|
|
| ARMS
TRADE RESOURCE CENTER
CURRENT UPDATES: September 25, 2006 Dear Friends, Turns out that the war in Iraq, rather than stemming the growth of terrorism, has helped fuel its spread across the globe, according to a classified intelligence assessment bringing together the work of the sixteen different agencies. This little bit of news was revealed by Mark Mazetti in the September 24th issue of the New York Times ("Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat"). In this edition of the Arms Trade Resource Center E-Update, we look at war plans for Iran and the legacy of cluster weapons in Lebanon. Best, I. IRAN: WAR OR RUMORS OF WAR? "We have about seven weeks
to try and stop this next war from happening." "We're working toward a
diplomatic solution to this crisis, and as we
do, we look to the day when you can live in freedom, and America
and
Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace."
"We are opposed to the
development of nuclear weapons. We think it is
of no use and that it is against the interests of nations."
Some analysts are alarmed at the bustle around Navy stations right now. In an article titled "What Would War Look Like?" Time Magazine reveals that the Navy has issued "Prepare to Deploy Orders" (PTDOs) to a strike group including a submarine, an Aegis class cruiser, mine sweepers and a mine hunter. Despite laying out a detailed scenario for "what would war look like" with Iran, Time opens its piece with a giant caveat: "No one knows whether - let alone when - a military confrontation with Iran will come to pass. The fact that admirals are reviewing plans for blockades is hardly proof of their intentions. The U.S. military routinely makes plans for scores of scenarios, the vast majority of which will never be put into practice." Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force Colonel, is perhaps the most pessimistic analyst of all regarding the prospects of a U.S. attack on Iran. He argues that the PTDO "is a very significant order and it is not done as an exercise." Taken alongside disclosures that the Chief of Naval Operations asked his planners for a rundown of how a blockade of Iranian oil ports would work, this revelation led Time to cautiously conclude that the U.S. "may be preparing for war with Iran." On the political side, we are listening to increasingly hot rhetoric coming from Washington. On Tim Russert last week, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked "Will we do anything to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear bomb?" While paying lip service to diplomacy, Cheney emphasized that "we think they should not have a nuclear bomb* the President has always emphasized no options have been taken off the table." Even in the midst of what was suppose to be a "warm and fuzzy" speech at the United Nations, President Bush leveled some barbed criticism at Iran, saying: Tehran continues to "fund terrorism, and fuel extremism, and pursue nuclear weapons* Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions." The only question is: what might push this combative rhetoric over the edge towards war? Iran's purported interest in nuclear weapons and its insistence on the right to enrich uranium have been portrayed is if they are one and the same thing* And members of the administration have cited other arguments in what looks like a propaganda campaign to justify acts of war against Iran, including Teheran's hostility to Israel, its support for terrorism, and its alleged desire to control some of the world's richest oil regions. WAR IS ABSURD: The "Making Sense" Filter Clogged "The notion of a war with Iran seems absurd," concludes the Time article. "By any rational measure, the last thing the United States can afford is another war." But as Sam Gardiner comments wryly in his report for the Century Foundation, "The End of the 'Summer of Diplomacy:' Assessing U.S. Military Options in Iran," the "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years in Iraq and is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran. Gardiner puts forward a hypothetical view of the "seven truths" about Iran shared by members of the Bush administration. Of these propositions, Gardiner sees two as true in the real world : 1) that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons; and 2) that sanctions aimed at stopping them will be ineffective. He also believes that Bush policymakers accept two unlikely propositions: 1) that the Iranian people support "regime change"; and 2) that Iran cannot be negotiated with. He further notes that U.S. and Israeli commandos have been exploring targets in Iran for some time. He argues that this combination of U.S. beliefs and real world actions will lead to U.S. air strikes against Iran, and even the possibility of a campaign for regime change. Running counter to Gardiner's worst case scenario are the substantial difficulties involved in bombing Iran. According to estimates quoted in Time, there are 1,500 different "aim points" (or viable targets) in Iran related to their nuclear development complex. Air strikes would require almost everything the Air Force has, and even then, a White House official admits "we don't know where it all is* so we can't get it all." Gardiner and most other analysts assume that air strikes would bring Iranian retaliation, from stepped up support for Hezbollah, to a greater role in fostering attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, to efforts to block the straits of Hormuz, a main outlet for Persian Gulf oil. Another possibility that is less likely but not out of the question would be Iranian attacks on the oil pipelines of other major suppliers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which would send world oil prices through the roof and make Iran's reserves worth all that much more In light of these potential counter moves, Anthony Zinni, former Commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East, warns: "You've got to be prepared for the worst case, and the worst case in Iran is [U.S] boots on the ground." Given all of this, couldn't we live with the Iranian bomb? We got used to nuclear armed India and Pakistan, and Israel's nuclear weapons are one of the world's worst kept secrets. What is so different about Iran heading down the same path? For U.S. policy makers a big part of the problem is that it would make it harder for the United States to assert its interests in the region, and that an Iranian bomb might provoke Saudi Arabia and Egypt to follow suit. But as Bill Berkeley notes in a well-argued piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, neither the Bush administration rhetoric comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler nor his tirades about wiping Israel off the map can be taken at face value: "For all the recent rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map, which is hardly new, the Iranians are not Nazis. For one thing, Iran is not the dominant military power in the region, Israel is. Iran can harass Israel through its proxies . . . but it lacks the military capacity to attack Israel itself. Moreover, Iran lacks a rational motive for doing so, since Israel would surely respond to such an attack with massive force that could jeopardize the Iranian regime's survival in power." With an estimated 100 to 200 nuclear weapons in Israel's arsenal, would an Iranian bomb change this calculation? And to the extent that it could shift the military balance in the region, shouldn't the Bush administration finally break down and engage in open and direct talks with Tehran? Could it be that the administration bluffing as a way of demonstrating their "hard nosed" diplomatic resolve? There is significant evidence for this alternative, starting from the fact that the U.S. military does not believe that air strikes on Iran are either workable or advisable, and, as noted above, that an attack would not be likely to hit all major Iranian nuclear sites, since U.S. intelligence doesn't know where they are. