In an op-ed piece picked up by the LA Times, Danielle Pletka [1] writes:
Iran, after all, is Terror Central: It has become an operational headquarters for parts of al-Qaida, continues to sponsor Hezbollah and Hamas, and senior officials remain under indictment in U.S. courts for masterminding the 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia of the Khobar Towers military housing complex, in which 19 Americans died.According to U.S. and European officials, the regime also remains bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and is well down the road to doing so.
The first one is obviously false. Or its as "true" as the assertion that Cuba, or rather the military prision at Gitmo, where one of my neighbors, a reservist, is currently stationed on active duty, has become an operational headquarters for parts of al Qaida. I'll have to tell his wife. She'll get a kick out of the idea that holding the bad guys behind bars operationalizes them and she can berate her husband for aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States. There are as many al Qaida cadres detained in Iran as in Pakistan, over a thousand all told. Iran came close to war with the Taliban/al Qaida before 9/11, holding a major mobilization on the Afgan border after several of its diplomats were assassinated. It funded and supplied the Northern Alliance during the November/December 2001 War, as did the US. Right up to this week Tehran was hoping to swap their al Qaida detainees for Washington's 3,800 Camp Ashraf Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization detainees.
Hezbollah and Hamas have many sponsors, in Lebanon, in Texas (if John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller are to be taken on face value, which doens't seem wise given their respective records), in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, and so on. They are but two of the 36 "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" (FTOs) designated by the US, along with, least we forget, the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO) campers.
The PBS and CNN coverages of the June 22, 2001 indictments for the Khobar Towers bombing lists 41 counts, 14 indictees (13 Saudi and 1 Lebonese), and the statements of Attorney General John Ashcroft and then-FBI Director Louis Freeh "that elements of the Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hizbollah". Oli North's basement office (and a surprising number of members of the 2nd Bush administration) were "elements of the American government", the American goverment was the government that passed, and enforced, the Boland Ammendment. I'll have to wait on a more timely example until it gets out of the Farsi press and into Europe, or I get Google-Graced.
Finally, there is the atoms-for-peace-or-war question. The P2-means-War meme.
To believe the current administration, it is necessary to believe that commercial uranium enrichment in Iran by centrifuge processing is definitive proof that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. However, the United States Enrichment Corporation (prior to the privatization of enriched uranium, a unit of the DoE) is going to shut down a gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant in Paducah Kentucky, after it builds a centrifuge processing enrichment plant in Piketon Ohio. Now there may be good reasons for Ohio to pursue a a weapons program, I'm simply unaware of what those reasons might be. To deter other states from holding primaries or caucuses before Ohio is a possibility.
I'm a businessman, and I do business in "the Middle East". I rate Danielle Pletka's four thesis as 1. profoundly false (Iran-al Qaida linkage), 2. superficially correct in part (Hezbollah targeting US forces in Saudi Arabia) and false in substance on the whole (34 other FTOs are ignored), 3. inconsistent with the actual indictment (no Iranians, public or private were indicted), and 4. contrary to the public statements of the US DoE and Bill Timbers, USEC's president and CEO.
Both Johns, Kerry and Edwards, will have to have NeoCon theology down cold to be able to reach into some superfically credible Bush or Cheney attack, like Carter's attack on Reagan's medicare record, and unravel it with panache in the face of Bush or Cheney, like Reagan did with the phrase "There you go again", and leap out into the surreal wasteland of the NeoCon NetherWorld and shred a tissue of lies.
In the mean time, isn't the OpEd page of the LA Times simply wonderful? Is there a single US media property that isn't running the P2-means-War story???
I wrote about this last January and February at Lisa English's blog Ruminate This. The articles are here and here.
[1] Vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Worthless Republican Flack.
Update: I simply can't see the monarchists I knew in the LA basin Iranian exile community any keener on a US-PMOI containment-tending-to-invasion-occupation-and-west-and-central-asian-general-war scenario than the marxists I knew in the SF Bay Area Iranian exile community would be. I suspect both would be happier living under the other, than either would be under Islamo-Marxos (emphasis on Harpo, Groucho, Zeppo and Karl) that are the MEK/MEO/PMOI/MOUSE, and not to put too fine a point on it, with mid-10^^6 Iranians living abroad, from the Pahlavi period to the 1st IRI period, to the Iran-Iraq War period, to the 2nd (current) IRI period, and a troop strength of only a brigade, the allure of the MEK outside the NeoCon circle of fanatics is distinctly limited.
Posted by at July 30, 2004 12:20 PM | TrackBack