Richard Clarke on how war with Iran would play out

[moodforaday]

This isn't new, but it's extremely interesting, even if you believe, as I do, that Clarke has been playing part-time shill for the Bush administration.

It's written as an imaginary lecture delivered in 2011, ten years after 9-11, looking back at the war on terror. Clarke predicts attacks on US soil and an attack on Iran as a retaliation. The chilling part is that Clarke annotates each of his predictions with real sources. He's not at all optimistic on how a war with Iran would play out for the US. You'll note that some of his predictions have already come true (attacks on public transport, though not in the US).

It's a lengthy but a gripping read - I guarantee.

Looking Back On The War On Terrorism 10 Years Later: September 11, 2011

http://www.bluegrassreport.org/bluegrass_politics/2005/07/looking_back_on.html

(It was originally published in Atlantic, and still available there at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200501/clarke but you need a subscription. Google returns a lot of copies elsewhere.)

Some excerpts below, but please read the whole thing, it's a coherent narrative.

(...)
The U.S. government had predicted that future attacks, if they came, would likely be on financial institutions, noting that Osama bin Laden had issued instructions to destroy the U.S. economy. Thus when the casinos were attacked, it was a surprise. It shouldn't have been; we knew that Las Vegas had been under surveillance by al-Qaeda since at least 2001. Despite that knowledge casino owners had done little to increase security, not wanting to slow people down on their way into the city's pleasure palace

(...)
The attorney general sought broad emergency powers to impose extended pre-arraignment detention, investigative confinement, broader material-witness authority, and expanded deportation authority. After the passage of Patriot Act II, federal agents conducted large-scale roundups of illegal immigrants and members of ethnic groups that were suspected of hiding terrorists in their midst. Many citizens who had been forcibly detained were held "with probable cause" for allegedly "planning, assisting, or executing an act of terrorism"; they were denied access to an attorney for up to seven days, "by order of the judicial officer on a showing that the individual arrested has information which may prevent a terrorist attack

(...)
In January {2006}, when the president actually delivered the speech, he called for immediate passage of Patriot Act III. "We are a nation at war," he said. "We need to start acting that way. We can no longer be in denial. We must mobilize the home front." To that end he proposed four things: adding 200,000 members of the Army, to compensate for National Guard shortfalls; deploying three squadrons of new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct reconnaissance in the United States; suspending the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (which had prevented the military from conducting arrests in the United States); and modifying the charter of the National Security Agency to permit "unfettered use of its capabilities" in support of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.24 Several senators immediately denounced the plan as the militarization of America, and promised to filibuster to stop the law's passage. Polls showed that 62 percent of Americans believed the president knew best what was necessary to defend America.

(...)
Then came Subway Day. Public-transit systems in Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were all struck at 8:15 A.M. eastern time, on a Monday in April. Unlike the previous year's attacks, these strikes did not appear to involve suicides.

(...)
We had suspected that Iran had assembled some nuclear weapons, but only owing to the good work of the British Secret Intelligence Service did we learn that all the weapons would be in one place at one time. The president decided to launch a pre-emptive attack; given the circumstances, he could hardly have done otherwise. The B-2 strike in May did indisputably destroy all the mobile missiles and their launchers. (Regrettably, it also killed some Chinese defense contractors.) To the president's dismay, the attack apparently did not destroy any of the nuclear warheads, because they had not yet arrived at the base. Intelligence is still not good enough to provide precision. The good news was that without their missiles, the Iranians had very few ways of using their nuclear warheads. The bad news was that this revived fears that the warheads would fall into terrorist hands.

[teach1st]

1. Thanks for posting that...

The details in Clarke's scenerio could be debated point by point, but his overall thesis rings especially true:

As early as 2004 our nation's leaders were admitting that the war on terror would probably last a generation or more, even as they continued to argue among themselves about whether it could ever truly be won. If they had acted differently—sooner, smarter—we might have been able to contain what were at one time just a few radical jihadis, and to raise our defenses more effectively. Instead our leaders made the clash of cultures a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning the first part of the twenty-first century into an ongoing low-grade war between religions that made America less wealthy, less confident, and certainly less free.

It is interesting that in Clarke's scenerio, the first wave of attacks is very low tech and committed in part by the Asian branches of al Qaeda. Sometimes we forget that jihadists are not exclusively Middle-Eastern. While we focus our resources to the fight in Iraq under the amazingly nearsighted flypaper theory, we squander chances to shore up our defenses, which are still full of holes. Later attacks use weapons we failed to secure during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by jihadists recruited by our misadventures in Iraq.

In Clarke's scenerio, the Iraq invasion was a move that plays out as horribly devastating to the United States.