Suggest a Show: March 2006
Immigration seems to be occupying us now, trying to figure out how to approach it. Israeli elections coming up, our obsession with Belarus has yet to abate and last night on C-Span Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from Nebraska, was at a chamber of commerce dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire.
As always, leave show suggestions as comments in the thread below. As always, take a look at Katherine’s short guide to suggesting shows.
March 27th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
More Dan Dennett, please.
This time, instead of booking other experts, how about a call-in from your listeners? (I’ll refrain from participation since I mostly understand the book already.)
You could use the blog to screen the questions – thus obviating any time wasted debated unverifiable issues like “God’s existence�.
The ‘God in Our Genes?’ thread, even if you took out all of my dozens of posts, ought to be enough of an indicator that there’s plenty more healthy juice to be squeezed from the Breaking The Spell fruits.
And please, please, please give us a longer ‘Warm Up’ next time!
After all, how many other topics are more compelling or historically vital than religion’s role in human culture?
March 27th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Hey, thanks for the new Suggestion thread!
Have billionaire conservatives developed an effectively insurmountable public-relations advantage for the Republican Party? http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2005Q4/battletanks ; http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0313-27.htm ; http://www.prwatch.org/node/4335
Why do some polls consistently show that Americans favor progressive policy options, yet Republicans win one national election after another?
Conservative writer David Brock authored The Real Anita Hill in 1993, which launched his ascendancy as a Republican star of the political publicity-machine intelligentsia. On the heels of this success, Brock had a hand in many other right-wing ‘examinations’ of Democrats and ‘liberals’ – notably the Clintons – attacks, whether in book or magazine article form, that he himself has since disavowed, discredited, and characterized as unjustified ‘smears’.
His book Blinded By The Right: The Conscience Of An Ex-Conservative was a 2002 best-seller, but his newest book,
The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media And How It Corrupts Democracy (Three Rivers Press; 2004-5; http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-0307236897-2)) is worthy on its own of an hour of ROS.
Here’s why:
Presenting an exhaustive historical survey beginning in the Goldwater era, Brock details the right’s conscious development of its media cooption strategy. This strategy, we learn early on, was predicated in no small part by corporate funding of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and three kindred institutions that have come to dominate the country’s political dialogue. Such ‘charities’ (for tax-write-off purposes!) typically serve not only as tutors for industry lobbyists, but as the sophisticated propagandists necessary to develop the deceptive sorts of language-frames that, for example, posit cherry-picked half-facts counter-intuitively suggesting that increased educational spending in fact decreases the efficacy of educators’ efforts, and labels increased air pollution ‘Clean Skies’, etc., (ad nauseum). Brock points out that Heritage (which stars in this section) has employed such propagandist luminaries as David Frum, whose writings include the appalling: “Is Contemporary Liberalism a Type of Mental Illness?�
Brock leads the reader through the years to the contemporary state of the art, wherein conservative and Republican strategists concoct smears, distortions, and outright lies, and then disseminate the product as ‘talking points’ to their flacks of right-wing radio and Fox News. Then, day by day, week after week, and month by month, these smears gain faux ‘credibility’ through endless repetition, and enough so to slime their way onto the pages of putatively legitimate news organizations like The New York Times and the rest of the presumed mainstream press.
375 pages of the book supply the exhaustive study of published documents, articles, and books necessary to back the premise Brock makes in his 16 page Introduction.
From the Introduction:
“…Democrats ignore these attacks at their peril: Not only do such attacks confirm the preconceptions of Republicans but they shape the thinking of undecided voters and even of Democrats. One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking to rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears—their own leaders—rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that ‘failed’ diplomacy had led to the war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot into his mouth.� (Pg.7)
On page 10, Brock quotes neoconservative writer and Weekly Standard contributor Matt Labash in an interview:
“While these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media like to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective… It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket.�
Brock’s conclusion: “…is that right-wing media is a massive fraud, victimizing its own audience and corrupting the broader political dialogue with the tacit permission of established media authorities who should, and probably do, know better.
“Democracy depends on an informed citizenry. The conscious effort of the right wing to misinform the American citizenry—to collapse the distinction between journalism and propaganda—is thus an assault on democracy itself.� (Pgs.10-11)
“Every day, professional news organizations, primarily in the prestige print press, report facts, across a broad range of subjects, that are essential to an informed view of politics and policy. More often than not, these stories die on the page and never reach most Americans, owing to right-wing command of the new media ‘echo chamber’.� (Pg.12)
See many additional and extended excerpts @: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Propaganda/Republican_Noise_Machine.html
The book’s scholarship is decidedly muscular, but Brock’s dispassionate writing is smooth and supple enough to engage instead of drone and bore. Its extensively sourced 391 pages offer a surprisingly swift read. (And the sources come via endnotes, not footnotes, which nicely speeds the read.) Unlike the disappointing and unconvincing Economic Hit Man, Brock’s exposé is a study of thousands of published articles, books, and other accounts, rather than an unverifiable slate of conspiracy accusations.
As a former Republican propagandist, he knows better than to accuse the machine of its deceits without overwhelming supporting evidence.
See ‘ideologically neutral’ review @: http://www.freepress.net/news/4529
And review @: http://www.literacyconnections.com/0_1400048753.html
See David Brock interview @: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/18977/
As an objective public media forum, Radio Open Source seems an ideal on-air program –especially as supplemented by its unique blog forum – to examine the machinations of this putatively democracy-deluding ‘little racket’ – particularly since we are already within the calendar year of a potentially republic-shaping national election.
Considering this, late April or May might be a fine time to air such a show – although a nice long ‘Warm-Up’ in the ROS bullpen would well serve the public interest too.
See also the many links and articles at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brock
Incidentally, the tight Republican Party-Fox News nexus detailed by Brock often occupies the attentions of the sharp-eyed watchdogs at NPR’s On The Media.
