Twenty Years Ago: George W. Bush Should Not Push Israel To Do Dirty Work in Iran, “Secret Pentagon Plans to Destabilize Iran” - Counter Information

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Tuesday, June 17, 2025

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Twenty Years Ago: George W. Bush Should Not Push Israel To Do Dirty Work in Iran, “Secret Pentagon Plans to Destabilize Iran”

Global Research, June 17, 2025


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[This article from 2005 is of utmost importance in understanding the recent Israeli attack on Iran.]

Revelations by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh about secret Pentagon plans to destabilize Iran and neutralize its potential nuclear threat may be linked to the FBI investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In an article in The New Yorker last week, Hersh said the United States has been conducting highly secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to identify nuclear, chemical and missile facilities for possible future targeting.

This is consistent with stories circulating in Washington for months about post-election plans to target Iran and reports of deep divisions inside the administration about how to go about it.

Hersh quotes a source with close ties to the Defense Department saying,

“The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”

In late August, CBS revealed that the FBI was investigating AIPAC for allegedly passing secret documents from the Pentagon to the Israeli government.

It is absurd to think the Pentagon would need AIPAC to do that since the two governments are in regular contact at the highest levels, much greater than those readily accessible to an American lobby group.

What is more realistic is that Pentagon advocates of the aggressive approach to Iran called on like-minded people at AIPAC to help them make their case right here in Washington — pushing AIPAC into the middle of a fierce internecine battle within the administration.

And it was those opposing that approach, probably Hersh’s “inside” sources, who blew the whistle.

That presumably includes the Pentagon Old Guard and others in the CIA and State Department who’ve often been in conflict with the neoconservative civilian officials around Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

 According to Cheney: (2005)

“The Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,” 

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Among the information allegedly passed to AIPAC by a Pentagon analyst was a draft of a presidential directive on Iran policy. That information could be vital in helping AIPAC and others mount an effective lobbying campaign to back the hardliners’ approach and to beat back administration dissenters.

Advocates of the get-tough approach could look to the lobby to build support for that policy on Capitol Hill and persuade critics in the administration to enlist in the cause.

AIPAC has made Iran a top priority for more than a decade since then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin asked the organization to focus on the Islamic Republic because he considered it the only existential threat facing Israel. That threat would only grow as Tehran built bigger and more accurate missiles and acquired nuclear technology, all the time making it clear that Israel was its number one target.

Rabin had another motive as well. He didn’t trust AIPAC, which he felt was too right wing and hostile to his pro-peace policies; he feared the lobby would work with his Likud opponents to run interference.

AIPAC won congressional approval for a tough Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in 1996 that helped tighten the focus on Tehran as a state sponsor of terror and a direct threat to American and Israeli security.

President Bush has said that military action against Iran has not been ruled out, and Vice President Cheney went a step further, putting Iran atop the U.S. target list and suggesting Israel might act preemptively as it did against the Iraqi reactor in 1981.

“The Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,” Cheney said on Inauguration Day.

Those comments followed leaks last September that the Pentagon was selling Israel 500 bunker buster bombs, which could be used for attacking deeply buried Iranian nuclear facilities. Not mentioned was that this was a routine munitions sale.

Cheney’s motives are unclear. Was he using Israel to build psychological pressure on the ayatollahs? Was he giving Sharon the green light to send in the Israeli Air Force? Or was he rattling the Israeli saber to convince the Europeans to take the Iranian nuclear threat more seriously?

Iran tops the list of strategic threats facing Israel, according to the IDF’s latest annual intelligence assessment.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Hersh:

“Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb,” and if the West doesn’t act, “our air force will take care of it.”

The Bush administration has ruled out direct negotiations with Tehran and is depending on the Europeans to handle the job, but there is little faith that they will genuinely squeeze the Iranians.

Bush is going to Europe this month on a fence-mending mission and Iran is high on his agenda.

Iran today is stronger than when Bush came to office, thanks largely to the administration’s removal of its two greatest threats: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Tehran knows threats of American invasion ring hollow with the Unite States and its shrinking coalition bogged down in Iraq.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) said a repeat of Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor is very unlikely. The Iraqis in 1981 had a very small nuclear program concentrated in one place, while today the Iranians, learning from that attack, have spread theirs around to various locations, and some are buried deep and unknown to us and the Israelis, Lugar said.

A retired senior Israeli defense official described talk of Israel attacking Iran as “ludicrous.” He said it can and should be done by the Western powers if negotiations and sanctions fail, and he doubts Israel has the means to do it alone.

Iranian retaliation against Israel wouldn’t have to wait for the nuclear program to be rebuilt — and there would be no certainty all sites would have been hit much less destroyed. The regime has thousands of rockets and missiles under its control in southern Lebanon, chemical and biological weapons, a terrorist network and other military and diplomatic options.

All this may actually make it more likely, not less, that Iran will soon be joining the nuclear club. The antidote is not outsourcing the job to the Israeli air force but a U.S.-led international initiative that includes force as a last resort.

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Douglas M. Bloomfield is a Washington, D.C.-based, political consultant who was formerly chief legislative lobbyist for AIPAC.


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