From Salon.com:
The Dangerous Hostility Game With Iran
Pressure for a military strike against Iran appears to be growing dangerously — a prospect with untold but certainly dire consequences for American troops in Iraq, a broader conflagration in the Persian Gulf and an oil price spike that could cripple the world economy. Repeated promises by the Bush administration to seek diplomatic solutions to disagreements with the Iranian regime haven’t quenched rising hysteria in the United States and Israel. Perhaps that is because the sound of White House vows to use force only as a “last resort” evokes bad memories.
If Washington and Jerusalem are moving toward a military confrontation with Tehran, as many media reports have suggested in recent days, the question is why now. Delving beneath the alarming editorials and headlines about the alleged threat from Iran, parroted by politicians in both parties, it is plain that the actual threat is shrinking slightly, while the opportunity for negotiation is improving.
Consider, for instance, the supposedly startling news that the Iraqis want the United States to agree to a timetable for withdrawal of American troops as the price of any continuing agreement between the two governments. As anyone who has paid attention to Iraqi public opinion understands, it is utterly unsurprising that an elected government would eventually reflect what has been the overwhelming sentiment in that country for years.Why would Iraqi government officials be sufficiently confident to express their people’s wish for true sovereignty now? Official sources and mainstream American media emphasize the growing competence of the Iraqi armed forces, although American generals always stress that such progress is fragile and tentative — and that to sustain those gains, the U.S. will be required to maintain a substantial military presence for years to come.
In fact the most plausible explanation for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s sudden outspokenness, which was echoed by his national security advisor and other Iraqi officials, much to the embarrassment of the White House, is not his army’s strength but his government’s relationship with Iran. Clearly the Iranians have been using their influence on events inside Iraq to encourage calm. The flow of weapons over the border (or at least their use against U.S. troops) has virtually halted, and the level of fighting among Shiite factions has likewise diminished. Neither of those trends could have taken hold without Iranian assent.
With levels of violence decreasing, the Iraqi government’s call for a scheduled American withdrawal is much harder to resist. It is no mere coincidence that the shift in Iraqi policy mirrors the Iranian position urging a swift end to the U.S. occupation. (Continue reading here).
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from The New Yorker:
Preparing The Battlefield: The Bush Administration Steps Up its Secret Moves Against Iran
Seymour Hersh
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature. (Continue reading here).
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From Global Research.ca
Representative Ron Paul says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed a section from a bill passed by Congress which would have barred the U.S. from going to war with Iran without a congressional vote, claiming she did so at the behest of the leadership of Israel and AIPAC.
Paul, a former Republican presidential contender who formally removed himself from the party’s nomination race last week, makes the allegation on C-SPAN during a recently held foreign policy conference in Virginia.
Paul says Pelosi’s first act as House Speaker in 2006 was to “deliberately” remove a portion of a legislative spending bill which said the United States “can’t go to war with Iran without getting approval from Congress.”
According to Paul, Pelosi and her allies in the chamber’s Democratic leadership initially accepted the bill designed to outline an Iraq exit strategy, but during a revision of the legislation excluded the statement regarding the need for congressional approval of any military assault on the neighboring country of Iran.
“She [Pelosi] removed it deliberately,” Paul says. “And then, the astounding thing is, when asked why, she said the leadership in Israel asked her to. That was in the newspaper, that was in ‘The Washington Post,’ that she was asked by AIPAC and others not to do that.”
Paul implies Pelosi, desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation, bargained away the proposal that would have been the House leadership’s primary vehicle for challenging the administration’s policies in the region.
According to John Nichols, who covered the story about Pelosi’s capitulation at the time for “The Nation,” Pelosi was “under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groups that want war with Iran, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).”
Paul’s allegation is corroborated by ‘The Asia Times’, which in another article published at the time says AIPAC was strongly against attaching “a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would require President Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option ‘off the table.’ The provision was killed.”
The article also cites Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, as saying [Pelosi's] decision was due to AIPAC.
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From Democracy Now:
Congress Agreed to Bush Request to Fund Major Escalation in Secret Operations Against Iran
Congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing Iran’s leadership, according to a new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine. The operations were set out in a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which, by law, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders. The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from supporting dissident groups to spying on Iran’s nuclear program.
