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 signalled 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. In 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 UN 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.

The introduction of a new reason for striking Iran, which also implied a much more limited set of targets related to Iraq, followed a meeting between Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Dec 13, 2006 in which the uniformed military leaders rejected a strike against Iran’s nuclear programme. Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein, reported last May that military and intelligence sources told him that the Joint Chiefs had unanimously opposed a possible strike against the Iranian nuclear programme in a meeting with Bush.

After several months of trying to establish specific links between Iraqis suspected of trafficking in weapons to a specific Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard contact, the US

command has not claimed a single case of such a link. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the US commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a July 6 briefing that his troops had not captured “anybody that we can tie to Iran”.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is known to be closely allied with Cheney on Iran policy, has betrayed impatience with a policy that depends on obtaining proof of Iranian complicity in attacks. On June 11 he called for “strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.” Lieberman repeated that position on Jul. 2, but thus far it has not prevailed. — IPS