Example: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_070904_outfoxed.html
Either of OTM’s two regular reporters might make an interesting counterpoint for Brock. Were he to exaggerate any of his claims (an unlikely prospect), I’d trust them to call him on it, since they study this stuff for their own show’s explicitly narrow focus.
Geoffrey Nunberg might also make a good guest considering his forthcoming: TALKING RIGHT – How the Right Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1586483862
(Lastly, while waiting for the March Suggestion thread to open, I distilled Wikipedia’s article on the book from this show-suggestion and book review. So, no ‘fair use’ worries, because I wrote both this and that [although it’s changed quite a bit since I contributed it]).
March 27th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Ethel Waters once said: “Mel Torme is the only white man who sings with the soul of a black man.” Count Basie agreed: “The way Mel sings, he should have been black.”
I’ve recently been enjoying the 2005-released CD of Mel’s early Bethlehem best, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000AP2YZ4/sr=8-1/qid=1143497135/ref=sr_1_1/102-1452302-3092964?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Frank Sinatra WISHES he could sing “The Way You Look Tonight” like Mel did here.
Let’s talk about Mel!
March 27th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
The Dan Dennett interview was a disaster, which is…okay. But to do his ideas justice wouldn’t it be appropriate to have him back on? Chris Lydon, you’re a great interviewer. You’re good enough, smart enough, and doggonnit listeners like you.
I’m a regular listener. (A UMass grad, btw.) Since moving to Japan I have listened to CL on OnPoint, on CL’s previous audioblog, and many ROS shows. However, I only started participating here last night after hearing the God in Our Genes show.
Some problems with past show, thoughts for next round:
First, there was the title of the show that Dennett objected to: Is God in Our Genes? It’s understandable that ROS would go where most recent reviewers (including NYT) have gone, following the meme/gene analogy too closely. Jeff G, who blogs at the Mormon Doctrine blog would have titled the show, “Why is religion the way that it is?”
http://mormondoctrine.blogspot.com/2006/02/breaking-which-spell-whats-going-on.html
(How about having him on as a guest?)
Second, though I like and appreciate where Dennett is going even he admits again and again that his field of memetics is in its infancy. They haven’t even come up with conventions to operationalize what constitutes a meme. So, rather than taking “Breaking The Spell” as a full on theory, you could view it with the humility that Dennett himself views it - as a very long heuristic paper (something to get ya thinking, something to suggest years of inquiry to follow). The following is from Todd who blogs on “Blogging with a hammer”:
“While there are some interesting possibilities here, there are also some serious problems with this metaphor; unfortunately, many evolutionary biologists have seized hold of this metaphor and are making fundamentally flawed arguments. Here is a perfect example of where scientists of different orders need to take each other’s research seriously. Cultural Anthropology and Sociology have been studying the formation of cultures and their changes over time for 150 years. But to read Dennett, it’s as if none of that work exists. Dennett speaks of religious ‘memes’ as acting independent of their ‘host organisms’ in order to ensure their survival; cultural bledning is explained as these memes adapting to new conditions to survive. My two preliminary objects are 1) that cultures do not exist apart from or independent of human bodies or experience, and 2) cultures do not brachiate or evolve in a manner parallel to how organisms evolve. On the first objection, human cultures are embodied; they arise out of the experiences of embodied individuals in transaction with their environment, physical and social. Some aspects of culture are designed in such a way to shape perception and prevent their transformation; but the problem with Dennett’s interpretation is that cultures do transform. Human beings ‘trip’ over things in their environment constantly, which forces them to a) change their environment, b) change their belief, or c) a combination of the two.”
http://toddshammer.blogspot.com/2006/03/evolution-of-god.html
Why not have Tod on as well?
Anyway, with the high number of posts on the God in Our Genes thread (and the amount of confusion that still lingers around the topic) isn’t a second round with Dan Dennett a must-do? I’m with Nikos all the way.
March 27th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
Another idea: How about inviting Cornel West on to have a conversation with Daniel Dennett? Topic, “Why is American Protestantism The Way It Is?” (I like this idea because ANY conversation between Prof. West and ANYONE is bound to go well.)
March 27th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Hey guys, I’m guessing that it’s unlikely that we’ll go back to Dennett any time soon. This isn’t because of any lack of affection for him and his ideas, but for broadcast and distribution purposes it’s difficult to spend too much time with any one person. We’ve had people on more than once in the past, but usually after four or more months and to visit a completely new idea.
Don’t mean to rain on your parade, but those, sadly, are the rules of radio.
March 27th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
I aslo vote for a show on globalization where GM is discussed, and on the discussion board prearing for that show I will supply source articles that show that there are actually more Americans making cars in the US that 10 years ago (they just don’t work at US car manufacturers, they work at Japanese and German ones in Southern “Red State” - this might be one answer to Nikos’ question above re: Republican successes in politics) and that it is widely felt that there will NO one working in Western European car factories in 20 years.
I just got a chance to listen to the show with Philips and think that his “beliefs” in the concepts of Peak Oil and the “US reliance on fianance” a bit quaint - isn’t peak oil a widely discredited modern formlation of Malthusianism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus - “One famous recent example of this is Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted, in the late 1960s, that hundreds of millions would die from a coming overpopulation crisis in the 1970s, and that by 1980 life expectancy in the United States would be only 42 years. Other famous examples are the 1972 book The Limits to Growth from the self-styled Club of Rome”
So, in contrast to this I present a few recent set of facts that I propose to be discussed.
Why U.S. Business Is Winning
Newspapers bring us the dark stories about American business. The Enron trial serves up tales of lies and looting. The General Motors restructuring dramatizes the death of traditional U.S. manufacturing.
Despite all the nostalgia for the era when GM dominated the world’s car industry, the heyday of American business may actually be now.
