Uncategorized

War with U.S. is of No Interest to Iran

Article by Alexander Cockburn.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Even by the forgiving standards of American credulity, the supposed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. is spectacularly ludicrous. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a sinister harbinger of a new crisis. Why would Iran want to kill the Saudi envoy — the mild-mannered functionary Adel al-Jubeir? To kill any ambassador — particularly a Saudi ambassador — is to invite lethal retaliation, even war.

Iran doesn’t want war with the U.S.

Manssor J. Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, has been indicted as the chief conspirator working for Iranian intelligence. He is charged with promising to pay $1.5 million to Los Zetas — one of the Mexican drug cartels — to kill the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

The FBI claims that Arbabsiar told the Drug Enforcement Agency’s informant — posing as a high-ranking member of Los Zetas — that it would be “no big deal” if many others died at the restaurant, possibly including United States senators. He also proposed bombing the Israeli embassy.

If even one U.S. senator died in a terrorist bombing in Washington, D.C., if anything larger than a firecracker detonated outside the Israeli embassy, U.S. bombers would be raining explosives on Iranian targets within 24 hours. Why would Iran want to invite such a response?

The supposed plot is wreathed in incidental grandiose absurdities: A side deal between the Al Quds force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Los Zetas to smuggle vast shipments of opium from the Middle East to Mexico with additional plans to bomb the Saudi and Israeli Embassies in Argentina.

 

Article image

To repeat: Iran doesn’t want war with the U.S., quite the reverse. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently tried to refloat the Tehran Research Reactor nuclear fuel swap. He proposed that Iran suspend production of some uranium-enrichment activities in exchange for fuel supplies from the United States. On Sept. 29, the International Herald Tribune ran an op-ed piece saying the proposal was well worth consideration by the U.S. government. All such hopes of a warming in relations have now been snuffed out.

 

There are two powers in the Middle East that most certainly do want war, or a deepening rift between the U.S. and Iran — namely Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Iranian intelligence is famously efficient at hiding its tracks. Though many believe that it was the Iranians who blew up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 — in retaliation for the shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the U.S. Navy ship the USS Vincennes — no convincing trail has ever come to light. Yet it is supposedly Iranian intelligence that wired $100,000 to the used car salesman, allegedly a down payment for Los Zetas, using a known Al Quds force bank account.

If the bid was a false flag operation mounted by the Saudis or Israelis, an open transfer of money would be one obvious tactic. The U.S. has made swift use of dubious “plots” in the not-so-distant past.

In 1981, the United States flourished charges of a Libyan “hit squad” entering the U.S. through the border tunnel between the Canadian town of Windsor to Detroit with a plan to assassinate newly elected President Ronald Reagan. No evidence was ever offered for this accusation.

B the accusation kindled animosities that culminated five years later with the U.S. raid on Tripoli, aiming to assassinate Col Gaddafi in his compound.

In April 1993, former President George H.W. Bush was visiting Kuwait to commemorate the victory over Saddam in the Gulf War. Detection by the Kuwaitis of a plot to kill him with a car bomb was announced. The FBI duly declared that the wiring of the bomb indicated that the bomb-makers belonged to Iraqi intelligence.

In June 1993, Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., denounced the plot in the Security Council and a day later President Clinton ordered the firing of 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad. One of the missiles landed in a Baghdad suburb and killed Layla al-Attar, one of Iraq’s leading artists. This set the tone for relations during the Clinton years.

There have also been some spectacular cases of gullibility on the part of supposedly seasoned U.S. intelligence operatives and high military commanders.

A year ago, General Petraeus and the U.S. high command in Afghanistan placed great confidence in Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, allegedly a senior Taliban commander empowered to make peace proposals. The U.S. negotiators and Afghan officials were initially suspicious of Mansour’s credentials, but their doubts soon melted. According to a New York Times report, “Several steps were taken to establish the man’s real identity; after the first meeting, photos of him were shown to Taliban detainees who were believed to know Mr. Mansour. They signed off, the Afghan leader said.”

It turned out that Mansour, given quite large sums of money by the Americans, was a freelance impostor. Note that in the case of the Iranian plot, the FBI says that Manssor J. Arbabsiar correctly identified a known Al Quds force officer from a photo array.

The question is why the U.S. government should nail its colors so firmly to the mast of this purported Iranian assassination plot. On two other occasions, the U.S. made passionate commitments at the U.N. to concocted evidence — with both used as levers to launch wars.

The first was U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s unveiling to the U.N. in February of 2003 of the infamous dossier of entirely bogus evidence that Iraq had a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The second was the allegation by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, in February of this year, that Gaddafi was committing crimes against humanity up to and including genocide against his own people — charges decisively refuted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Absurdity is not a decisive factor. Iran doesn’t want war with the U.S. But how far will the U.S. go in its response, led as it is by a weak president always glancing fearfully over his shoulder at the neo-cons and the war party?

Copyright Creators.com

Categories: Uncategorized

Leave a Reply