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, argues that there may be two tracks - one involving force as a form of pressure and one involving plans for an actual military attack - moving on parallel tracks. He sums up the current situation as follows: "Bush and Ahmadinejad, who share a boastful confidence in their sense of destiny, seem on a collision course in the logic of highway chicken - the game where two drivers speed their cars toward each other, head-on, on a road late at night. The winner is the one who doesn't veer off the road. If both drivers get nervous and veer off, it's a tie. If they both keep driving straight on, pedal to the metal, certain of victory, opposed on moral principle to backing down, the outcome is mutual catastrophe. And in this case, we're all sitting in those cars." The flaw in Kaplan's metaphor is that it implies two equal adversaries. Even with a nuclear weapon, Iran would be far from being able to inflict the kind of damage on the U.S. that Washington could inflict on it. And as in Iraq, the car that "veers off the road" can come back to fight another day, through other means. Resources: The End of the 'Summer of Diplomacy:'
Assessing U.S. Military Options
in Iran," Century Foundation, Sam Gardiner, Mind Games: Are We Going to
Attack Iran? Fred Kaplan, Slate.Com, September 18, 2006 Iran War, Diplomacy on Parallel
Tracks Jim Lobe, InterPress Service, September 21, 2006 Iran: Know Thine Enemy, Bill
Berkeley, Colombia Journalism Review, September 14, 2006 II. CLUSTER BOMBS IN LEBANON Being the world's sole superpower, largest weapons supplier, and biggest foreign humanitarian donor is no cake-walk. One day you are selling cluster bombs to Israel. Another day you're doling out aid to help Lebanon clean up cluster bombs that did not detonate. What happened on the days in between? Your cluster bomb customer used up most of his supply shelling Lebanon. The United States has put together a package of post-war aid for Lebanon totaling $230 million-including a $420,000 grant for the Mine Advisory Group so they can "quickly expand" their landmine and unexploded ordinance humanitarian clearing program to "help remove the newest explosive remnants of war"-most of which came from the United States. An Israeli military spokesman insists that "all of the weapons and munitions used by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) are legal under international law and their use conforms to international standards." But, the U.S. State Department is investigating Israel's use of American-made cluster bombs during the war in Lebanon-particularly looking at whether or not Israel broke a secret agreement with the United States not to use cluster bombs against civilians. This secret agreement seems to have created a loophole to the Arms Export Control Act which does not allow the United States to sell weapons to countries involved in aggression. There have not been any follow up news reports on the status of the investigation, or its conclusions and calls to the Office of Defense Compliance to get more information were not returned. An amendment that would have required the US and countries to which it sells weapons to avoid using cluster bombs in or near civilian areas, offered by Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy on September 8th, was voted down 70/30. Jan Egeland, The United Nations' Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, was decidedly undiplomatic in his assessment: "what is shocking and (I would say to me) completely immoral is that 90% of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution." During those three days, Israel dumped an estimated 1.2 million bomblets throughout Lebanon- a country smaller than Connecticut. These bombs have a failure rate of up to 30%, which means that one of every three bombs may not immediately detonate- lying in wait for children, trucks, livestock and just about whoever or whatever else might set it off. The peace agreements were all signed by August 14th, but the cluster bombs have kept on killing. According to the UN Mine Action Coordination Center, since the war ended unexploded ordinance (or UXOs in the lingo) have killed 12 and wounded 39-two of the dead and 11 of the wounded have been children. The Seattle Times talked to one shepherd injured by a cluster bomb. "Lying in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Tyre with a broken and burned leg, 22-year-old shepherd Mohammed Hassan was recovering from stepping on a bomblet." He told the Seattle Times, "'All I remember is being catapulted several meters into the air,' he said. The bomblet was near a path between his family's farm and the chicken house where he had gone to fetch eggs. 'Just before fainting, I felt down to my leg and thought, Thank God, it's still there.' His other foot was also injured, as were both of his hands." At least two of cluster weapons and launch systems used by Israel are made by U.S. companies. Human Rights Watch discovered remnants of the "M483A1" 155mm artillery projectiles which have 88 U.S. manufactured M42 and M46 sub-munitions. They also found evidence of the Multiple Launch Rocket System, manufactured by Lockheed Martin and equipped with M26 rockets. Each MLRS can fire up to 12 rockets at once, and each rocket contains 644 M77 submunitions. A few of the U.S. manufacturers of cluster weapons and their products are described below. Aerojet Raytheon Textron Wide Area Munitions (WAM) can be placed by hand, by ground vehicles, rocket, or aircraft. "WAM, designated XM93, is a derivative of the Skeet submunition that is used in the BLU-108/B submunition...it can be dispensed quickly above ground over a wide area." Companies are making and trying to market new cluster weapons all the time. In vivid military jargon, Textron's promotional flier describes the CLAW-Clean Lightweight Area Weapon, which they describe as "the next generation smart soft target munition." For those not familiar with the jargon, a soft target is a person. Textron boats that a "single 64 pound munition has the footprint and effectiveness of a 1,000lb legacy cluster bomb." According to Human Rights Watch, other manufacturers of cluster weapons and components include: General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. RESOURCES: "Time to Take Stock: The
U.S. Cluster Munitions Inventory and the FY 2006 Department of Defense
Budget," Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper, July 2005. Cluster Munition Coalition
Reports | Recent News Coverage | Updates
|
 |