Why Iran may be thenext Mideast countryto be in thecowboy’s crosshairs.
Is Iran The New Bush Target?By Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 12th, 2007Perhaps precisely because of its hopeless blunders in Iraq, Iran has become the Bush Administration’s “Public Enemy Number One”, against which its Middle East strategy is increasingly focused, according to some leading experts on the Gulf region.That strategy appears aimed at forging an informal alliance between Bush, Sunni-led Arab states and Israel. The alliance seems designed to challenge and roll back perceived Iranian influence in the region, according to Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor who served as former President Jimmy Carter‘s chief advisor on Iran.”The organizing principle of the new strategy is confrontation with and containment of Shia influence–and specifically Iranian influence–wherever it appears in the region,” says Sick.In a recently circulated memo, Sick wrote that Bush’s new strategy stems primarily from the dramatic shift in the regional balance of power in Iran’s favor following the removal–by American forces, no less–of Tehran‘s two neighboring nemeses, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein‘s Ba’athist Party in Iraq.Yes, the Afghanistan attacks may have been needed; but this was surely not the case with the “fruitless nation-building” of Iraq. Such a blunder on the heels of the Afghanistan invasion has caused a predictable power vacuum in the Gulf, and pain for Washington‘s traditional Sunni-led “allies”–particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.Perhaps out of desperation, the administration has tried to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran, both in the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear program and in Iraq by charging Tehran with arming sectarian militias and harassing Iranian officials there.At the same time, Bush has assured the Saudis, in particular, that he will keep U.S. forces in Iraq to prevent a full-scale civil war that could be catastrophic for the Sunni population; a civil war that everyone else knows is already going on. Bush also plans to press Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to control the Shia militias or risk replacement by a “more Sunni-friendly” regime.This strategy is attractive to Bush for a variety of reasons. First, focusing greater attention on Iran would serve to “distract public attention from the Iraqi disaster,” according to Sick. Moreover, given the anger Americans still hold toward Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis, it should be relatively easy to rally bipartisan opinion against the Islamic Republic, Sick added.But Sick perhaps correctly identifies the neo-conservative penchant for geopolitical preconceptions when he writes that the neo-cons feel Iran may be compared to Washington’s global contest with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The new strategy would provide a “single, agreed enemy that can serve as the organizing point of reference… (which) can be used to explain and rationalize a wide range of policies that otherwise might be quite unpopular,” he wrote.While Arab states primarily found it hard to believe that Moscow was the greater threat during the Cold War, “Iran as a large, neighboring, non-Arab, racial Shia state may fulfill that role more convincingly,” according to Sick, who added that the “extravagant rhetoric and populist posturing” of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may add to this strategy’s appeal.And Sick isn’t the only expert to see afoot such efforts. A Jan.15th Inter Press Service (IPS) article entitled, “Bush’s New Iran Policy–War Plan or Propaganda?” by Gareth Porter, an historian and national security policy analyst, notes that in early January, an unidentified U.S. military unit launched an attack on an Iraqi building used by Iranian consular officials in Erbil, and seized six Iranian officials in the compound.But according to Porter, “all indications are that the U.S. military has no real intelligence on any Iranian direct involvement in supplying lethal weapons to insurgents.”The statement issued by the U.S. military said the detainees, who were not identified as Iranians, were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces”. U.S. troops also seized documents and computers, “indicating that the attack was really nothing more than an intelligence operation, launched in the hope of finding some evidence that could be used against Iran,” wrote Porter.The only other major U.S. military raid came in late December, and targeted four Iranian officials visiting Baghdad at the invitation of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. That operation “bore similar evidence of being a fishing expedition against Iranians, based on nothing more than the ‘suspicion’ that they were connected with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Porter wrote.”Contrary to the impression conveyed by the administration,” he concluded, “it is not targeting those who it knows to be involved in supplying insurgents with weapons, but is still trying to find some evidence to justify its tough rhetoric against Iran.”
