Is CENTCOM Commander Fallon standing between us and an attack on Iran?

gareth porter, writing for ips, offers some points of perspective...

• [In] a meeting between Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Dec. 13, 2006 ... the uniformed military leaders rejected a strike against Iran's nuclear programme.

• The Joint Chiefs were soon joined in opposition to a strike on Iran by Admiral William Fallon, who was nominated to become CENTCOM commander in January.

• A source who met with Fallon at the time of his confirmation hearing quoted him as vowing that there would be "no war with Iran" while he was CENTCOM commander and as hinting very strongly that he would quit rather than go along with an attack.

• Fallon also suggested that other military leaders were opposing a strike against Iran, saying, "There are several of us who are trying to put the crazies back in the box," according to the same source.

• The possibility that Fallon might object to an unprovoked attack on Iran or even resign over the issue represents a significant deterrent to such an attack.

so, with heavy senior level military opposition to a strike against iran's nuclear facilities, the purpose and scope of an attack on iran was reframed...

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.

porter speculates on where fallon stands in light of the revised strategy...

Fallon is unlikely to refuse to carry out such a limited strike under those circumstances.

is the strategy working...?

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

we all know what darth wants...

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