The upcoming nuclear attack on Iran
The Next War
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006. Originally from Harper's
Magazine, October 2006. By Daniel Ellsberg.
Sources
A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of
serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain
largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964,
the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam
War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the
information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a
disastrous war might have been averted entirely.
My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out
to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of
only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on
August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon
Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of
war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that
the president sought "no wider war" and had no intention of expanding
hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they
were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on
North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in "retaliation" for
the "unequivocal," "unprovoked" attack by North Vietnamese torpedo
boats on U.S. destroyers "on routine patrol" in "international
waters."
Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That
they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven
years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several
thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in
Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment,
published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the
official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate
deception.
When we met in September, Morse had just heard me mention to an
audience that all of that evidence of fraud had been in my own
Pentagon safe at the time of the Tonkin Gulf vote. (By coincidence, I
had started work as a special assistant to an assistant secretary of
defense the day of the alleged attack—which had not, in fact,
occurred at all.) After my talk, Morse, who had been a senior member
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, said to me, "If you
had given those documents to me at the time, the Tonkin Gulf
resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if it had
somehow been brought up on the floor of the Senate for a vote, it
would never have passed."
He was telling me, it seemed, that it had been in my power, seven
years earlier, to avert the deaths so far of 50,000 Americans and
millions of Vietnamese, with many more to come. It was not something
I was eager to hear. After all, I had just been indicted on what
eventually were twelve federal felony counts, with a possible
sentence of 115 years in prison, for releasing the Pentagon Papers to
the public. I had consciously accepted that prospect in some small
hope of shortening the war. Morse was saying that I had missed a real
opportunity to prevent the war altogether.
My first reaction was that Morse had overestimated the significance
of the Tonkin Gulf resolution and, therefore, the alleged
consequences of my not blocking it in August. After all, I felt,
Johnson would have found another occasion to get such a resolution
passed, or gone ahead without one, even if someone had exposed the
fraud in early August.
Years later, though, the thought hit me: What if I had told Congress
and the public, later in the fall of 1964, the whole truth about what
was coming, with all the documents I had acquired in my job by
September, October, or November? Not just, as Morse had suggested,
the contents of a few files on the events surrounding the Tonkin Gulf
incident—all that I had in early August—but the drawerfuls of
critical working papers, memos, estimates, and detailed escalation
options revealing the evolving plans of the Johnson Administration
for a wider war, expected to commence soon after the election. In
short, what if I had put out before the end of the year, whether
before or after the November election, all of the classified papers
from that period that I did eventually disclose in 1971?
Had I done so, the public and Congress would have learned that
Johnson's campaign theme, "we seek no wider war," was a hoax. They
would have learned, in fact, that the Johnson Administration had been
heading in secret toward essentially the same policy of expanded war
that his presidential rival, Senator Barry Goldwater, openly
advocated—a policy that the voters overwhelmingly repudiated at the
polls.
I would have been indicted then, as I was seven years later, and
probably imprisoned. But America would have been at peace during
those years. It was only with that reflection, perhaps a decade after
the carnage finally ended, that I recognized Morse had been right
about my personal share of responsibility for the whole war.
Not just mine alone. Any one of a hundred officials—some of whom
foresaw the whole catastrophe—could have told the hidden truth to
Congress, with documents. Instead, our silence made us all
accomplices in the ensuing slaughter.
* * *
The run-up to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution was almost exactly
parallel to the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war resolution.
In both cases, the president and his top Cabinet officers consciously
deceived Congress and the public about a supposed short-run threat in
order to justify and win support for carrying out preexisting
offensive plans against a country that was not a near-term danger to
the United States. In both cases, the deception was essential to the
political feasibility of the program precisely because expert opinion
inside the government foresaw costs, dangers, and low prospects of
success that would have doomed the project politically if there had
been truly informed public discussion beforehand. And in both cases,
that necessary deception could not have succeeded without the
obedient silence of hundreds of insiders who knew full well both the
deception and the folly of acting upon it.
