Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power by Sanger David E

Author:Sanger, David E. [Sanger, David E.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307718044
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

GEN. JAMES MATTIS is no one to be trifled with. The burly head of CENTCOM spent the last year bolstering defenses in case war breaks out with Iran. He has placed antimissile batteries around the region, gathered the equipment needed to sweep mines out of the Strait of Hormuz, and identified how the United States would take out Iran’s air defenses and command-and-control if it needed to do so. He’s also spent a lot of time thinking about the “and then what?” questions—as in, “Israel strikes … and then what?”

Mattis sought the answer in a war game that was under way while Netanyahu was visiting. Called “Internal Look,” and described to my colleagues Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, the two-week-long exercise ended the way all such exercises do: with the United States sucked into the war.

Mattis’s exercise was classified, but in the account published in the Times, the Israeli attack set the Iranian program back by about a year. But at some point early in the exercise, the Iranians took a shot at a US Navy warship and killed about two hundred Americans. “A ridiculously high number,” one former Israeli official told me. Maybe so, but every other simulation I’ve ever seen didn’t turn out much better.

The simulations all start with the same premise: the Israelis believe that knocking back the Iranian program even for a short time is worth it. After all, in 1981, when Israeli pilots were about to take off to destroy Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, they were told it might only delay Saddam Hussein two or three years—and the pilots were unlikely to get home alive. It turned out Saddam’s nuclear ambitions never recovered. In 2007 the Israelis took out a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. The Syrians are now preoccupied with bigger problems.

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