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11/28/2005:

"Nuking Iran Without the Dachshund"

How do you convince military planners to prepare detailed plans for a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear nation, without having them think you are a madman?

Use the dachshund principle, as illustrated by this old story:

A small boy asked his father how wireless telegraphy works.

"First let me explain how telegraphy works with wires," said the father. "Imagine a dachshund so long that his tail is in New York and his head is in London. You pull his tail in New York and he barks in London [no reference to Tony Blair intended]. Do you understand?"

"Yes," said the boy, "it's perfectly clear. Now what about wireless telegraphy?"

"Exactly the same thing," replied the father. "Only without the dachshund."

In July of this year, a remarkable story by former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi appeared in the American Conservative and spread quickly over the Internet. It read,

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons."

The "9/11-type terrorist attack" is, of course, the dachshund. You need it to make the process understandable, but not to actually do wireless telegraphy.

If you are Dick Cheney and you want to draw up plans to nuke Iranian installations, how will you go about it? You need a "reasonable" scenario to convince people that you are not mad, that it is not a waste of time to plan to nuke a non-nuclear country that is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a country that is working with the IAEA to dispel unproven accusations that it is aiming to produce nuclear weapons, and that is at least a decade away from the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons (NIE estimate), further than it was in a CIA 1993 estimate. Well, if another 9/11 attack or worse were to occur, and it was attributable to Iran, such a response might be conceivable. So let's draw up the plans, just in case.

Once wireless telegraphy is in place, it works without the dachshund. Once plans to nuke Iran are in place, they can be implemented without the "9/11-type terrorist attack."

Barely two months after the Giraldi story appeared, the Pentagon's "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" [.pdf], which outlines several scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries in precisely the same situation as Iran, came to light. Coincidence?

Barely two weeks later, the U.S. succeeded in getting a totally toothless resolution passed by the IAEA [.pdf] on Iran's noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which implies, however, that the U.S. would not be violating its commitment to the NPT if it used nuclear weapons against Iran. Coincidence again?

John Bolton has been the administration's point man on nuclear policy and aggressive in denouncing Iran's supposedly evil intentions. He will be the ideal person to explain to the world, after the fact, why a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran was justified. Earlier this year, he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to the UN, over extraordinary bipartisan opposition. Coincidence again?

All along, the administration has been ratcheting up the pressure on Iran, disseminating "classified" evidence from a laptop computer that purports to prove that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. U.S. pressure managed to derail the negotiations between Iran and the European Union following the "Paris agreement" of December 2004.

The Philip Giraldi story concludes,

"Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing –that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."
antiwar.com