Iranian manchurian
Iranian Manchurian
December 16, 2004
So now the Iraqi defense minister is the latest to say that Abdel Aziz Hakim and Ayatollah Sistani’s Shiite fascist party is a Trojan Horse for Iran.
The statement from Defense Minister Hazim Shalaan is a stunner, and the fact that he is a chief actor in the puppet U.S. interim government doesn’t take away from the fundamental truth of what he had to say.
Most of today’s papers cover Shalaan’s remarks, but without the prominence they deserve.
The Sistani-backed Shiite party, organized by Hussein Shahristani, a Sistani acolyte, is the “Iranian list,” says Shalaan. “Iran is the big link in terrorism in Iraq. … I want to warn you that Iran is the most dangerous enemy to Iraq and to all Arabs. Shahristani went to Iran after 1991 and worked on building an Iranian nuclear reactor. We will not let him come back and become an Iraqi prime minister.” He warned that Iran and Sistani want “turbaned clerics to rule.”
He is exactly right—and the neoconservatives backing the rise of Shiite fascism in Iraq are to blame.
Incredibly, SCIRI—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdel Aziz Hakim, a semi-ayatollah—is leading the Sistani list, despite its official backing from Iran. And Al Dawa (The Call) is another Shiite fascist party. Its members actually blew up the American embassy in Kuwait in 1983, with Iranian help, and carried out hundreds of assassinations and terrorist acts in Iraq between 1969 and 2003, also backed by Iran. These are the parties that President Bush wants to rule Iraq? Their leaders ought to be arrested for espionage and put on trial for terrorism by the Iraqi authorities. Hopefully, Shalaan will do just that, but Prime Minister Iyad Allawi isn’t there yet.
Unraveling all this is too complicated for a blog entry. But the important thing to understand is that the forces in Iran supporting Sistani, Shahristani, Hakim and Al Dawa are a faction of Iranians amenable to collaboration with the United States, Israel and the neocons. They are still (of course) Islamic revolutionaries, but slightly more moderate than the hardest of hardliners in Iran. They are the faction of illusory moderates that Bill Casey, Ollie North and Michael Ledeen courted during Iran-Contra in the mid-1980s, and I believe that Hashemi Rafsanjani—who is now contemplating a run for the presidency of Iran—is one of them. As I reported in yesterday’s entry (see below), this is a Big Mistake by the neocons, who seem to relish making Big Mistakes.Thursday 11:30 AM
Neocons in Black Turbans
December 15, 2004
Not many neoconservatives are descended from the Prophet Mohammed. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many neocons—and their puppet in the White House—are backing the Iraqi Shiites.
The black turbans, of course, are the Shiites (mostly clergy) who make the spurious claim that they are descended in a direct bloodline from the prophet himself. Now, unless they’ve hired the genealogical whizzes from the Mormons, it’s not likely that they can prove any such thing. But among the credulous faithful, it’s a big deal. One of those who makes that claim is Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Iranian-connected “Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.” You wouldn’t think that anyone whose party calls for “Islamic revolution” would be invited to the White House, but Hakim has cozied up with President Bush himself in the Oval Office. Hakim also loves to snuggle with Iranian ayatollahs, and his paramilitary praetorian guard, the Badr Brigades, were armed and trained since the 1980s by Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard.
Lots to say on this today.
The New York Times has a he-said, she-said page one article on Hakim today, raising some concerns about Hakim and then knocking them down. It’s a horrible article, full of contradictions and with little to none investigative content. (Where, oh where, have the investigative reporters gone?) One glaring contradiction, unremarked on, is that it quotes Ghazi Yawar, the president of Iraq, warning that more than a million people from Iran have crossed the border to vote in the election and than Iranian money and agents are being mobilized to tilt the vote. It then reports: “But American and Iraqi officials say that many of the migrants crossing the largely unmonitored border are Iraqi Shiite families that fled Saddam Hussein’s repression.” I would point out that Yawar, the president, is not so sanguine, and he counts as an Iraqi official.
In the Washington Times today, Arnaud de Borchgrave, conservative but no neocon, says that Jordanian intelligence reports that three million Iranians have entered Iraq since 2003.
The New York Times piece goes on to tell readers to relax—that Shiites in Iraq don’t like Iran, that they don’t believe clerics should run the government, and that there are bitter rivalries among them. (Indeed, Hakim’s brother was blown up last year in Iraq.) All true. Yet there is no question that a great Shiite fundamentalist power is arising in Iran, Iraq and surrounding areas, and it’s all happening with American support.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute takes all this on in a piece called: “Will Iran Win the Iraq War?” The heart of Gerecht’s piece is this: That a Shiite power in Iraq will undermine the clergy’s rule in Iran, and is part of a needed Bush administration offensive against the hard-liners in Teheran. Quote: “Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Teheran’s clerical dictatorship.”
