Imagining A Judy In Drag

By Steve Hynd

I remain convinced that there will be a war with Iran either before the end of Barack Obama's first term or shortly after the next incumbent takes office, probably begun by Israel but rapidly involving at least the U.S., Arab nations and Russia. The bipartisan pressure of hyperbolic rhetoric and evidence-bending, from both officials and the media, has not let up since Dubya left office, and eventually someone is going to decide that a critical mass of public opinion has been reached and...boom!

When the eventual accounting for that war is made, then much like the run-up to Iraq a New York Times reporter will stand out as having done more than their fair share of water carrying. With Iraq, that reporter was the now disgraced stenographer to warmongers, Judy Miller. For Iran, it will be Miller's sometime partner in crime David "Judy In Drag" Sanger.

He's at it again today, with two pieces carrying his byline. The first is a piece of "ZOMG! Scary!" journalism that hides its rather less scary truth well down the page - a report dealing with anonymous "unofficially official" claims that Iran has already begun construction on two Qom-like enrichment centers. It fails to note Iran's most likely motivation for this, if it's true - deterring an agggressive and pre-emptive illegal attack by dispersing facilities so that its civilian program, which has cost it billions and is the subject of considerable investment of national pride, cannot be easily destroyed in toto. That was the reason Iran gave for building the Qom facility too and everything we know about it suggests that, rather than a military program, is the real reson - hyperbole from Western hawks not withstanding. But the facts readers should take away from Sanger's first article are contained entirely in one graph.

In any case, no new processing site would pose an immediate threat or change the American estimates that it will still take Iran one to four years to obtain the capability to build a nuclear weapon. Given the complexity of building and opening new plants, it would probably take several years for the country to enrich uranium at any of the new sites.

That "one to four years" estimate presumes, of course, that Iran intends building a nuke, rather than just building the capacity to build a nuke swiftly if attacked, as Japan has done. The latter assessment of Iran's intentions was the assessment of Mohamed el-Baradei while IAEA head, is Iran's own explanation, and remains the most likely scenario.

Then there's Sanger's second piece, entitled "Imagining an Israeli Strike on Iran". There's an excluded middle in Sanger's description of the flow of events, in which Israel attacks suddenly thus side-stepping any U.S. attempts to halt it's illegal aggression. That excluded middle is made plain by the graphic at the top of the page:

 

That big red arrow goes right through Iraq - which is entirely reliant on the U.S. for its air defense early warning and response forces. Israeli planes could only cross Iraqi airspace if the U.S. allowed it to. That's the big flaw in any scenario that includes the notion that "lack of advance notice allows Washington to say truthfully that it had not condoned the attack." The only thing that would allow that in such circumstances would be American jets shooting down Israeli ones.

Sanger ends his report of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy's little wargame pipe-dream by writing:

No one won, and the United States and Israel measured success differently. In Washington, officials believed setting the Iranian program back only a few years was not worth the huge cost. In Israel, even a few years delay seemed worth the cost, and the Israelis argued that it could further undercut a fragile regime and perhaps speed its demise. Most of the Americans thought that was a pipe dream.

I'm sure that Sanger also thinks an attack eventually unseating the Tehran regime is a pipe dream - he's a hack but not a stupid one. However, the vast amount he has written on Iran and its nuclear program shows clearly that he agrees that setting it back "only a few years" would be worth the "huge cost" too. Unfortunately, that too is a pipe dream, but one that Sanger and others are determinedly succeeding in convincing the American public to believe.