War With Iran: Has It Already Begun?
Obama talks peace with Iran, but what's he doing
under the radar?
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 In
public, when it comes to the Iranian question, President Obama is
all sweet reason and kissy-face. His recent video
message to the Iranian people was just what the doctor ordered.
However, this public performance is severely undercut by an ongoing
covert program aimed at regime-change in Tehran – or, at least,
at undermining the Iranian regime to such an extent that it must
respond in some way.
This covert
action program, reported by Seymour
Hersh last year, was started by the Bush administration and
funded to the tune of $400 million. The U.S. is, in effect, conducting
a secret
war against Tehran, a covert campaign aimed at recruiting Iran's
ethnic and religious minorities – who make up the majority of the
population in certain regions, such as in the southeast
borderlands near Pakistan – into a movement to topple the government
in Tehran, or, at least, to create so much instability that U.S.
intervention to "keep order" in the region is justified.
Given recent events in Iran – a suicide
bombing in the southeast province of Sistan-Baluchistan and
at least two other incidents – the effort is apparently ongoing.
A suicide-bomber
blast, which occurred inside a mosque in the city of Zahedan, killed
at least 30 people: a rebel Sunni group with reported links to the
U.S. claimed responsibility. The Iranian government immediately
accused the U.S. and Israel of being behind the attack. The violence
was very shortly followed up by attacks
on banks, water-treatment facilities, and other key installations
in and around Zahedan, including a strike against the local campaign
headquarters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Add to this
an attempted
bombing of an Iranian airliner, which took off from the southwestern
city of Ahvaz, and you have a small-scale insurgency arising on
Iran's eastern frontier.
The Iranians,
confronted with peace overtures from Washington, can be blamed for
wondering if the war against them has already begun.
A recent op-ed
piece in the New York Times by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett
opines that President Obama's "Iran policy has, in all likelihood,
already failed" due to America's covert actions in Iran. In
the current debate within the administration over what course to
take with Iran, hard-liners like Dennis
Ross – special envoy for the region – argue that Iran's lack
of a positive response to Obama's overtures are evidence the whole
effort is futile, and that it's time to start thinking about harsh
sanctions and military action. The Leveretts, however, have a
different take:
 |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
"But
this ignores the real reason Iranian leaders have not responded
to the new president more enthusiastically: the Obama administration
has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but
well-publicized program, begun in President George W. Bush's second
term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the
Islamic Republic. Under these circumstances, the Iranian government
– regardless of who wins the presidential elections on June 12 –
will continue to suspect that American intentions toward the Islamic
Republic remain, ultimately, hostile."
Last year,
the same terrorist group behind the Zahedan suicide bomb blast kidnapped
16 Iranian policemen and videotaped their execution. The video
was played on al-Arabiya television.
Imagine if,
say, the governments of Mexico and the U.S. were engaged in talks
aimed at improving relations between the two countries and all the
while the former was funding and arming terrorist groups that were
sowing death and destruction in America's southwestern cities. Imagine
if these terrorists seized 16 American cops and, when the U.S. refused
to negotiate with the hostage-takers, murdered them and posted the
grisly proceedings on YouTube. The reaction would be so swift and
deadly
that the Mexicans wouldn't know what hit them.
Little wonder,
then, that there hasn't been much of a response to Obama's peace
feelers. In this context, it's only a matter of time before hard-liners
in Tehran gain the upper hand and launch a provocation – aimed,
perhaps, at U.S. forces in Iraq – that precludes any negotiating
process and sets us on a course for war.
In mounting
a campaign to destabilize Iran, the U.S. is allying itself with
some pretty loathsome elements. Jundallah,
for example, is a Sunni militant organization, created to establish
a Baluchi Islamic state in southeastern Iran and parts of Pakistan.
One of the founding members of Jundallah was allegedly
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational commander
of 9/11 attacks, who was arrested in
2003 in Pakistan and is now in U.S. custody.
Read
the rest of the article
June
5, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
Justin
Raimondo Archives
|