The dawn of this heyday came in 1995. In the two preceding decades, the productivity of American workers had grown more slowly than that of Japanese and European competitors. But in the decade since 1995, U.S. labor productivity growth has outstripped foreign rivals’. Meanwhile U.S. firms’ return on equity — that is, the efficiency with which they manage the capital entrusted to them — has pulled away from that of Japan, France and Germany, according to data provided by Standard & Poor’s Compustat.
But today the United States provides most of the business role models, from Starbucks to Procter & Gamble, from Apple to Cisco. The (British) Financial Times publishes an annual list of the world’s most respected companies. In 2004 and again in 2005, no fewer than 12 of the top 15 slots were occupied by American firms.
This duo organized a survey of 732 medium-sized American and European companies and measured their management procedures against benchmarks of best practice. The result: American firms, including the subsidiaries of American firms in Europe, are simply better managed than European rivals. In fact, superior American management accounts for more than half of the productivity gap between American and European firms.
So the shift from manufacturing to services; the gallop of globalization; and the rise of information technology that flattens corporate hierarchies: All these forces come together to create an American moment. But you could be forgiven for missing this, because other forces spoil what ought to be a celebration. In the midst of this American moment, hatred of President Bush has simultaneously created an anti-American moment. And in the midst of American prosperity, rising inequality has prevented American workers from sharing in the success of American firms.
Enough with the globo-gab
Transnationalism may be on the way out — and not a moment too soon
Based on current trends, by mid-century, America, India and China will each be producing roughly 25 per cent of world GDP, with Europe down to 10 per cent.
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060327_123641_123641
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032600878.html
March 28th, 2006 at 5:26 am
How about a Nepal show. A king that comes to power after the rest of the family is shot dead. He dissolves the parliament and becomes the only law of the land. Rebels probably have more power than he does and the entire country is in a political twilight zone. Bring on the Nepalese bloggers and maybe some of the scholarly types as well.
I’ll probably do this show on my own podcast this month… but I always like to hear how you do it.
March 28th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
I am still interested in the question “will music Resurrect New Orleans” How can a city with soul be recreating. I now we have had many show about the Big Easy. I would like ton listenh to the musicians,the poets and the writers.
March 28th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
I don’t know if it’d be worth a whole show, but is it just me wondering about the “coincidence” of similarity of names between the Pres’ new chief of staff (Josh Bolton) and the US’s “ambassador” to the UN (John Bolton)?
March 29th, 2006 at 2:27 am
Prof. Michael Parenti. My favorite books:
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565847970/qid=1143616575/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/104-9662136-9421545?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
History as Mystery: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0872863573/qid=1143616575/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/104-9662136-9421545?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
March 29th, 2006 at 2:28 am
Walter Truett Anderson (PoMo I can grok)
The Truth about the Truth:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874778018/qid=1143616813/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/104-9662136-9421545?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062500171/qid=1143616813/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/104-9662136-9421545?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
March 29th, 2006 at 2:33 am
Michael Kimmelman
The Accidental Masterpiece : On the Art of Life and Vice Versa:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594200556/qid=1141688859/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-5186899-8707304?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Articles:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=MICHAEL%20KIMMELMAN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=MICHAEL%20KIMMELMAN&inline=nyt-per
BTW, I forgot to include this. Here’s Walter T. Anderson’s web page:
http://www.waltanderson.info/
March 29th, 2006 at 6:32 am
I would like to see a show about the state of American labor in general. A rundown on where wages are going, for what sectors, and how that might be impacted by having to pay for our own health care via those ridiculous HSAs, what sort of jobs are available, how many people get laid off, does business really need to be quite so streamlined, what sort of hours are we working these days, etc.
Then I would like to hear from maybe Barbara Ehrenreich, someone from organized labor, and perhaps a professor involved in theorizing about management practices to comment on what is happening to all of us working folks and (assuming that what is happening to us is bad) what we can do about it.
March 29th, 2006 at 6:38 am
Second idea is that I would like to hear a show all about intellectual property and patent law (soooooo exciting, I know). In particular I would like to hear a show focused on how IP and patents are affecting high tech innovation rather than the music and film industries, which are admitedly more titillating (what’s more titillating than something involving pirates, honestly?) but IMHO ultimately of vastly less importance to our society.
It might even be somewhat topical considering that the Supreme Court is supposed to be ruling on something like 4 patent law cases this year.
March 29th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Last one, I promise.
If you could possibly get David Foster Wallace on the show, that would be great. I find his takes on American society to be deeply insightful, his latest collection of essays gave me many of those moments where you read something and find that the author has perfectly articulated something that you’ve felt and been trying to get out in a coherent form for months or years.
March 29th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
In light of your recent post concerning God, I would like to hear a show about Spinoza and current thoughts regarding his word and its importance to today’s world. There is also in important political thread in his work for modern audiences. recently in the world of Israeli history, many intellectuals are looking at his impact on israeli politicans such as Ben Gurion. There must be similar studies for american statesman (kissinger?).
March 29th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Interview Prof. Cornel West, about anything he wishes to talk about, but I’d especially like to hear him speak concerning the role of religion in American life and politics.
For example: How do his religious views differ from those of Pres. Bush? What’s the liberal tradition of Christianity in the USA? (Comments on George W. Bush’s religioius views are always of current news interest.)
Perhaps a panel on Pres. Bush, the 21st Century, and political associations of organized Christian churches in America would be of most interest. What about the new century’s potential for a veritable ‘Armageddon’?
Last year, Dr. Cornel West spoke at the University of South Florida and drew a huge crowd.
Links:
http://www.CornelWest.com
http://www.pragmatism.org/library/west/
http://usfnews.usf.edu/page.cfm?link=article&aid=868
March 30th, 2006 at 1:21 am
Okay, ROS pals, since you’re willing to play the ‘public radio rules’ card to deny Dan Dennett’s revolutionary book the accurate exposition it’s due, how about Bobby Henderson and his Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-0812976568-0
At least it’s funny.
