Friday March 30 Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton will speak on the warfare state at Brave New Books, 1904 Guadalupe St., Austin, Texas, from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. with Cindy Sheehan, Thad Crouch, and Antonio Buehler.
Israel is quietly getting much closer to Azerbaijan, a small country bordering northern Iran along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Israel has recently supplied Azerbaijan with a $1.6 billion arms deal including “sophisticated drones and missile defense systems” and has also, U.S. officials suspect, secured access to airfields which could be essential to Israeli fighter jets flying bombing missions over Iran. Mark Perry, writing in Foreign Policy:
“We’re watching what Iran does closely,” one of the U.S. sources, an intelligence officer engaged in assessing the ramifications of a prospective Israeli attack confirmed. “But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy about it.”
…The U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials told me they believe that Israel has gained access to these airbases through a series of quiet political and military understandings. “I doubt that there’s actually anything in writing,” added a senior retired American diplomat who spent his career in the region. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt — if Israeli jets want to land in Azerbaijan after an attack, they’d probably be allowed to do so. Israel is deeply embedded in Azerbaijan, and has been for the last two decades.”
…Former CENTCOM commander Gen. Joe Hoar simplified Israel’s calculations: “They save themselves 800 miles of fuel,” he told me in a recent telephone interview. “That doesn’t guarantee that Israel will attack Iran, but it certainly makes it more doable.”
For what it’s worth, officials in Azerbaijan have denied that Israel has been given access to airfields and that they would ever assist Israel in an attack on Iran.
Via Eli Clifton, Thomas Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under George H.W. Bush, warned against a military strike on Iran in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. Here is a clip:
This is essentially the consensus in the U.S. military and intelligence community, as best as I can tell. As Clifton mentions:
Pickering’s comments today closely match the warnings issued by former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan earlier this month. Dagan warned that an Israeli attack on Iran could spark a “regional war” and, at best, could only delay Iran’s nuclear program. That assessment is shared by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Incidentally, this scenario was shown to be almost certain after a classified war simulation held this month forecasted that a “strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States” and kill many, many people. As Ha’aretz reports, this Congressional Research Service report estimates that Iran could completely recover from a strike on its nuclear program within six months.
Beyond Dagan and Panetta, Pickering’s assessment also matches that of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey who has made statements in recent weeks that an attack on Iran would be pointless, dangerous, and unwise. High level officials have been issuing such warnings for months. Hell, retired generals and intelligence officers have taken out full page ads in the Washington Post arguing against war. Former CENTCOM Commander Admiral William J. Fallon and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General General James Cartwright said as much in a CSIS panel a few weeks ago, adding that the talk of attacking Iran essentially amounts to warmongering.
What is still amazing to me is that the pro-war jingoists are ignoring these assessments. Typically, jingoists exalt military leaders and put weight on their practical and strategic judgment. That the War Party, and especially the GOP candidates, are ignoring those judgements is a sign of how off the rails our political landscape is right now.
MJ Rosenberg writes about Iranian-American Sohrab Ahmari, who seems to be vying for a spot as the new neo-con favorite à la Ahmed Chalabi.
Ahmari, the neocons’ favorite Iranian, is very much in the mold of the neocons’ favorite Iraqi. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion Ahmed Chalabi was their darling because, as an Iraqi émigré, he was thought to have unique credibility. Neocons loved hearing an Iraqi say that invading Iraq would not only prove successful but would be welcomed by his fellow Iraqis. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a fake, whose agenda was almost entirely personal. The war he and his friends promoted was an infamous catastrophe. And, to put it mildly, the invasion he told us that Iraqis would welcome was not welcomed.
The role Chalabi played in precipitating the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq is still under-appreciated, I think. He lied through his teeth to high-level neo-conservatives bent on regime change in Iraq like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith. Since his nefarious involvement with Bush administration officials, he has gone on to continue his superlative corruption in Iraqi politics.
Ahmari seems hungry to fill the role Chalabi did, publicly advocating an all-out war on Iran with an air of entitlement given his Iranian derivation.
On March 25, I reported that the ongoing Gaza blackout had killed an infant after his respirator failed. Though the infant did die in the manner reported, later information has showed that he actually died earlier in the month.
This isn’t the major shift in story that it sounds like, however. The Gaza Strip has been under rolling blackouts for over a month now, and the same exact issues surrounding the infant’s death would’ve been true in early March as were on the 25th. The Hamas government’s state media simply didn’t catch wind of the story and report it to the world until weeks after it happened, and therefore no one else knew about it either. Instead of some plot by Hamas to garner world sympathy, it strikes me more as an attempt to cover up that they have such a poor handle on things that they didn’t even notice an infant dying in the blackouts.
Some other outlets are scrambling to correct the story because they initially blamed the Israeli blockade for the death. Interestingly, however, this wouldn’t have been true at either date, and this is one of those rare occasions when suffering in Gaza isn’t a direct result of Israeli policy.
As I pointed out in the initial article, the Egyptian junta is the one that stopped the fuel shipments to Gaza’s power plant, though no one seems to have a solid answer as to why. Israel even went to the surprising length of supplying Gaza some emergency diesel fuel last week, though it was quickly burned through.
