Iranian diplomats in Washington will have plenty to say in their cables to Tehran today. In what a blogger called a blockbuster story, the Washington Post reports that the Bush White House has authorised its troops to kill or capture Iranian "operatives" in Iraq.
According to the Post's Dafna Linzer, the move is part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear programme.
Until now, US forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time and then releasing them. But, the Post says, George Bush authorised a new "kill or capture" policy last autumn against some 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard command, believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time.
If the report, which looks extremely thorough, is correct it is further evidence that the Bush administration has well and truly discarded the Baker-Hamilton recommendation of starting talks with Iran. Mr Bush has already sent a second carrier group to the Gulf to dispel the notion that the US is overcommitted in the area, as Robert Gates, the US secretary of defence, said recently.
The US may well be calculating that this is the right time to turn the screws on Iran amid signs of division in Tehran on how best to respond to western pressure to stop its uranium enrichment programme.
As the Guardian reported recently, Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatic conservative defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election, is trying to persuade the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that further negotiations are essential to avoid a potentially disastrous conflict with the US or Israel.
As the US ratchets up the pressure on Iran, Scott Ritter, UN weapons inspector turned Iraq war critic, urges the Democrats to hold the administration to account for its increasingly aggressive approach to Iran.
"America should never shy away from defending that which legitimately needs defending. The sacrifice expected of our military forces, while tragic, will be defensible. But if the case for war with Iran is revealed to be as illusory as was the case for war with Iraq, then Congress must take action to stop this conflict from occurring. This is the Democrats' issue now, the one that will make or break them in 2008 and beyond."
Meanwhile, as Toby Greene writes on the Guardian's Comment is Free, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is becoming Israel's main strategic preoccupation, pushing its conflict with the Palestinians into the background.
"It is quite clear, listening to Israel's leaders discuss the issue that they do not want the situation to end in military action against Iran. They know that such action carries no guarantees of success and that whoever were to carry it out, it is Israel which is most vulnerable to reprisals. But there is a growing determination that a nuclear armed Iran is simply not an acceptable option."
It is a fair assumption that Iraq will be none too pleased at rising tension between the US and Iran. The prospect of a US-Iran proxy battle being fought on its territory is not exactly what Iraq needs right now. Adul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the 130-member Shia bloc in parliament and one of Iraq's most powerful politicians, last month criticised the US seizure of several Iranians after a raid on a liaison office in the northern city of Irbil. He condemned the raid as an attack on Iraq's sovereignty.
But in more encouraging political news for Iraq, the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who once denounced the US as an occupier, now favours cooperation with US forces. The Los Angeles Times reports that a leader of the Sadr movement in Baghdad has publicly backed Mr Bush's revamped Iraq security plan.
The Guardian. |
