[THS] Gareth Porter: Pentagon Targeted Iran after 9/11

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19872.htm

Pentagon Targeted Iran for Regime Change after 9/11

By Gareth Porter

06/05/08 - -- -WASHINGTON, May 5 (IPS) - Three weeks after the 9/11
terror attacks, former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established
an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein
regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and
four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted
extensively in then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith's
recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the
map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was
supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, "War and Decision", released last month, provides excerpts of
the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W. Bush on Sep. 30, 2001
calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a
series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to
free themselves of regimes that support terrorism."

In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states
to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states"
in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon "campaign
plan" document, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes are listed as
"state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted,
but the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons".

Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO bombing campaign in the
Kosovo War, recalls in his 2003 book "Winning Modern Wars" being told by
a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that
Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take
down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.

Clark writes that the list also included Lebanon. Feith reveals that
Rumsfeld's paper called for getting "Syria out of Lebanon" as a major goal
of U.S. policy.

When this writer asked Feith after a recent public appearance which
countries' names were deleted from the documents, he cited security
reasons for the deletion. But when he was asked which of the six regimes
on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of
them."

Rumsfeld's paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush
had approved a U.S. military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin
Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld's proposal
called explicitly for postponing indefinitely U.S. airstrikes and the use of
ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try
to catch bin Laden.

Instead the Rumsfeld paper argued that the U.S. should target states which
had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It urged
that the United States "[c]apitalize on our strong suit, which is not finding a
few hundred terrorists in caves in Afghanistan, but in the vastness of our
military and humanitarian resources, which can strengthen the opposition
forces in terrorist-supporting states."

Feith describes the policy outlined in the paper as consisting of "military
action against some of the state sponsors and pressure -- short of war --
against others".

The Rumsfeld plan represented a Pentagon consensus that included the
uniformed military leadership, according to Feith's account. He writes that
the process of drafting the paper involved consultations with the outgoing
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton and the incoming
Chairman Gen. Richard Myers.

Myers helped revise the initial draft, Feith writes, and Gen. John P. Abizaid,
who was then director of the Joint Staff, enthusiastically endorsed it in draft
form. "This is an exceptionally important memo," wrote Abizaid, "which
gives clear strategic vision." In a message quoted by Feith, Abizaid
recommended to Myers that "you support this approach".

After the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, Abizaid was promoted to
become chief of CENTCOM, with military responsibility for the entire Middle
East.

Neither Myers nor Abizaid, both of whom are now retired from the military,
responded to e-mails asking for their comments on Feith's account of their
role in the process of producing the Rumsfeld strategy.

Rumsfeld's aides had also drafted a second version of the paper, as
instructions to all military commanders in the development of "campaign
plans against terrorism".

That instructions document was a joint effort by Feith's office and by the
Strategic Plans and Policy directorate of Abizaid's Joint Staff. It followed the
broad outlines of the paper for Bush, arguing that the enemy was a
"network" that included states that support terrorism and that the Defence
Department should seek to "convince or compel" those states to cut their
ties to terrorism.

The Pentagon guidance document called for military commanders to assist
other government agencies "as directed" to "encourage populations
dominated by terrorist organizations or their supporters to overthrow that
domination".

That language was adopted because the campaign planning document was
issued as "Strategic Guidance for the Defense Department" on Oct. 3, 2001
-- just three days after the Rumsfeld strategy paper had gone to the
president.

Bush had not approved the explicit aim of regime change in Iran, Syria and
four other countries proposed by Rumsfeld. Thus Rumsfeld adopted the
aggressive military plan targeting multiple regimes in the Middle East for
regime change even though it was not White House policy.

The Defence Department guidance document made it clear that U.S.
military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to
terrorism. The document said that the Defence Department would also seek
to isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy"
their military capacities -- not necessarily limited to WMD.

The document included as a "strategic objective" a requirement to "prevent
further attacks against the U.S. or U.S. interests". That language, which
extended the principle of preemption far beyond the issue of WMD, was so
broad as to justify plans to use force against virtually any state that was not
a client of the United States.

The military leadership's strong preference for focusing on states as
enemies rather than on the threat from al Qaeda after 9/11 continued a
pattern of behaviour going back to the Bill Clinton administration
(1993-2001).

After the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa by al Qaeda
operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael Sheehan
proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan
against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However, senior U.S.
military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a 2004 account by
Richard H. Shultz, Jr., a military specialist at Tufts University.

A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism
director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterised more than
once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The
paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of
Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

(FIN/2008)