I know there have been a couple of mentions in broader diaries, and
this diary from khyber900, but I want to keep this news in view.
According to a Hersh article in the New Yorker, The Bush regime apparently intends to watch the Europe-Iran negotiations fail, launch military strikes against Iran with the expectation that Iranian people will rise up against their oppressive mullahs (sound familiar? remember "the Iraqis will welcome the U.S. as liberators"?)
Doesn't anyone in the Bush regime bubble realize what everyone else in the world knows: an attack on Iran will close ranks not just within Persia but throughout the Muslim world, further enflaming opposition and hatred against the U.S.
Maybe that's just what Rumsfeld wants.
Not only does Hersh reveal particulars on preparing actions against Iran, but the "lessons learned" from their first four years seem to be to give Rumsfeld even more, virtually unlimited and unchecked power to initiate actions anytime, anywhere, without oversight nor even reporting to Congress.
It should come as no surprise that this article by Hersch reveals that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld regime is set to repeat many of the same first term
mistakes in the upcoming second term.
Failure to engage diplomatically:
The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. "The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal," a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. "And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked."...
Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a "lose-lose position" as long as the United States refuses to get involved. "France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it," the diplomat said. "If the U.S. stays outside, we don't have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse."
Fascist-like secrecy:
The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it `covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's `black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Self-assured inevitability:
The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans' negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. "We're not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "They've already passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it."
Deluded or at least illinformed rosy expectations:
The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"--like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.
The only mistake our regime seems to have taken from Endless War Phase I (Iraq) was what a pesky nuisance those experts in the CIA can be. The complete removal of the CIA from the GWOT appears near:
In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it "would best serve the nation" to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.'s own élite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel's conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. "It seems like it's going to happen," Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.'s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me.
And above all, we now have an amazing--even for this regime--consolidation of power:
The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill.
...
After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director's power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his "statutory responsibilities."
...
[Quoting Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate],
"Rummy's plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets"--including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.
"Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government's intelligence wringer," the former official went on. "The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What's missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone's priorities--in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security--are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he's doing so they can ask, `Why are you doing this?' or `What are your priorities?' Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it."