weeks before, Tenet himself had told his British counterpart that the President had decided to make war on Iraq for regime change and that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

When Bush’s senior advisers came back to town after the Labor Day holiday in 2002, the next five weeks (and by now, the next five years) were devoted to selling a new product — war on Iraq. The actual decision to attack Iraq, we now know, was made several months earlier but, as then-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card explained, no sensible salesperson would launch a major new product during the month of August, Cheney’s pre-emptive strike notwithstanding. Yes, that’s what Card called the coming war: a ‘new product....’