Throw us a bone, for cryin’ out loud.
Or give Dennett his just due.
March 30th, 2006 at 1:48 am
PS, and don’t think your loyal listeners haven’t noticed that Sheri Turkle has broken your vaunted ‘public radio rules’ by two appearances in five weeks.
Look, your editorial bias in favor of theism has come through loud and clear, and it’s your party, but Dennett’s book is ultimately more humanist and potentially more beneficial than anyone seems to want to give it credit for.
Have someone on staff read the thing from cover to cover (this time), and then look at the ocean of misunderstanding on the blog (including my own inadequate attempts to ‘speak for Dennett’), and then tell us honestly if you gave the subject anything close to justice.
March 30th, 2006 at 3:32 am
Fun with equations:
miprs + mr&bb = mi/wi
What’s it mean?
miprs = most innovative public radio show
mr&bb = most revolutionary & beneficial book
mi/wi = misinformation/wrong impression
How could it have gone so wrong?
Whether or not you ever deign to admit it, you guys owe Dan Dennett a corrective second hour.
You can hide behind the unquestionable bounty that this blog provides us dissenters (and we are truly grateful for the forum!), but any of us who’ve actually read the whole of Dennett’s book can surmise the editorial disinterest in which you held it.
It is, of course, your party. But if I were Dennett, I’d not be terribly happy with your obvious lack of preparation for the show featuring his remarkable brain-child.
Still stubborn? Fine, I’m a bonehead myself. (And how!)
Then give us Bobby Henderson. Maybe Sheri Turkle can provide another angle for that show too!
March 30th, 2006 at 9:00 am
Nikos: Let it go. Surely you must understand that Sherry Turkle had a lot to offer on two completely different subjects. What you’re suggesting is that we do two shows on the exact same subject. While you may enjoy another, fuller treatment that does Dennett’s book justice, don’t you think it’d be a bit of a disservice to everyone else who listens to this show? Don’t you think it’d be a bit self-indulgent of us to say “Sorry guys, didn’t quite nail that one; here, the same hour again in your iPod, only this time it’s better.”
We often feel, during our post-show wrapups, that we didn’t quite get it right; this is part of the cycle of a daily deadline. It’s not pride or arrogance that keeps us from going back and fixing it with a new show; it’s self-preservation and a sense of obligation to the listener. There are no mulligans in radio, Nikos.
March 30th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Brendan, consider it ‘let go’.
Besides, I’ll consider my agitation-in-four-parts in this thread worthwhile if only one person somewhere out there suspects that perhaps Dennett’s book offers more wisdom than was evident in the show, and therefore reads it. Dennett’s suggestion that religions can be improved by scrutiny and subsequent reform will require a sea-change in conventional wisdom
Every individual trickle of water will contribute to such a sea change. Think Rosa Parks.
The Saudi feminist Wajida Al-Huwaider calls for a religious self-examination akin to Dennett’s. http://www.metransparent.com/texts/arab_feminists_on_women_s_rights.htm
Any agitation that stirs people away from the complacent patterns of thought that sanction the ongoing repression of fellow human beings is worth it.
Even if it ticks off the ROS blog-master.
Thanks for the platform.
March 30th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
This isn’t a show suggestion but possibly something better:
How about a new category akin to the “Outsourced� – A ROS “Book Club� thread or grouping threads with a permanent home on the left side of the page under ‘Recently Aired’ and ‘Series’?
The usual dynamic of the bloggers is to drift away from a show thread within a couple of days after the show’s air-date. This isn’t likely to change, perhaps, but a ‘Book Club’ would allow us to compare notes and share nuggets from the many authors you feature well beyond the aired show’s typical ‘shelf life’.
Obviously, I’m thinking of Dennett, but this same dynamic applies to most other authors too. The Kevin Phillips thread has already effectively fossilized.
As has Elizabeth Kolbert’s ‘Global Warming’ thread, which featured her Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=29928&cgi=product&isbn=1596911255
Thanks once again for the forum.
March 31st, 2006 at 8:33 am
Another suggestion for a show on media. I guess when it begins to “trickle up” into the MSM maybe then the subject is ripe for discussion. But in the article below by Kinsley, I can’t find that he ever makes any distinction bewteen ALL journalism and opinion journalism and I do think that he makes a great case that any claim to the idea that “journalism is like a scientific search for truth” is naive.
The Twilight of Objectivity
How opinion journalism could change the face of the news.
Objectivity—the faith professed by American journalism and by its critics—is less an ideal than a conceit. It’s not that all journalists are secretly biased, or even that perfect objectivity is an admirable but unachievable goal. In fact, most reporters work hard to be objective and the best come very close. The trouble is that objectivity is a muddled concept. Many of the world’s most highly opinionated people believe with a passion that it is wrong for reporters to have any opinions at all about what they cover. These critics are people who could shed their own skins more easily than they could shed their opinions. But they expect it of journalists. It can’t be done. Journalists who claim to have developed no opinions about what they cover are either lying or deeply incurious and unreflective about the world around them. In either case, they might be happier in another line of work.
http://www.slate.com/id/2139042/
March 31st, 2006 at 11:55 am
This’d be for april, which is, of course, national poetry month. Instead of the tried and true, how about the “poet that died in the gutter?” (Dylan quotation). Me? Oh, well, I ain’t dead yet but I have an end stage emphysema sentence hanging over my head. But MORE important I can deliver the goods. I can even deliver what’s great. I’m a first class poet. First water, top drawer. The real deal in this doggerel hounded world. But enough bark. Here’s my bite:
Dialogue in Bloody Desert
Is it my fault that my skin is the color
Of my own desert land?
Is it my fault I’ve been angry
For a thousand years?