This theory, now official doctrine for the neocons, is at the heart of their Iran strategy. It counts as second Big Mistake of the Iraq war. Big Mistake No. 1 was the neocon belief that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms—instead, they welcomed us with arms. Big Mistake No. 2, now taking shape, is that Iraq’s Shiites are Good Guys who will lead a pro-American Iraq against Iran’s “clerical dictatorship.” I believe that they really believe this. But the reality is that in a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the hard-liners and the people with guns (i.e., the Badr Brigades) will take over, and they will make common cause with some of the clergy in Iran. It will be a dagger all right, but one aimed at Saudi Arabia’s Sunni state. Of course, that too is part of the long-term Israeli-neocon strategy, to overthrow the Saudi king. It’s a regional regime-change strategy (one that includes Syria of course) and it has been central to their whole Middle East policy for a decade. It is also a fantasy, with a thousand possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. Big Mistake No. 1 led to the Iraqi insurgency. Big Mistake No. 2 could lead to a Middle East inflamed by Islamic revolution in spades.Wednesday 10:39 AM
Bolton's War
December 14, 2004
It might be a long way away—I’d guess 2006—but the war-on-Iran hawks in the Bush administration, led by John Bolton of the State Department, are rattling sabers. The Los Angeles Times has a good piece describing the escalating rhetoric around Iran, and it starts with an anecdote about Bolton sabotaging talks with Europe over Iran:
Top diplomats from the United States and its closest allies gathered this fall in Washington to hammer out a common approach to Iran's nuclear ambitions. But the mood quickly soured.Dispensing with the usual diplomatic niceties, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton simply read aloud a U.S. position paper. In it, the administration refused to back European negotiations with Iran and instead insisted that Tehran be dragged before the United Nations Security Council to condemn it for concealing a nuclear weapons program.Irked, the Europeans demanded to know what good it would do to bring Iran before the U.N. when Washington knew it could not muster enough Security Council votes even to slap Tehran's wrist.Bolton referred them to another U.S. position paper."He was not willing to discuss anything," said one stunned participant.
Meanwhile, the neocons are waiting for the “end of the day”:
Other officials said the United States and its allies have many options short of military action with which to isolate and punish a government that they believe persists in trying to develop nuclear weapons."At the end of the day we may have to do it," said another senior official, referring to military action. "We're not at the end of the day yet."Tuesday 10:12 AM
War on Iran
December 13, 2004
Amid all the talk about the supposed crisis in Iran, I haven’t heard anyone say what the legal basis would be for an attack on Iran. Is there any? Is there an international lawyer in the house?
My guess is: No. The invasion of Iraq was the de facto implementation of the Bush administration’s preventive/pre-emptive war policy. But the neocons cooked up a legal justification, based on Iraq’s supposed violations of UN Security Council resolutions. (I personally interviewed the general counsel of the U.S. NSC about this, and listened in amazement as he spun the tale of how spurious Iraqi violations meant that the United States could invade Iraq in defiance of international law.)
Is this why the neocons are so hot to get the Iran nuclear issue to the UN? Usually they attack the UN lustily, but now they are pushing the issue there. Is it because they are seeking some vaguely worded UN resolution that they can use to invade or bomb Iran? As far as I can tell, Iran has every right in the world to develop nuclear weapons, since last time I checked it was a sovereign nation. We can be mad about it, but I don’t there is the slightest legal justification for an attack.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Bush and the denizens of Neocon World. Here’s the entire text of a UPI release today:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department reportedly held simulations to determine the effectiveness of an attack on Iran, the Middle East Newsline reported SundayThe Atlantic Monthly revealed the Pentagon held simulations of a U.S. military strike on Iranian bases and nuclear facilities. The war games also included a ground invasion.
A silly piece in the New Republic—a cover story no less—by Franklin Foer, purports to be an account of how the neocons are divided about how to deal with Iran. Maybe they haven’t settled on a specific plan yet (though the outlines are pretty clear), but Foer goes on and on about some supposed big division among them. Perhaps Foer ought to interview the neocons that run the New Republic first.
As the Times reported over the weekend, the United States (led by neocon-in-chief at the State Department John Bolton) and Europe are still at loggerheads over Iran, with the United States still trying to undermine the deal that Europe is trying to consolidate with Teheran. The article included this stunner :
U.S. officials say, however, they are suspicious of any partial deals that do not encompass an end to Iran’s support of insurgents in Iran and to groups that carry out attacks on Israeli citizens, including Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and militant factions within the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Huh? So it’s not enough to get Iran’s agreement to slow down its nuclear program, but Washington wants Iran to change its whole foreign policy and to bail out the United States’ bungled war in Iraq? Including a poison pill like this is obviously designed to scuttle an agreement.Monday 10:43 AM
http://www.tompaine.com/archives/the_dreyfuss_report.php
December 16, 2004
So now the Iraqi defense minister is the latest to say that Abdel Aziz Hakim and Ayatollah Sistani’s Shiite fascist party is a Trojan Horse for Iran.
