by Ali Fathollah-Nejad

Can Neoconservative Belligerent Dogmatism be Halted by the Empire’s Realists?

In mid-September 2006, CNN invited retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, previously a strategic scholar at various U.S. Army War Colleges, to discuss the probability of a U.S. military strike against Iran. Responding on how close, in his opinion, the Bush Administration was away from giving the go-ahead order regarding Iran, Gardiner unmistakably said: "It’s been given. In fact, we’ve probably been executing military operations inside Iran for at least 18 months. The evidence is overwhelming." (emphasis added)

He is now promptly interrupted by his interviewer’s anticipatory obedience, who recalls that the President had underlined that he wanted diplomacy to work in order to convince the Iranian government to stop enriching uranium. Quoting Bush, in an interview by David Ignatius of the Washington Post from the day before, with the words "I would tell the Iranian people that we have no desire for conflict," CNN’s familiar face Wolf Blitzer turns back to Gardiner and repeats his initial question. Almost desperately the colonel replies with great emphasis: "We are conducting military operations inside Iran right now. The evidence is overwhelming, from both the Iranians [and] Americans, and Congressional sources." (emphasis added)

This blunt affirmation came from someone who was closely affiliated with the issue of how to handle the Iran case. It was in 2004 that Gardiner conducted a war game organized by the Atlantic Monthly magazine to gauge how an American president might respond, militarily or otherwise, to Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, concluding that military strikes would at the end represent a quite inadequate instrument to confront the issue. However, the go-for-war crew at the White House further underscored their firmness of ‘all options being on the table.’ In that same CNN appearance, Gardiner laid out that despite serious concerns of military leaders about whether U.S. attacks on Iran would be effective, the Neoconservative officials remained fervent to their regime change goal: "The House Committee on Emerging Threats tried to have a hearing some weeks ago in which they asked the Department of State and Defense to come and answer this question [of military operations in Iran underway—the author] because it’s serious enough to be answered without congressional approval, and they didn’t come to the hearing." He stressed the gravity of the situation as the Pentagon war plans have gone to the White House, which is "not normal planning. When the plan goes to the White House, that means we’ve gone to a different state."

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(pi) Source: Global Research


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