One insider aware of the Iraq plans, and knowledgeable about the
inevitably disastrous result of executing those plans, was Richard
Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for George W. Bush and adviser to
three presidents before him. He had spent September 11, 2001, in the
White House, coordinating the nation's response to the attacks. He
reports in his memoir, Against All Enemies, discovering the next
morning, to his amazement, that most discussions there were about
attacking Iraq.
Clarke told Bush and Rumsfeld that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11,
or with its perpetrator, Al Qaeda. As Clarke said to Secretary of
State Colin Powell that afternoon, "Having been attacked by al Qaeda,
for us now to go bombing Iraq in response"—which Rumsfeld was already
urging—"would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked
us at Pearl Harbor."
Actually, Clarke foresaw that it would be much worse than that.
Attacking Iraq not only would be a crippling distraction from the
task of pursuing the real enemy but would in fact aid that enemy:
"Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its
new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our
unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."
I single out Clarke—by all accounts among the best of the best of
public servants—only because of his unique role in counterterrorism
and because, thanks to his illuminating 2004 memoir, we know his
thoughts at that time, and, in particular, the intensity of his
anguish and frustration. Such a memoir allows us, as we read each new
revelation, to ask a simple question: What difference might it have
made to events if he had told us this at the time?
Clarke was not, of course, the only one who could have told us, or
told Congress. We know from other accounts that both of his key
judgments—the absence of linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam and his
correct prediction that "attacking Iraq would actually make America
less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist
movement"—were shared by many professionals in the CIA, the State
Department, and the military.
Yet neither of these crucial, expert conclusions was made available to
Congress or the public, by Clarke or anyone else, in the
eighteen-month run-up to the war. Even as they heard the president
lead the country to the opposite, false impressions, toward what
these officials saw as a disastrous, unjustified war, they felt
obliged to keep their silence.
Costly as their silence was to their country and its victims, I feel I
know their mind-set. I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of
the president's secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to
break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at
the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the
Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were
to the secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of
secrecy, on which my own career as a president's man depended). I'm
not proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher
loyalties owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our
soldiers in harm's way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to
the Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath "to support
and uphold."
It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had
signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the
Constitution. That conflict arose almost daily, unnoticed by me or
other officials, whenever we were secretly aware that the president
or other executive officers were lying to or misleading Congress. In
giving priority, in effect, to my promise of secrecy—ignoring my
constitutional obligation—I was no worse or better than any of my
Vietnam-era colleagues, or those who later saw the Iraq war
approaching and failed to warn anyone outside the executive branch.
Ironically, Clarke told Vanity Fair in 2004 that in his own youth he
had ardently protested "the complete folly" of the Vietnam War and
that he "wanted to get involved in national security in 1973 as a
career so that Vietnam didn't happen again." He is left today with a
sense of failure:
It's an arrogant thing to think, Could I have ever stopped another
Vietnam? But it really filled me with frustration that when I saw Iraq
coming I wasn't able to do anything. After having spent thirty years
in national security and having been in some senior-level positions
you would think that I might be able to have some influence, some
tiny influence. But I couldn't have any.
But it was not too arrogant, I believe, for Clarke to aspire to stop
this second Vietnam personally. He actually had a good chance to do
so, throughout 2002, the same one Senator Morse had pointed out to
me.
Instead of writing a memoir to be cleared for publication in 2004, a
year after Iraq had been invaded, Clarke could have made his
knowledge of the war to come, and its danger to our security, public
before the war. He could have supported his testimony with hundreds
of files of documents from his office safe and computer, to which he
then still had access. He could have given these to both the media
and the then Democratic-controlled Senate.
"If I had criticized the president to the press as a special
assistant" in the summer of 2002, Clarke told Larry King in March
2004, "I would have been fired within an hour." That is undoubtedly
true. But should that be the last word on that course? To be sure,
virtually all bureaucrats would agree with him, as he told King, that
his only responsible options at that point were either to resign
quietly or to "spin" for the White House to the press, as he did. But
that is just the working norm I mean to question here.
