The Pentagon views the weak, militarily surrounded and impoverished country of Iran as the greatest threat America faces, according to one of the US’s top military officials.

Adm. James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Washington think-tank on Tuesday that he doesn’t “see any greater challenge than Iran.”

Of all the general national security threats America faces, Winnefeld said, including economic threats, terrorist threats, and the threat of a potential offensive military strike on the US, “you find Iran touches (them) one way or the other.”

Part of the reason this answer comes so easily to the political and military establishment is because of the mantra about Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons. But there is a consensus in the intelligence community that Iran has no such weapons program.

The US is not so concerned with Iranian military capabilities per se. Iran is one of the few states in the geo-strategically vital Persian Gulf area that isn’t a client of the US, doing the bidding of Washington power-brokers in exchange for economic, military, and diplomatic support. This disobedience is the real threat to an America that wants complete control over the Middle East.

“It is a matter of faith among many American politicians that Iran is the greatest danger now facing the country,” writes Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But if that is true, then the United States can breathe easy: Iran is a weak military power.”

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran’s“military forces have almost no modern armor, artillery, aircraft or major combat ships, and UN sanctions will likely obstruct the purchase of high-technology weapons for the foreseeable future.”

Even if Iran did have nuclear weapons, which it doesn’t, “the threat to the US homeland would continue to be minimal,” according to Zenko.

But the military establishment continues to habitually hype threats that don’t exist, because it fills the pockets of rent-seekers in the military industrial complex and it serves the bureaucratic interests of powerful hawks in Washington.

ESSAY: RUDABEH PAKRAVAN

Territory Jam: Tehran

U.S. Adds Forces in Persian Gulf, a Signal to Iran
by THOM SHANKER, ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
July 3, 2012

WASHINGTON — The United States has quietly moved significant military reinforcements into the Persian Gulf to deter the Iranian military from any possible attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz and to increase the number of fighter jets capable of striking deep into Iran if the standoff over its nuclear program escalates.

The deployments are part of a long-planned effort to bolster the American military presence in the gulf region, in part to reassure Israel that in dealing with Iran, as one senior administration official put it last week, “When the president says there are other options on the table beyond negotiations, he means it.”

But at a moment that the United States and its allies are beginning to enforce a much broader embargo on Iran’s oil exports, meant to force the country to take seriously the negotiations over sharply limiting its nuclear program, the buildup carries significant risks, including that Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps could decide to lash out against the increased presence.

The most visible elements of this buildup are Navy ships designed to vastly enhance the ability to patrol the Strait of Hormuz — and to reopen the narrow waterway should Iran attempt to mine it to prevent Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters from sending their tankers through the vital passage.

The Navy has doubled the number of minesweepers assigned to the region, to eight vessels, in what military officers describe as a purely defensive move...

 

IAEA says no progress in nuclear talks with Iran
by Reuters
article from The Jerusalem Post
June 8, 2012

The United States, European powers and Israel want to curb Iranian nuclear activities they fear are intended to produce nuclear bombs. The Islamic Republic says its nuclear program is meant purely to produce energy for civilian uses.

Six world powers were scrutinizing the IAEA-Iran meeting to judge whether the Iranians were ready to make concessions before a resumption of wider-ranging discussions with them in Moscow on June 18-19 on the decade-old nuclear dispute.

The lack of result may heighten Western suspicions that Iran is seeking to drag out the two sets of talks to buy time for its uranium enrichment program, without backing down in the face of international demands that it suspend its sensitive work.

"It should by now be clear to everyone that Iran is not negotiating in good faith," a senior Western diplomat said...

 

Behind the US/Israeli Cyberattacks on Iran
by Juan Cole at his blog, with some help from ProPublica
June 3, 2012 

The New York Times has published a report detailing how the Bush and Obama administrations created the cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and used it to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program.

Much has been written about Stuxnet, which, as ProPublica recently reported, remains a threat beyond Iran. But the Times account, based on interviews with unnamed U.S. and Israeli officials, is the most extensive account to date of U.S. cyberwarfare capabilities. Here’s our cheat sheet on what’s new and the fallout...

 

In the world of journalism, Hersh is considered the best of the best...

Our Men in Iran?
by Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
April 6, 2012

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens...

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me...

Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with surrogates,” he said.

The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations that it never had before.”

In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.”