Gates raked by newspaper for scorning war on Iran

Having failed miserably with its summer time order to move a million people out of Tehran in five weeks, the government is now giving four months for a million Tehranis to move elsewhere. The announcement Sunday was made by Vice President Lotfollah Foruzandeh, who is in charge of the plan to thin out Tehran’s population. Specifically, he said that a directive signed by President Ahmadinejad orders that all executive agencies move 40 percent of their personnel to cities outside of Tehran province by Now Ruz. He said that amounted to 200,000 civil servants who would have to move. With the average Iranian household containing 4.8 people, that would mean moving almost one million people out of the capital in just four months. Foruzandeh did not say how it would be physically possible for moving vans to move that many families so quickly, let alone where they could be accommodated in the provinces so quickly. The order was the latest in Ahmadi-nejad’s effort to reduce the population of the capital because it lies on an earthquake fault. Ahmadi-nejad issued a degree last April saying 40 percent of government employees must leave the capital. Most people treated it like a joke and ignored the order. But Ahmadi-nejad has come back to this theme time and time again. Unlike many poorly conceived orders by governments over the decades, it has not fallen under its own weight and disappeared. Ahmadi-nejad has remained persistent. action. “Mr. Gates’s prediction of how Iranians would react to an attack is speculative, but what we do know for sure is that the last decision Iran made to curb its nuclear program, in 2003, came when the regime feared—reasonably or not—that it could be a target of the US forces that had just destroyed the Iraqi army. As for the effect of the sanctions, Tehran has not shown itself ready to begin serious bargaining about its uranium enrichment. “Mr. Gates’s Pentagon has been a center of opposition to discussing military options for Iran for years. Given the potentially high costs and uncertain outcome of such a mission, that’s understandable. But by sending the message to Iran that US military action is not a serious possibility, the defense establishment only makes it more likely that the United States and Israel will eventually face a terrible choice between launching an attack and accepting an Iranian bomb,” the editorial concluded. Although it is not widely understood, the Pentagon is commonly the strongest agency in Washington arguing against the use of military force. Professional military officers understand how badly things can go in war and are often “almost pacifist in their approach to war,” as some analysts have observed. Gates has twice played down the utility of force against Iran in recent weeks, the comments that irked The Washington Post. He first rejected a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who said that if the United States “hopes to stop Iran’s nuclear program without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.” Gates responded: “I disagree that only a credible military threat can get Iran to take the actions that it needs to end its nuclear weapons program.” He added that while “we are prepared to do what is necessary,… the political, economic approach we are taking is having an impact in Iran.” Then, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, Gates elaborated on that point. Saying the Iranian leadership had been “surprised by the impact of the sanctions” imposed this year, he argued that a military solution “will only … bring together a divided nation; it will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons and they will just go deeper and more covert. So I think the politicaleconomic strategy is the one we have to continue to pursue.”