Oh I am an orphan, I am a widow
And I am on fire
And my house is on fire
And my town is on fire
And my land is on fire
And the world is on fire
But allah is cool as grapes on a golden plate
And I will be with him
In paradise perfectly.
I. I am American.
It ain’t my fault that I’m perfect.
I come here where things are all
Dirty and broken and sick
Cause they brought me here
From America to do the job
Americans must do to and for you.
But it ain’t our fault that we’re
Americans and you ain’t.
You’ll never be perfect but
I know about free will and
You can stop being poor,
Ignorant and emotional
Any old time you choose.
You know about Jesus and paystubs
And kmart, floss for your teeth
And big wheels for the kids.
And all you need is seven
Elevens on every corner,
A few jr colleges, tv
Shows that make sense.
And you never will be perfect
But jesus would fix you a little
If you would just go to church.
I am here in my own ancient land,
In my ancient days, ancient robes,
When the singer calls the prayers,
And for five thousand years my fathers
Studied the numbers and letters and
Pages and stories and systems that held
The spheres in golden light in these
Sand and glass walled schools that swelled
Like pride beside the roads that flow like
Lava in vulcan-like days in the daily
Catastrophe of sun in summer.
Well there in the texts
And in the hands’ grips
And gentle prints of finger tips
Too many to read–
Recorded on the skin and in the sinew
Of old, old artifacts that were the bric
A brac upon the shelf when man was born,
There in the dust on dust on dust on dust
Chronicles many a war like cash register receipt
Is scratched and scribbled, ticked askance.
And in the poetry that scrolls forever down
The poetic throat of the people who birth
Golden poets with lapis lazuli hands, tongues
Crimson and hearts made of all the tribes’
Tears torn perfectly from the disappointment
Which is this world, which is this life– in this poetry
The agony of war is blueprinted as if buildings
Fell upon the poet’s page, and, also, carved out
By surgical gouges like medical texts are passages
Of pains and dismemberings. And there are the
Flowers, weddings, begettings shot to ashes, blood,
And the bitter soup in the bowel and brain
That smells like tastes like spills like spells like
Revenge
Now tell me fool.
My babies you murdered.
Wives husbands friends parents
Sibling cousins aunts uncles are dead.
My institutions have been killed,
And my buildings buried. My days
Are slaughtered along with sleep
And dream and the steadiness of
Hand and heart I thought was me,
Nor that vague whiff of happiness lives.
I don’t even remember the ease of skin
And loin in the breeze against fabric
That once may have been mine.
My skin is boiled my bones crumpled
My blood is some alien traif.
Now what do you think I think.
Hatred is not so dark an ink
As is what writes your perfect answer
Upon a perfect page of a sunny America day.
Sometime.
Man. Says the American boy.
What makes you think so?
I can’t even get back there myself!
Miranda Joan Howe
copyright december 2005
all rights reserved
And I’ve a lifetime of work like it though each piece is its own calculus, as are real poems. I’ve a thousand pieces from over thirty-two years since I was twentyfour. So come on use me. Wanna send five copies to my mother. When I was young my mentors told me I was so very good that I wouldn’t be renowned except posthumously. When I was young I thought, how romantic. But I’d like my stuff known now. And I’d like my mother to live to see it.
miranda
April 1st, 2006 at 11:01 am
So I’m terribly gauche I know to sing these songs of myself, but have this much talent, be fifty-six with an unlaunched career of anykind and bear a death sentence and see how modest you’d be. There’s no TIME, you see for Ben Franklen’s tactic of modesty or WWhitman’s tact of anonymous boosting. And I detract from noone, boast for many, but right here say LOOK! LOOK AT THIS POETRY! LOOK! LOOK AT ME! MIRANDA JOAN HOWE! Think on this beauty and wit and power! I’m an american poet! Alive. Here! Now!
I’m here adding three works to give a broader sample and unless asked, I’ll do no more here. I’m not a freak or weak (Though, what if I were? Would I be less of a daughter of the land? less a woman of letters? OK. I am a freak. And you madam? You sir?)
miranda
I think what makes
Me cry is that we
Are still enslaved by
The cruel stupidity
That dries our rivers
And stills the fluidity
Of the air we breathe
Which kills what we may be.
I think what makes
Me weep so mournfully
When I hear the childish
Sneer so vengefully
Is how deep and broad
The gap between camaraderie
And Plato’s dark cave
Of fear, hate and slavery.
I think what makes
My tears the tears of slavery
Are the slaps and sayings
Of childhood’s chained savagery
That congeal and conceal
A child’s free born ability
To look to hear and then to feel
That everyone needs love to be free.
What makes me grieve
So mournfully
Is what when healed
Makes me sing so joyously
And I believe in dreams
And I believe in earthly glory
I believe that freedom
Is the world’s one true story.
copyright 2006,
Miranda Joan Howe
all rights reserved
Bitter Chariot; No Direction Home
I’m bone tired of my own ghost
Haunting me down like I myself
Am my own best heaven.
What have I done or failed to do
Or both done and not in perfect
Syncopated sociopathic
Auto conspiracy thus singling
Myself out for multiple manifestation
And mirrorings on such a slender strand
Of unilateral living,
On such a bare base of being?
What context? What crime?
What school of victims?
It will drown me eventually
But long since I’ve
Navigated this misleading ocean,
This misty ocean of mystery and misery.
I was Magnificent.
The sheets of sweat
On my beautiful skin
Reflected distant fires
And ancient and future oil
Paintings as though god
Had taken up a hobby.
It was in reflected light from
My own self that I learned to read
The books gods study and so I stopped
Mid all to hear the lectures of
The ages and the leaves as springs
Brought them always new, mad and ancient.