His unperceived alternative, I wish to suggest, was precisely to court
being fired for telling the truth to the public, with documentary
evidence, in the summer of 2002. For doing that, Clarke would not
only have lost his job, his clearance, and his career as an executive
official; he would almost surely have been prosecuted, and he might
have gone to prison. But the controversy that ensued would not have
been about hindsight and blame. It would have been about whether war
on Iraq would make the United States safer, and whether it was
otherwise justified.
That debate did not occur in 2002—just as a real debate about war in
Vietnam did not occur in 1964—thanks to the disciplined reticence of
Clarke and many others. Whatever his personal fate, which might have
been severe, his disclosures would have come before the war. Perhaps,
instead of it.
* * *
We face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis
hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles by
Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those earlier
cases, the president has secretly directed the completion, though not
yet execution, of military operational plans—not merely hypothetical
"contingency plans" but constantly updated plans, with movement of
forces and high states of readiness, for prompt implementation on
command—for attacking a country that, unless attacked itself, poses
no threat to the United States: in this case, Iran.
According to these reports, many high-level officers and government
officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring
about regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice
president have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so
than they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense
is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military
success there as he was in Iraq.
Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported
in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney's
office had directed contingency planning for "a large-scale air
assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear
weapons" and that "several senior Air Force officers" involved in the
planning were "appalled at the implications of what they are
doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but
no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection."
Several of Hersh's sources have confirmed both the detailed
operational planning for use of nuclear weapons against deep
underground Iranian installations and military resistance to this
prospect, which led several senior officials to consider resigning.
Hersh notes that opposition by the Joint Chiefs in April led to White
House withdrawal of the "nuclear option"—for now, I would say. The
operational plans remain in existence, to be drawn upon for a
"decisive" blow if the president deems it necessary.
Many of these sources regard the planned massive air attack—with or
without nuclear weapons—as almost sure to be catastrophic for the
Middle East, the position of the United States in the world, our
troops in Iraq, the world economy, and U.S. domestic security. Thus
they are as deeply concerned about these prospects as many other
insiders were in the year before the Iraq invasion. That is why,
unlike in the lead-up to Vietnam or Iraq, some insiders are leaking
to reporters. But since these disclosures—so far without documents
and without attribution—have not evidently had enough credibility to
raise public alarm, the question is whether such officials have yet
reached the limit of their responsibilities to our country.
Assuming Hersh's so-far anonymous sources mean what they say—that this
is, as one puts it, "a juggernaut that has to be stopped"—I believe
it is time for one or more of them to go beyond fragmentary leaks
unaccompanied by documents. That means doing what no other active
official or consultant has ever done in a timely way: what neither
Richard Clarke nor I nor anyone else thought of doing until we were
no longer officials, no longer had access to current documents, after
bombs had fallen and thousands had died, years into a war. It means
going outside executive channels, as officials with contemporary
access, to expose the president's lies and oppose his war policy
publicly before the war, with unequivocal evidence from inside.
Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political
responsibilities of officials rightly "appalled" by the thrust of
secret policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the
sober decision—accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk
of prison—to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably,
official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the
military plans being considered. What needs disclosure is the full
internal controversy, the secret critiques as well as the arguments
and claims of advocates of war and nuclear "options"—the Pentagon
Papers of the Middle East. But unlike in 1971, the ongoing secret
debate should be made available before our war in the region expands
to include Iran, before the sixty-one-year moratorium on nuclear war
is ended violently, to give our democracy a chance to foreclose
either of those catastrophes.
The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as
great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over
130,000 young Americans—with many yet to join them—in an unjust war.
Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and civil
courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before the
next war begins.
This is The Next War, originally from October 2006, published
Thursday, October 19, 2006. It is part of Features, which is part of
Harpers.org.
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The upcoming nuclear attack on Iran