The statement from Defense Minister Hazim Shalaan is a stunner, and the fact that he is a chief actor in the puppet U.S. interim government doesn’t take away from the fundamental truth of what he had to say.
Most of today’s papers cover Shalaan’s remarks, but without the prominence they deserve.
The Sistani-backed Shiite party, organized by Hussein Shahristani, a Sistani acolyte, is the “Iranian list,” says Shalaan. “Iran is the big link in terrorism in Iraq. … I want to warn you that Iran is the most dangerous enemy to Iraq and to all Arabs. Shahristani went to Iran after 1991 and worked on building an Iranian nuclear reactor. We will not let him come back and become an Iraqi prime minister.” He warned that Iran and Sistani want “turbaned clerics to rule.”
He is exactly right—and the neoconservatives backing the rise of Shiite fascism in Iraq are to blame.
Incredibly, SCIRI—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdel Aziz Hakim, a semi-ayatollah—is leading the Sistani list, despite its official backing from Iran. And Al Dawa (The Call) is another Shiite fascist party. Its members actually blew up the American embassy in Kuwait in 1983, with Iranian help, and carried out hundreds of assassinations and terrorist acts in Iraq between 1969 and 2003, also backed by Iran. These are the parties that President Bush wants to rule Iraq? Their leaders ought to be arrested for espionage and put on trial for terrorism by the Iraqi authorities. Hopefully, Shalaan will do just that, but Prime Minister Iyad Allawi isn’t there yet.
Unraveling all this is too complicated for a blog entry. But the important thing to understand is that the forces in Iran supporting Sistani, Shahristani, Hakim and Al Dawa are a faction of Iranians amenable to collaboration with the United States, Israel and the neocons. They are still (of course) Islamic revolutionaries, but slightly more moderate than the hardest of hardliners in Iran. They are the faction of illusory moderates that Bill Casey, Ollie North and Michael Ledeen courted during Iran-Contra in the mid-1980s, and I believe that Hashemi Rafsanjani—who is now contemplating a run for the presidency of Iran—is one of them. As I reported in yesterday’s entry (see below), this is a Big Mistake by the neocons, who seem to relish making Big Mistakes.Thursday 11:30 AM
Neocons in Black Turbans
December 15, 2004
Not many neoconservatives are descended from the Prophet Mohammed. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many neocons—and their puppet in the White House—are backing the Iraqi Shiites.
The black turbans, of course, are the Shiites (mostly clergy) who make the spurious claim that they are descended in a direct bloodline from the prophet himself. Now, unless they’ve hired the genealogical whizzes from the Mormons, it’s not likely that they can prove any such thing. But among the credulous faithful, it’s a big deal. One of those who makes that claim is Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Iranian-connected “Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.” You wouldn’t think that anyone whose party calls for “Islamic revolution” would be invited to the White House, but Hakim has cozied up with President Bush himself in the Oval Office. Hakim also loves to snuggle with Iranian ayatollahs, and his paramilitary praetorian guard, the Badr Brigades, were armed and trained since the 1980s by Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard.
Lots to say on this today.
The New York Times has a he-said, she-said page one article on Hakim today, raising some concerns about Hakim and then knocking them down. It’s a horrible article, full of contradictions and with little to none investigative content. (Where, oh where, have the investigative reporters gone?) One glaring contradiction, unremarked on, is that it quotes Ghazi Yawar, the president of Iraq, warning that more than a million people from Iran have crossed the border to vote in the election and than Iranian money and agents are being mobilized to tilt the vote. It then reports: “But American and Iraqi officials say that many of the migrants crossing the largely unmonitored border are Iraqi Shiite families that fled Saddam Hussein’s repression.” I would point out that Yawar, the president, is not so sanguine, and he counts as an Iraqi official.
In the Washington Times today, Arnaud de Borchgrave, conservative but no neocon, says that Jordanian intelligence reports that three million Iranians have entered Iraq since 2003.
The New York Times piece goes on to tell readers to relax—that Shiites in Iraq don’t like Iran, that they don’t believe clerics should run the government, and that there are bitter rivalries among them. (Indeed, Hakim’s brother was blown up last year in Iraq.) All true. Yet there is no question that a great Shiite fundamentalist power is arising in Iran, Iraq and surrounding areas, and it’s all happening with American support.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute takes all this on in a piece called: “Will Iran Win the Iraq War?” The heart of Gerecht’s piece is this: That a Shiite power in Iraq will undermine the clergy’s rule in Iran, and is part of a needed Bush administration offensive against the hard-liners in Teheran. Quote: “Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Teheran’s clerical dictatorship.”