Though children, the day, the weathers,
The politics, the romances, the monies
Changing, clanging, thudding out of wallets,
Vacuum pockets, slots, envelopes, windows,
Stacks, packs, cracks, presses, couches,
Roulette wheels, gutters, mints and through the
Spectra of purses from thrift to spenddrift,
And through all the birthdays and other emergencies
Scheduled or un, through holidays and hollowdays–
Though all these things and verbs twine me about
To tie me and try me and come and look into my eyes
As if I from I divided my from me and I might look at
My life while my life looks resentfully at me
And thus I might divine and thus be my own god.
No pardon, no gold watch, no dotage, no way out.
But I had stopped to listen.
Therefore was I deaf to bright
Sunny now whose tricks break
Profusely like an ocean
Of waves just on the beach
All over me which was my
Skin and senses altogether
My innards and out skin…
Time penetrating me as all else.
Best I do know do remember
The private glory like when my
Babies were brand-new there was
In those first stainglass hours,
A sweet powdered touch to them.
Even atheist mothers know this
Is the residue of angels’ wings
Who’d late been working near.
Well I’ve had a lovely time but
Too it’s been a hideous sojourn.
I do not want to come again.
I do not want to ride victorious
Astride the flaming blood red chariot
Of karma back into the light of day
And the hunt of night and proceed
To ruin myself run myself down
Run myself over after I play
The little scene swathed in the
Bathetic bandages again as babies
Do and pretending I haven’t seen
The tilt of the horizon, the hitch
And hooks of the Sun and the Moon,
The paint box and plastic clay of
Seasons and countrysides.
And when still a child but
Best bragged brave babydoll
Barge in on the big folk–
YES! Riding my fine self out onto
The breast of the marketplace
And dance upon that stage and wail
And whimper my teenage sentiments
Like a terrorist demanding till
Civilization gives me sex money
And property and my share of
The daily poison– the old dirty soap
Opera and political tragic comedy.
No. I’d rather not come again.
I’d rather withstand the white light
And love and be loved eternally
Than yearn for one more perfect summer day
Which comes and goes like winter snow.
copyright 2005
Miranda Joan Howe
all rights reserved
Dancing Lessons
Walt Whitman went out to Californee
Verses on his brain, paper on his knee
Spelling poems and spilling poetry
From metaphor sea to simile.
Rasputin and his hyper thyroid spin
Rushed the czar with bizarre Russian tantrums,
While Edison was muy big medicine
Who, in courtly age of angst, wooed angstroms.
Proletarians John Brown and Joe Hill
Were each a union men, both of them.
By God Moses unified his people
For all that got to see God’s garment’s hem.
Will Shakespeare kicked it at Los Alamos
Splitting infinite sanskrit, less vedic
J. Robert Oppenheimer saw that ghost
Said “Upstart goose! Get thee to a medic!”
Mother Goose’s sneezes were Freud-like guilt,
Allergic to feathers, drunk on cough pills.
Slept like a gosling under the plush quilt,
Wrote reams of child’s rhymes with flow’ry Jung quills
Wm. Carlos Wms. healed verse for us
But Dylan Thomas stole him some plumes
Waxed eloquent like a burnt Icarus
Imbibing flight, height and light that consumes
Abe Lincoln had with him a battling wife
An uncivilized war and slaves to free.
Abe was good, Lincoln great through war and strife,
Only man filled up the presidency.
Dear, if you stumble, sweetness, if you fall,
When you hear music but can’t dance at all
Remember that the world is one big ball
Sometimes you’re the flower sometimes you’re the wall.
Miranda Joan Howe
copyright 2005
all rights reserved
April 3rd, 2006 at 4:45 pm
It is very unusual for the dean of a law school to speak out about politics, particularly to strongly criticize both the Republican and Democratic parties. However, that’s exactly what Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence R. Velvel has done this week. And he believes he is articulating a point of view shared by many American citizens.
Dean Velvel asks this question in his latest blog posting:
“What should now be done if, like so many Americans, one is unhappy with the warmongering, the extreme rightward thrust in both foreign and domestic affairs, and the rampant dishonesty which have come to extensively characterize much of American policies and politics, especially since the days of Nixon but also since the days of Johnson with regard to war and dishonesty?”
Velvel has an answer:
“In my judgment it is now necessary, as it was in the 1850s, to create a new political party. As when the Republican Party was created, the old parties are played out. As has been shown by Gulf II, they are incapable of doing the right thing. They are too beholden to big money — money is virtually all that our politicians care about. The pols, far too often, are people who have spent or want to spend their whole lives and careers, or at least 20 to 40 years of them, in politics, with all the kowtowing, hypocrisy, venality and evil that this causes. They have gotten too used to the ethically crooked, morally criminal ways of our system, cannot even envision serious change in the political and electoral system, and even regard the possibility of serious change as not only naive, but also as semi-treasonous. They do not represent the millions of us — one suspects the tens of millions of us — who want serious change. If there is to be serious change, it will not come from either of the two existing political parties, who for all their claimed differences are, at rock bottom, tweedle dum and tweedle dee as someone once said (George Wallace? Ross Perot?). Rather, it must come from those of us who are disgusted with the situation, and are idealistic and hopeful enough to think that, at least in the long term, something can be done to improve things. Those of us who share these characteristics must form a new political party to agitate for, to press for, change as fast as possible but certainly in the long run.”
Any interest in a program about an internet-based new political party?
Kirby F. Smith
smith@mslaw.edu
April 4th, 2006 at 8:31 am
The SAT scandal!
– 4000 students got erroneous scores on their SAT — some as many as 200 points lower
– Educational Testing Services, which administers the test, sat on the errors until *after* some students had applied to college. Scores have a major impact on where those kids got accepted.
– ETS is still not admitting how many errors there were, or how much the errors were; it’s not clear that they’re contacting students, or if students have to contact them and request a “hand count” which costs $50
– It’s not the first time it’s happened
– ETS is now basically a monopoly
– There’s no governmental or regulatory oversight
– ETS operates tax free and is a private company. No one knows how much money they rake in. Since they’re a monopoly, they simply raise testing fees.
