This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official [said]. "Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war, and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah -- we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.
In the following months, pressure on the U.N. Security Council by the Bush administration became a major concern to military brass and intelligence experts, as they began to see an imperialistic executive branch continue to operate outside international and domestic law.
But engaging Iran in military action would not be as easily sellable to the American people, who were still grieving post-911 when the Bush administration presented a story of a nuclear Iraq working in conjunction with Al Qaeda -- now completely and fully debunked.
But the United States failed in making a case for an operational Iranian home-grown WMD program. Attempts to revive the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 2003 findings on Iran's centrifuges and blueprints only proved to be another embarrassment for the United States.
So it was after all a U.S. ally who had been providing Iran with parts for weapons, and that investigation had already shown that Iran had made no significant progress toward a fully operational nuclear program.
Even now, most estimates range that such a program would not be ready for seven to 10 years, at minimum, while others speculate even longer. But again, this is of course the case if Pakistan continues to provide black-market support for Iran.
Whatever the trigger event would be, however, most experts believed that no military action would be undertaken by the United States until the spring of 2007.
Sometime around mid-spring of this year, that calculation changed. Experts I consulted at this time, still working in this administration and others already gone, began speaking of a summer or fall strike. And then, as though on cue, things began to move more quickly.
We find out, for example, that in March of this year, the Department of Defense replaced its already disbanded and notorious Office of Special Plans with what they call the Iranian Directorate. As with the OSP, the ID is run out of the policy side and contained largely the same cast of characters, minus Larry Franklin, who has already pleaded guilty to passing classified information to Israel and Iran, and Doug Feith, former undersecretary of defense policy. Feith's shoes were filled by another neoconservative hawk, Eric Edelman.
In describing OSP and by extension, ID, one expert I talked with did not hold back his feelings on what has come to be known as the "cabal":
"It was created to, as Dean Acheson urged Harry Truman, to scare the hell out of the American people by making things a little bit clearer than the truth," John Pike of Global Security told me. But OSP did more than scare people; it created a war that the vice president's office could sell. And if ID was created for the same reason, then there is no doubt a war is already being "cooked up," as some say.
But what would be the trigger?
When aircraft carriers began movements that experts found troubling, and other covert operations began in earnest, the trigger was believed to be provocation. That is, placing a ship where it could be targeted by Iranian forces believing it to be a threat.
I spoke with retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner in May about this then, and he too was troubled by the ships and their movement.
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