The winner of the next presidential election will face a struggling world economy and a Middle East in the process of dramatic political transition, but GOP presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain appear intent on scaring the public about fanciful dangers of an
The winner of the next presidential election will face a struggling world economy and a Middle East in the process of dramatic political transition, but GOP presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain appear intent on scaring the public about fanciful dangers of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
The threat of a rogue state or terrorist launching an EMP attack — the detonation of a nuclear warhead at a high altitude, shutting down electrical power across large portions of the U.S. — has become the nightmare scenario cited by defense hawks as justification for costly missile defense systems. But the likelihood of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon, which they would then affix to a ballistic missile, remains remarkably small.
EMP alarmism generally remains on the fringe circles of the Republican party — the Center for Security Policy‘s Frank Gaffney issued a dire warning that an EMP attack could kill “nine out of ten Americans” — but comments from Gingrich and Cain have brought the “pulsers” agenda into the Republican primary race.
Cain’s “Foreign Policy & National Security Pillars” [PDF] includes:
COUNTER URGENT THREATS
• Stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons
• Fix border security – for real
• Shield us against Cyber and
• Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks
And Gingrich, listing the greatest threats to the U.S. at the Nov. 22, CNN National Security Debate, said:
The greatest threat to the United States was the weapon of mass in an American city, probably from a terrorist… [is] one of the three great threats. The second is an electromagnetic pulse attack which would literally destroy the country’s capacity to function.
Gingrich and Cain’s outspoken concern about the threat of a terrorist or rogue state’s EMP attack might appear to be simple paranoia, but the EMP campaign has been a go-to argument for proponents of costly missile defense shields and preventive war against North Korea and Iran.
While EMP rhetoric might be largely overlooked or ridiculed, EMP enthusiasts do little to hide the ulterior motives of pushing for dramatic increases in defense spending and leading the U.S. into preemptive wars with suspected nuclear proliferators.
]]>The blog, which falls under the “news and events” tab, seems to promote news and views about Iran, with a particular focus on human rights issues inside the country. There’s also an occasional perfunctory right-wing pro-Israel talking point – with little connection to Iran — thrown in for good measure. Entries so far are few, all written by someone named “Emily.”
One post in particular caught my eye: an item warning of an Iranian ‘electro-magnetic pulse’ or EMP attack on the U.S.
This one small blog post is a shining example of what independent journalist Max Blumenthal wrote about in his latest piece for Tom Dispatch: the recent uptick in Islamophobia is not some spontaneous eruption, but the “fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.”
Following up on Blumenthal’s post, Matt Duss at the Wonk Room notes a Washington Post story on Islamophobic actors giving lectures to law enforcement. One of the totally expected cast of characters is Frank Gaffney, the head of the rightist Center for Security Policy (and, as Duss notes, Obama truther, birther, and other Obama-Muslim wacky conspiracy-theorist).
Gaffney, of course, was recently named to Clarion’s advisory board.
I tried to contact “Emily” to ask her some questions, but Alex Traiman — director of “Iranium” as well as Clarion’s Associate Director and media handler — apologized that he couldn’t furnish an e-mail contact because he was “really pretty busy.”
What’s most troubling about the fear-mongering inherent in “Emily”‘s posting is the many issues it conflates, especially with regard to the author’s characterization of comments made over the weekend by Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Just before some scare-mongering about an EMP attack, Clarion blogger “Emily” sums up Mullen’s comments in the Persian Gulf region like this:
The United States announced over the weekend that it is “very ready” to counter Iran should the regime try to start a war.
Enter the “looming” threat of an Iranian EMP weapon:
But what if Iran attacks with an EMP and renders all of America’s society and infrastructure out of commission? Then how ready will we be? Maybe we should have more of a plan.
That there is the entirety of the post. Leave aside the staggering absence of depth (the hollow recommendation for “more of a plan”), the short piece is based on innuendo designed to stoke fears of a threat-that-isn’t.
An Iranian attack against U.S. soil was not what Mullen was talking about in Bahrain. A quick click on the link to a BBC article provided by “Emily” or me readily proves this. The headline unequivocally states as much (“…Mullen Reassures Gulf States on Iran”) as do Mullen’s quotes in the body of the BBC story (my emphasis):
The US was “very ready” to meet any challenge from Iran, he said. “There are real threats to peace and stability here, and we’ve made no secrets of our concerns about Iran.”
Does it sound like Mullen should have then espoused that the United States, in addition to already stated “concerns about Iran,” develop policy to address a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory?
So this is exactly the EMP ruse.
Think Progress analyst Matt Duss made light of the obsession with EMP among advocates of far right foreign policy positions:
As a practical matter… it’s probably worth pointing out here that the likelihood of Iran, or anyone, actually pulling off such an attack is roughly the same as Iran building an enormous, space-bound vacuum cleaner and sucking up all of America’s oxygen. But Gaffney and other EMP threat promoters like Newt Gingrich are betting that most Americans aren’t going to invest the amount of time it would require to learn this.
