Iran 172

'Military Resistance Forced Shift on Iran Strike
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The George W. Bush administration’s shift from the military option of a massive strategic attack against Iran to a surgical strike against selected targets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker earlier this month, appears to have been prompted not by new alarm at Iran’s role in Iraq but by the explicit opposition of the nation’s top military leaders to an unprovoked attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The reorientation of the military threat was first signaled by passages on Iran in Bush’s Jan. 10 speech and followed by only a few weeks a decisive rejection by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of a strategic attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Although scarcely mentioned in press reports of the speech, which was devoted almost entirely to announcing the troop “surge” in Iraq, Bush accused both Iran and Syria of “allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq”. Bush also alleged that Iran was “providing material support for attacks on American troops”.
Those passages were intended in part to put pressure on Iran, and were accompanied by an intensification of a campaign begun the previous month to seize Iranian officials inside Iraq. But according to Hillary Mann, who was director for Persian Gulf and Afghanistan Affairs on the National Security Council staff in 2003, they also provided a legal basis for a possible attack on Iran.
“I believe the president chose his words very carefully,” says Mann, “and laid down a legal predicate that could be used to justify later military action against Iran.”
Mann says her interpretation of the language is based on the claim by the White House of a right to attack another country in “anticipatory self-defence” based on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. That had been the legal basis cited by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had in September 2002 in making the case for the invasion of Iraq.'

Lees verder: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/19/4686/