April 4th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Articles on the unfolding SAT scandal
April 8th, 2006 at 12:07 am
I’d like to suggest a book show.
Philip Roth will be publishing a new novella in the next few weeks. I suggest Chris do a show on the novel but also include bloggers as well as listeners views about the work.
I remember hearing his interview with Saul Bellow when the latter author published Ravelstein. the theme of Everyman the new novella by Roth parallels that of Bellows.
Perhaps both works can be incorporated into the show.
April 8th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Chris, you and Cassandra Wilson need to set with each other for an hour of serious music mojo, man! Do I need to ask if you have her new album, Thunderbird? Of course not — but just in case, surf over to the Blue Note website and find out why Time Magazine called her the Best Singer in America.
Please promise me to have her on your show soon… you haven’t let me down yet!!
April 9th, 2006 at 3:00 am
Now that communism is confined to 20th century history (OK, there is still North Korea), it seems like the time to rethink the winner of the clash of socio-economic systems. All over the globe, Capitalism reigns, but it does not do so uniformly. France is a good example with its riots against labour deregulation. Japan has always tried to provide, with government programmes and subsidies and a more communal corporate culture, a buffer against the Anglo-American model. Raw fish, indeed; but not raw capitalism. Chavez in Venezuelan has thrown down a socialist agenda as a challenge to transnational hegemony. Islam, too, in many ways is a rejection of the ideology of competitive individualism and the life mimics market mimics life cycle.
So, ROS, what about a show on the future of Capitalism(s). Have we really reached the End of (economic) History?
April 9th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Also see below:
US Is Studying Military Strike Options on Iran •
Go to Original
The Iran Plans
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
17 April 20006 Issue
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
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.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said 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.”
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?’ ”
The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”
When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson 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.”
One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “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.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the CIA said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)
“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”
A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”
In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”
The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions - rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing - since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a US military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The US will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for “continuity of government” - for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the US knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ” - the giveaway - “was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.
A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the US to “go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure - it’s feasible.” The former defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous - put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”
But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath - to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. ” ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”
He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout - we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out” - remove the nuclear option - “they’re shouted down.”
The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran - without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.
The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the US arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”
With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target” than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”
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. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate” - that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.
If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. 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. The troops “are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground” - quoting a line from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.
The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by CIA operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.
” ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”
The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the US Embassy and the US Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists.
Robert Baer, who was a CIA officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles - you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”
Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The whole internal debate is on which way to go” - in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans - and forestall the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the US Something bad is going to happen.”
While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it” - bomb Iran - “without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble.”
Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside Iran - the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program - I believe it, but I don’t know it.”
In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the US new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ ” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear” - or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.
“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources - sensors and the covert teams. The CIA, which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”
The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:
The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The US Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.
Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran “questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, “What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?” The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)
Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, “RELYING ON COMPUTER, US SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”
I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a US embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic “walk-in.”
A European intelligence official said, “There was some hesitation on our side” about what the materials really proved, “and we are still not convinced.” The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but had the character of sketches,” the European official said. “It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”
The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”
In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”
Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases - one hundred per cent totally certified nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side” - in Washington. “At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians.”
The central question - whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium - is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”
Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system - if you don’t trust them - you can only bomb.”
There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. “We’re quite frustrated with the director-general,” the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk.”
The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,” a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”
“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried we’re going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British “are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise.”
The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but “to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges” to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off.”
The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed” - in sanctions - “is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ’solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.
Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the US “Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to US movies and books, and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.”
Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”
A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”
Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: “What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally - that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”
Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the US Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s impossible to block passage,” he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the US has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.
Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. “They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world.”
Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at US intelligence agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)
The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle.” The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”
“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”
The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.”
Go to Original
US Is Studying Military Strike Options on Iran
By Peter Baker, Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Sunday 09 April 2006
Any mix of tact, threats alarms critics.
The Bush administration is studying options for military strikes against Iran as part of a broader strategy of coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran to abandon its alleged nuclear development program, according to US officials and independent analysts.
No attack appears likely in the short term, and many specialists inside and outside the US government harbor serious doubts about whether an armed response would be effective. But administration officials are preparing for it as a possible option and using the threat “to convince them this is more and more serious,” as a senior official put it.
According to current and former officials, Pentagon and CIA planners have been exploring possible targets, such as the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. Although a land invasion is not contemplated, military officers are weighing alternatives ranging from a limited airstrike aimed at key nuclear sites, to a more extensive bombing campaign designed to destroy an array of military and political targets.
Preparations for confrontation with Iran underscore how the issue has vaulted to the front of President Bush’s agenda even as he struggles with a relentless war in next-door Iraq. Bush views Tehran as a serious menace that must be dealt with before his presidency ends, aides said, and the White House, in its new National Security Strategy, last month labeled Iran the most serious challenge to the United States posed by any country.
Many military officers and specialists, however, view the saber rattling with alarm. A strike at Iran, they warn, would at best just delay its nuclear program by a few years but could inflame international opinion against the United States, particularly in the Muslim world and especially within Iran, while making US troops in Iraq targets for retaliation.
“My sense is that any talk of a strike is the diplomatic gambit to keep pressure on others that if they don’t help solve the problem, we will have to,” said Kori Schake, who worked on Bush’s National Security Council staff and teaches at the US Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
Others believe it is more than bluster. “The Bush team is looking at the viability of airstrikes simply because many think airstrikes are the only real option ahead,” said Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon policy official.
The intensified discussion of military scenarios comes as the United States is working with European allies on a diplomatic solution. After tough negotiations, the U.N. Security Council issued a statement last month urging Iran to re-suspend its uranium enrichment program. But Russia and China, both veto-wielding council members, forced out any mention of consequences and are strongly resisting any sanctions.