Although Clarion thus far isn’t providing a “plan” to counter the EMP threat, many EMP fear-mongerers have: Missile defense systems. In a piece on an EMP conference, Right Web‘s Robert Farley wrote:
The central political purpose of the EMP awareness movement appears to be advancement of the cause of missile defense.
It’s no surprise, again, that Gaffney’s think tank receives much funding from the same groups — defense contractors (Boeing, General Atomics, General Dynamics, Litton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Thiokol, and TRW) – that would profit massively from the creation of the robust systems (including space-based missile defense) that these EMP scare-mongers are pushing.
]]>A news article from reporter Rowan Scarborough speculates about which U.S. military hardware could best pull off an attack, while an opinion piece from Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett and Peter Vincent Pry, president of the anti-proliferation advocacy group EMPact America, write that despite the dearth of evidence, Iran may actually already have a nuclear weapon. In the news piece, Scarborough, a former media fellow at the right-wing Hoover Institution, turns to some of the same sources he turned to in 2002 to build the case for the invasion of Iraq. Namely, Scarborough’s entire premise — that the B-2 bomber could destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities — relies on a lead-off quote from Ret. Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerny.
McInerny has spent most of the past ten years advocating for bombing runs, invasions, and covert regime change just about everywhere you can imagine. Sticking closely to this program, the Fox News analyst and military committee member of the neo-conservative Center for Security Policy (CSP) told Scarborough that the U.S. would use the B-2 and cruise missiles to knock out the nuclear program while covert forces would ensure regime change by making sure that Iranians don’t rally to their embattled regime, which some Iran-experts (including, it seems, two neocons) and Iranian opposition activists think is exactly what will happen.
McInerny has displayed this kind of disregard for the consequences of U.S. military strikes on ostensible U.S. allies like the Green Movement or the South Koreans before: In a 2005 war game conducted for the Atlantic, McInerny said he was prepared to take massive Korean causalities in Seoul — hoping to “minimize” deaths to 100,000 — in order to take the long odds at destroying North Korea’s well-hidden nuclear program.
McInerny is no stranger to Scarborough, who featured the Air Force hawk in a January 20, 2003, front-page article in the Washington Times. In that article, McInerny insisted that it was target strikes against the country’s leadership and its weapons stockpiles that would create a quick, peaceful regime change in Iraq. “We ought to leave the lights on so every Iraqi knows the war is against Saddam, not against the people,” McInerny said at the time. “Go after regime-change targets, weapons of mass destruction, palaces, those troops that choose to fight.”
Scarborough also quoted John Pike, an expert from Global Security.org, a Jane’s-like website, who also gave rosy predictions for the Iraq War. “Almost all are in isolated areas where civilian casualties would not be much of a problem. Most of them have co-located staff housing. Bomb the housing, kill the staff, set back the program by a generation,” Pike said in the Washington Times piece. On October 5, 2002, Pike told the Quincy, Mass., Patriot Ledger that “it’s a given” that Saddam Hussein would use chemical and biological weapons against U.S. forces, which, of course, presumes that the existence of said weapons is also “a given.” If things went wrong, Pike said at the time, the conflict could last for “months.”
If Scarborough’s credulity (even with experts who have been wrong before) informs his piece, the opinion article by Rep. Bartlett and EMPact president Peter Vincent Pry is based on pure skepticism — which veers occasionally into conspiracy theory territory. Bartlett and Pry basically argue that no one can be sure that Iran doesn’t already have a nuclear weapon constructed, even suggesting that well-respected former International Atomic Nuclear Agency chief Mohamed El-Baradei may have covered up information about Iran’s nukes in order to curry favor with the public in his native Egypt, where El-Baradei is now apparently running for president and where apparently, “an Islamic bomb is popular on the Arab street.”
“Iran only needs a single nuclear weapon to destroy the United States,” Bartlett and Pry write to close their op-ed, striking an alarmist tone. Their theory relies on a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) weapon. Hyping the EMP threat has long been a hobby horse for neocons like Frank Gaffney and his organization, the aforementioned CSP. Gaffney and Bartlett both spoke at last fall’s EMPact America-sponsored conference in Niagara, New York.
The Washington Times appears to be using the same playbook it employed in 2002 and 2003 to hype the Iraq threat. That adventure turned into a foreign policy disaster that, in fact, bettered Iran’s regional standing and has mired (and, even as of yesterday, continues to mire) tens of the thousands of U.S. troops, including thousands dead, and billions of dollars from U.S. coffers in a country that turns out to have been little threat the U.S. One wonders what sort of chutzpuh it takes to make similar (albeit scaled-up) over-statements about Iran.
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