The standoff over Iran's nuclear program has reached its peak with Iran rejecting a deadline to respond to an international proposal aimed at ending the current crisis, saying it would respond in a month, which, according to the Iranian calendar, begins July 23.
"We do not consider such statements as constructive and invite them to wait for our answer until next month," said Hamidreza Assefi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, the ISNA news agency reported.
Some experts suggested that this might hasten the American government's plans to launch a military strike to destroy Tehran's nuclear sites.
But a report published Sunday on the New Yorker Magazine cited Pentagon officers saying that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would probably fail to destroy the country's nuclear program, and warning the American President George W. Bush that any attack launched against Iran's nuclear sites could have "serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States".
"A crucial issue in the military's dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit," according to the report.
Following September 11 attacks on the United States, President Bush had a message for countries that allegedly "support terrorism,"whcih Washington claims include Iran.
"America has a message for the nations of the world. If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends."
But on May 31st, the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced what analysts described as an apparent major change in the American foreign policy.
Rice said that the U.S. government was considering joining Russia, China, and its European allies in diplomatic talks with Iran about its nuclear program, under one condition, that negotiations do not begin until, as the President put it in a June 19th speech at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, "the Iranian regime fully and verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities."
Washington probably made such shift in its policy thinking that the Iranians would welcome its generous offer, or may be it was just laying the diplomatic groundwork for future military action, according to an article on Uruknet.Info.
News reports and officials at the Bush administration revealed earlier that the U.S. Strategic Command has been readying plans, at the President's direction, for a major military operation to knock down Iran's nuclear program.
But senior Pentagon officials, including generals and admirals, strongly oppose the President's plans against Iran, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials.
They warned the Bush administration that attacking Iran will probably not succeed in achieving its intended goals, i.e., destroying the country's nuclear program.
Given the American and European intelligence agencies' failure to find at least one evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities in the Islamic Republic, war planners are confused what to hit.
"The target array in Iran is huge, but it's amorphous," Seymour Hersh, in one of his most recent articles, quoted a high-ranking general as telling him. "The question we face is, when does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious?"
The U.S. Army's continuous failures in Iraq, together with the numerous scandals uncovering the American President's lies in the run up to war, including flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and alleged links between the former Iraqi leader and Al Qaeda network, has affected America's approach to Iran.
"We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq," he said.
"There is a war about the war going on inside the building," a Pentagon consultant said. "If we go, we have to find something."
Senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the President's claims made during his June speech regarding the Islamic Republic's intentions to eventually build a bomb, what concerns them is the intelligence gaps.
In his article, Hersh also cited a former senior intelligence official as saying that Pentagon officials are asking "What's the evidence? We've got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys"-the Iranians-"have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We're coming up with jack sh*t."
Another senior military official told Hersh that "even if we knew where the Iranian enriched uranium was-and we don't-we don't know where world opinion would stand. The issue is whether it's a clear and present danger.
"If you're a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is the capability of the Iranian response, and the likelihood of a punitive response-like cutting off oil shipments? What would that cost us?"
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides "really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary."
European Union's foreign policy chief offered Tehran in June a package of proposals presented by Germany and five other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council; China, Russia, Britain, France and the United States.
The package included political and economic incentives as well as a pledge to help develop Iran's nuclear program in return for full suspension of nuclear enrichment.
Foreign ministers from the Group of 8 nations - United States, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Britain and Japan - are demanding a quick response from Iran to the proposals.
On the other hand, minister of intelligence, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, linked the arrest of Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian-Canadian philosopher who has been jailed since late April, to what he described as efforts by the Bush administration to start a "soft revolution" in Iran.
"The United States is pursuing efforts to start soft revolution in Iran and in many other countries and Mr. Jahanbegloo's arrest can be defined as part of that," ISNA quoted Mr. Mohseni-Ejei as saying.
"Mr. Jahanbegloo had an assignment and the intelligence apparatus became suspicious at the scale of his activities and resources" at his disposal, he said.
The Iranian intelligence ministry accused Jahanbegloo of having tried to instigate U.S.-backed opposition in Iran.
"Ramin Jahanbegloo is one of the people who were arrested in line with the U.S. effort to start a velvet and soft revolution in Iran," Ejeie was quoted as saying.
"The intelligence apparatus suspected his activities and arrested him and currently is completing its investigation," the intelligence minister added.
The U.S. government seems to have decided to resort to new tactics to achieve its goals against Iran and preserve its hegemony in the Middle East.
Given the public and global furor over the quagmire going in Iraq and the rising casualties on both the U.S. and Iraq sides, Bush's admin. could be withdrawing its plans to bomb Iran, instead, fueling the opposition to topple the current regime or pushing for a UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Source: IslamOnline
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