Richard Whalen

While the President and Vice President continue to threaten Iran with punitive, pre-emptive war, the admiral who would command any U.S. air and naval attacks against Iran is publicly urging peace-seeking diplomacy.

Taking up the “challenge,” in an interview in the Financial Times, Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, disputes “the stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now, there will be another war, which is just not where we want to go.” Fallon declares: “Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as the means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.” Admiral Fallon, a career naval aviator, was chosen to command Centcom last year.

This brave Admiral may very well be putting his career at risk! Try to imagine the uproar in Tokyo in mid-November 1941 if Admiral Yamamoto instead of sailing to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7 had called a press conference and denounced the “insane” war against overwhelmingly powerful America that he privately foresaw would destroy the Japanese Empire. Yamamoto confided his anguish in his diary and obeyed his orders. Fallon is obeying his conscience, as will many other American senior officers moved by his example.

In the 14 months remaining in Bush’s term, “the Decider” could find time and opportunity to extend the Long War beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran by many pretexts. Some observers believe that the Cheney-led “neoconservative” warhawks secretly intend to attack Iran by air and sea in the waning days of the Bush Administration. And, Admiral Fallon declines to rule out the possibility of a future attack. “We have to make sure that there is no mistake on the part of the Iranians about our resolve in tending to business in the region,” he says.

Retired General John Abizaid, Fallon’s predecessor, whom I have interviewed and respect as a warrior-statesman, expects the U.S. to be involved in Iraq for another 25 to 50 years. Iraq floats on an ocean of oil that the world desperately needs. Does the U.S. have the strategic vision and staying power to persist in a fixed design for a half century?