Planning, Planning, Planning
After Sy Hersh reported that the Pentagon is planning to take out Iran's nuclear sites, the punditocracy went into a tizzy. But as Peter Brookes explained on Larry Kudlow's show last night, of course the military is planning--that's what they do:
We better have military plans, Larry, to deal with this. I mean, you know, people, it's really interesting, people criticize the Bush administration about not having planning for post conflict Iraq. Now we're planning for potential contingencies after we go through the diplomatic phase, and maybe an economic sanction phase and then we get into the military phase. And they're criticizing him about planning when this is what they're criticizing about him in Iraq.
Brookes, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, explained the other day that the military spends an inordinate amount of time planning for a variety of contingencies. Certain plans are updated every year, others every two years. These plans include far more than just dropping bombs on targets, even when that's the core of the mission; they cover all the logistics, from how much toilet paper our troops will need, how many cans of beans, to how and when troops will be deployed if the plan is put into action. As the Post's William Arkin explains, "The contingency planning process never really begins or ends." Rather, "military strategists and logisticians constantly toil away at the hard work of planning war."
The problem is looseness with language. When we say "is planning," colloquially, we usually mean "expects to" rather than "is drawing up many alternative plans that may or may not be used." So those blaring headlines earlier in the week were correct, literally. But no more than that, because they were deliberately deceiving.
So far as we can tell, there's no reason not to take the Administration at its word that U.S. focus is on diplomacy. Really, it would be strange if our focus were elsewhere at the moment, given that Iran is not expected to have a bomb in hand (unless it obtains fissile material from some other source) for anywhere from 2 to 8 years and that there is still a real possibility that diplomacy--with a harder edge than the impotent UN is willing to wield--may bear fruit.
But at the same time, it would irresponsible not to plan for that last resort, military action. That the U.S. will strike is no sure thing--and no likely thing, for now--but that could change. If it does, we must be prepared. Hold onto your hat, Sy, but that takes planning.
Planning, we might add, that's been ongoing for years. The Post's Arkin reports on nuclear wargaming involving Iran begun in 1991 and carried on through the Clinton Administration:
Iran war planning culminated in 1995, when a classified war game called the Technology Initiatives Game 95 (TIG-95) centered on a 2015 scenario for an even greater Iranian threat. The country now had 20-30 nuclear warheads, undertaking a bolt-out-of-the blue attack on its Gulf neighbors.The TIG-95 scenario, according to the pre-game "Player Handbook," included Iranian military and paramilitary operations, missile attacks against military targets in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and near simultaneous terrorist attacks in Qatar and the UAE.
We suggest this to headline-writers: "U.S. Planning Iran Offensive for 10 Years." In a literal sense--which is all that matters, right?--it is undeniable.