US officials continue to pursue the diplomatic course but privately seem increasingly skeptical that it will succeed. The administration is also coming under pressure from Israel, which has warned the Bush team that Iran is closer to developing a nuclear bomb than Washington thinks and that a moment of decision is fast approaching.
Bush and his team have calibrated their rhetoric to give the impression that the United States may yet resort to force. In January, the president termed a nuclear-armed Iran “a grave threat to the security of the world,” words that echoed language he used before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Vice President Cheney vowed “meaningful consequences” if Iran does not give up any nuclear aspirations, and U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton refined the formula to “tangible and painful consequences.”
Although Bush insists he is focused on diplomacy for now, he volunteered at a public forum in Cleveland last month his readiness to use force if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tries to follow through on his statement that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”
“The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally, Israel,” Bush said. “That’s a threat, a serious threat. . . . I’ll make it clear again that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”
Bush has also been privately consulting with key senators about options on Iran as part of a broader goal of regime change, according to an account by Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.
The US government has taken some preliminary steps that go beyond planning. The Washington Post has reported that the military has been secretly flying surveillance drones over Iran since 2004 using radar, video, still photography and air filters to detect traces of nuclear activity not accessible to satellites. Hersh reported that US combat troops have been ordered to enter Iran covertly to collect targeting data, but sources have not confirmed that to The Post.
The British government has launched its own planning for a potential US strike, studying security arrangements for its embassy and consular offices, for British citizens and corporate interests in Iran and for ships in the region and British troops in Iraq. British officials indicate their government is unlikely to participate directly in any attacks.
Israel is preparing, as well. The government recently leaked a contingency plan for attacking on its own if the United States does not, a plan involving airstrikes, commando teams, possibly missiles and even explosives-carrying dogs. Israel, which bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant in 1981 to prevent it from being used to develop weapons, has built a replica of Natanz, according to Israeli media, but US strategists do not believe Israel has the capacity to accomplish the mission without nuclear weapons.
Iran appears to be taking the threat seriously. The government, which maintains its nuclear activity is only for peaceful, civilian uses, has launched a program to reinforce key sites, such as Natanz and Isfahan, by building concrete ceilings, tunneling into mountains and camouflaging facilities. Iran lately has tested several missiles in a show of strength.
Israel points to those missiles to press their case in Washington. Israeli officials traveled here recently to convey more urgency about Iran. Although US intelligence agencies estimate Iran is about a decade away from having a nuclear bomb, Israelis believe a critical breakthrough could occur within months. They told US officials that Iran is beginning to test a more elaborate cascade of centrifuges, indicating that it is further along than previously believed.
“What the Israelis are saying is this year — unless they are pressured into abandoning the program — would be the year they will master the engineering problem,” a US official said. “That would be a turning point, but it wouldn’t mean they would have a bomb.”
But various specialists and some military officials are resisting strikes.
“The Pentagon is arguing forcefully against it because it is so constrained” in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Middle East specialist. A former defense official who stays in touch with colleagues added, “I don’t think anybody’s prepared to use the military option at this point.”
As the administration weighs these issues, two main options are under consideration, according to one person with contacts among Air Force planners. The first would be a quick and limited strike against nuclear-related facilities accompanied by a threat to resume bombing if Iran responds with terrorist attacks in Iraq or elsewhere. The second calls for a more ambitious campaign of bombing and cruise missiles leveling targets well beyond nuclear facilities, such as Iranian intelligence headquarters, the Revolutionary Guard and some in the government.
Any extended attack would require US forces to cripple Iran’s air defense system and air force, prepare defenses for US ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and move Navy ships to the Persian Gulf to protect shipping. US forces could launch warplanes from aircraft carriers, from the Diego Garcia island base in the Indian Ocean and, in the case of stealth bombers, from the United States. But if generals want land-based aircraft in the region, they face the uphill task of trying to persuade Turkey to allow use of the US air base at Incirlik.
Planners also are debating whether launching attacks from Iraq or using Iraqi airspace would exacerbate the political cost in the Muslim world, which would see it as proof that the United States invaded Iraq to make it a base for military conquest of the region.
Unlike the Israeli air attack on Osirak, a strike on Iran would prove more complex because Iran has spread its facilities across the country, guarded some of them with sophisticated antiaircraft batteries and shielded them underground.
Pentagon planners are studying how to penetrate eight-foot-deep targets and are contemplating tactical nuclear devices. The Natanz facility consists of more than two dozen buildings, including two huge underground halls built with six-foot walls and supposedly protected by two concrete roofs with sand and rocks in between, according to Edward N. Luttwak, a specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The targeteers honestly keep coming back and saying it will require nuclear penetrator munitions to take out those tunnels,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA analyst. “Could we do it with conventional munitions? Possibly. But it’s going to be very difficult to do.”
Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, an expert in targeting and war games who teaches at the National Defense University, recently gamed an Iran attack and identified 24 potential nuclear-related facilities, some below 50 feet of reinforced concrete and soil.
At a conference in Berlin, Gardiner outlined a five-day operation that would require 400 “aim points,” or targets for individual weapons, at nuclear facilities, at least 75 of which would require penetrating weapons. He also presumed the Pentagon would hit two chemical production plants, medium-range ballistic missile launchers and 14 airfields with sheltered aircraft. Special Operations forces would be required, he said.
Gardiner concluded that a military attack would not work, but said he believes the United States seems to be moving inexorably toward it. “The Bush administration is very close to being left with only the military option,” he said.
Others forecast a more surgical strike aimed at knocking out a single “choke point” that would disrupt the Iranian nuclear program. “The process can be broken at any point,” a senior administration official said. “But part of the risk is: We don’t know if Natanz is the only enrichment facility. We could bomb it, take the political cost and still not set them back.”
Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said a more likely t