This theory, now official doctrine for the neocons, is at the heart of their Iran strategy. It counts as second Big Mistake of the Iraq war. Big Mistake No. 1 was the neocon belief that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms—instead, they welcomed us with arms. Big Mistake No. 2, now taking shape, is that Iraq’s Shiites are Good Guys who will lead a pro-American Iraq against Iran’s “clerical dictatorship.” I believe that they really believe this. But the reality is that in a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the hard-liners and the people with guns (i.e., the Badr Brigades) will take over, and they will make common cause with some of the clergy in Iran. It will be a dagger all right, but one aimed at Saudi Arabia’s Sunni state. Of course, that too is part of the long-term Israeli-neocon strategy, to overthrow the Saudi king. It’s a regional regime-change strategy (one that includes Syria of course) and it has been central to their whole Middle East policy for a decade. It is also a fantasy, with a thousand possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. Big Mistake No. 1 led to the Iraqi insurgency. Big Mistake No. 2 could lead to a Middle East inflamed by Islamic revolution in spades.Wednesday 10:39 AM
Bolton's War
December 14, 2004
It might be a long way away—I’d guess 2006—but the war-on-Iran hawks in the Bush administration, led by John Bolton of the State Department, are rattling sabers. The Los Angeles Times has a good piece describing the escalating rhetoric around Iran, and it starts with an anecdote about Bolton sabotaging talks with Europe over Iran:
Top diplomats from the United States and its closest allies gathered this fall in Washington to hammer out a common approach to Iran's nuclear ambitions. But the mood quickly soured.Dispensing with the usual diplomatic niceties, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton simply read aloud a U.S. position paper. In it, the administration refused to back European negotiations with Iran and instead insisted that Tehran be dragged before the United Nations Security Council to condemn it for concealing a nuclear weapons program.Irked, the Europeans demanded to know what good it would do to bring Iran before the U.N. when Washington knew it could not muster enough Security Council votes even to slap Tehran's wrist.Bolton referred them to another U.S. position paper."He was not willing to discuss anything," said one stunned participant.
Meanwhile, the neocons are waiting for the “end of the day”:
Other officials said the United States and its allies have many options short of military action with which to isolate and punish a government that they believe persists in trying to develop nuclear weapons."At the end of the day we may have to do it," said another senior official, referring to military action. "We're not at the end of the day yet."Tuesday 10:12 AM
War on Iran
December 13, 2004
Amid all the talk about the supposed crisis in Iran, I haven’t heard anyone say what the legal basis would be for an attack on Iran. Is there any? Is there an international lawyer in the house?
My guess is: No. The invasion of Iraq was the de facto implementation of the Bush administration’s preventive/pre-emptive war policy. But the neocons cooked up a legal justification, based on Iraq’s supposed violations of UN Security Council resolutions. (I personally interviewed the general counsel of the U.S. NSC about this, and listened in amazement as he spun the tale of how spurious Iraqi violations meant that the United States could invade Iraq in defiance of international law.)
Is this why the neocons are so hot to get the Iran nuclear issue to the UN? Usually they attack the UN lustily, but now they are pushing the issue there. Is it because they are seeking some vaguely worded UN resolution that they can use to invade or bomb Iran? As far as I can tell, Iran has every right in the world to develop nuclear weapons, since last time I checked it was a sovereign nation. We can be mad about it, but I don’t there is the slightest legal justification for an attack.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Bush and the denizens of Neocon World. Here’s the entire text of a UPI release today:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department reportedly held simulations to determine the effectiveness of an attack on Iran, the Middle East Newsline reported SundayThe Atlantic Monthly revealed the Pentagon held simulations of a U.S. military strike on Iranian bases and nuclear facilities. The war games also included a ground invasion.
A silly piece in the New Republic—a cover story no less—by Franklin Foer, purports to be an account of how the neocons are divided about how to deal with Iran. Maybe they haven’t settled on a specific plan yet (though the outlines are pretty clear), but Foer goes on and on about some supposed big division among them. Perhaps Foer ought to interview the neocons that run the New Republic first.
As the Times reported over the weekend, the United States (led by neocon-in-chief at the State Department John Bolton) and Europe are still at loggerheads over Iran, with the United States still trying to undermine the deal that Europe is trying to consolidate with Teheran. The article included this stunner :
U.S. officials say, however, they are suspicious of any partial deals that do not encompass an end to Iran’s support of insurgents in Iran and to groups that carry out attacks on Israeli citizens, including Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and militant factions within the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Huh? So it’s not enough to get Iran’s agreement to slow down its nuclear program, but Washington wants Iran to change its whole foreign policy and to bail out the United States’ bungled war in Iraq? Including a poison pill like this is obviously designed to scuttle an agreement.Monday 10:43 AM
http://www.tompaine.com/archives/the_dreyfuss_report.php
posted by REZA S. @ 6:11 PM
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