Planning for foreign wars is the Pentagon's job. But a flurry of tough statements and alarming predictions by Defence Department officials about the potency and imminence of the Iranian ‘threat', including the possibility of a missile strike on the US, suggests a different kind of warfare could be breaking out at home, within the Obama administration itself.
The looming battle is shaping up as a contest between those who believe US President Barack Obama's carrot-and-stick policy can still induce Tehran to abandon its alleged nuclear weapons-related activities; and those who, despairing of diplomacy and sanctions, are beginning to speak in favour of a more directly confrontational approach.
Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, lit the blue touch paper with a secret memo, penned in January and revealed last week, in which he reportedly warned the US lacked a coherent, long-term plan to deal with Iran, should it persist with uranium enrichment and long-range missile development.
Gates has since insisted his views were misrepresented. The US was "prepared to act across a broad range of contingencies in support of our interests," he said.
All the same, the timing of his White House memo was not coincidental. It followed the passing of Obama's December deadline for Tehran to respond positively to the West's offer of civil nuclear co-operation and increased engagement.
Instead, ignoring Obama's ‘unclenched fist' speech, and at least two personal letters, the regime said it was greatly expanding enrichment capacity. It brazened out the discovery of an underground nuclear plant at Qom, and derided flailing US efforts to win Chinese and Russian support for tougher UN sanctions.
Last resort
"Iran's armed forces are so strong today that enemies will not even think about violating our territorial integrity," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a weekend military parade, which featured the Shahab 3 medium-range ballistic missile. As is often the case, Ahmadinejad's judgment is suspect. A Pentagon report sent to Congress last week makes clear that a great deal of detailed thinking about the parameters and consequences of military action in Iran is going on. It includes the prediction that Iran may construct a missile capable of striking the US by 2015.
This claim, revising an earlier estimate, ups the ante in terms of how Obama may respond to continued Iranian defiance. And it follows an apparent change of view by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs. On Sunday he said a US military attack "would go a long way to delaying" Iran's nuclear programme before reiterating Obama's position that such action would be a last resort.
It may be that all this talk of war is just that talk. But it's plain that pressure is growing on Obama, his national security adviser, James Jones, and his chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton, to win international backing for the ‘crippling' sanctions they promised and quickly get some sort of a result or think again about what to do with Iran. Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has not ruled out military strikes of his own, is adding his tuppence worth. He doesn't speak much to Obama these days. But last week, he advised viewers of ABC's Good Morning America show that Iran was "the biggest issue facing our times" and required urgent action.
John McCain, Obama's defeated Republican presidential rival, said Obama's Iran policy had failed. "We have not done anything that would in any way be viewed effective. I did't need a secret memo from Gates to ascertain that. We have to be willing to pull the trigger on significant sanctions. And then we have to make plans for whatever contingencies follow if those sanctions are not effective," McCain told Fox News.
It gets worse. John Bolton, a senior Bush era official, claimed in National Review that Obama's whole nuclear counter-proliferation strategy, including cuts in warhead stockpiles, was placing the US at risk, while specifically encouraging miscreants, such as Iran and North Korea.
Writing in Commentary magazine, Michael Rubin, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, went further. "Regime change is the only strategy, short of military strikes, that will deny Iran a nuclear bomb," he said. "Is that possible? Yes." He went on to advocate the assassination of military figures and other measures to achieve this end.
Obama will ignore such extreme advice. But he cannot ignore an important insider such as Gates, who worries aloud that Iran will stealthily compile all the components of a nuclear bomb but not assemble them and then suddenly ‘break out' as did North Korea, testing a device and presenting the world with a nuclear fait accompli.
Nor can Obama ignore the bottom line policy position laid out by his own officials. The US, they say, will not allow Iran to "acquire a nuclear capability" nor gain the ability to breakout, which implies pre-emptive action down the line. Keeping this promise could be the hardest thing Obama ever has to do.
Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.
