U.S. ties Iranian to bombs killing U.S. troops.

[MAC1]

Well, it looks like the U.S. military has evidence linking Iran to attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. Iran denies it and says the evidence is fabricated. Assuming Iran is supplying weapons to insurgents, what should the U.S. do about it?

Here is the CNN headline:
U.S. ties Iranian leader to bombs killing U.S. troops

My view is that Iran shouldn't be treated any differently than the Taliban. If Iran is supplying weapons to kill U.S. troops then it is an act of war.

 

[Calabrio]

Diplomatic efforts will have to be used first. Politics dictates this. Though, I fail to see what they will accomplish.

And sadly, if the U.S. simply launches air strikes on production facilities in Iran, the American Political left will go haywire and attempt to misrepresent and exploit the action for political gain.

 

[fossten]

Iran Sends IEDs to Iraq for Peaceful Purposes

By Scott Ott, Editor-in-Chief, ScrappleFace.com
News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher.

(2007-02-12) — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today confirmed U.S. allegations that high-ranking Iranian officials provide Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing explosives, however, Iran’s president said the devices are for peaceful purposes only.

“No one can deny the right of the Iranian people to develop technology that improves our lives,” said Mr. Ahmadinejad. “Although we cannot control how our Iraqi customers use our products, we make these armor-piercing devices to generate energy.”

The Iranian leader noted that the devices are “especially useful for bringing light to confined dark places, like the inside of an Abrams tank or Humvee, as well as for providing a plentiful source of instant heat.”

 

[97silverlsc]

The White House line that Iraq’s extremists are all backed by Iran is a myth, writes robert fox

Now the Saudis tool up for war.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=1&subID=1147
This weekend, buyers from across the Gulf states and the Middle East will descend on a huge arms fair in Dubai. Sheikhs, emirs, princes and kings will be buying anything from specialised sniper ammunition by the ton, to the highest-tech surveillance gear and even the odd British Aerospace gunboat or Eurofighter.

The Arab world will use the International Defence Exhibition (IDEX), to tool up for a coming confrontation with Iran, and to arm Sunni insurgents to fight Iran's allies in Iraq, the Shia militias.

Even the Bush administration will now admit, under its collective breath of course, that Iraq is in the throes of a full-blown civil war between armed groups of its Sunni and Shia Arab communities, triggered a year ago by the destruction of the al-Laskar mosque in Samara, a revered Shia shrine.

What the American authorities are reluctant to admit, however, is that there are signs that the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and their allies - including Jordan - have been equipping and training Sunni extremists in Iraq for some time now. Critically, not all the weaponry and munitions have been used against the militants' Shia and Kurdish Iraqi enemies. Some of them - including lethal roadside bombs - have been aimed at US forces.

"The growth of the official and unofficial Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments," a senior British officer has told me privately after a visit to Iraq.

The Bush administration has kept mum about this while it tries to concentrate the minds of America and the world on their new public enemy number one, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the region's chief sponsor of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

British strategic advisers to the Pentagon and the National Security Council report that, undeterred by their unfinished business in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are now intent on opening up a third front against Iran. Their argument runs that Saddam Hussein was bad and al-Qaeda even worse, but the threat to world peace now comes from Ahmadinejad. He must be stopped before he gets a nuclear weapon and uses it against Israel.

In Baghdad this week US forces have displayed 'shaped charge' roadside bomb kits - also known as EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) - which have killed 170 American service personnel in Iraq. This figure is surprisingly precise, in contrast to much of the rest of the American presentation: the officers and intelligence analysts would not give their names, and could not substantiate their claim that the deployment of the EFPs was sanctioned "at the highest level" of the Ahmadinejad regime.

It was also reported this week that a consignment of Steyr Mannlicher HS50 sniper rifles sold by Austria to the Iranian police force had ended up in the hands of Shia militias in Iraq. This was reported by the Daily Telegraph, but no one followed it up. The nnuendos – if not the facts – are clear: Bush and Cheney are ramping up the case for an attack on Iran, just as they did before invading Iraq.

David Kay, whose Iraq Survey Group torpedoed the claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, says: "If you want to avoid the perception that you've cooked the books you come out and make the charges publicly" - and, he might have added, you name your sources and define the quality of your information. Something the Bush administration has failed to do.

The Americans have also been coy about the threat to their helicopters. At least six are now admitted to have been downed by hostile fire, and the number could be as high as 50, including a Chinook loaded with dozens of troops. Who is doing this and how, the Americans will not say - for obvious security reasons. But the chances are that at least some of the helicopters have been downed by those Sunni extremist pals of Saudi Arabia and Jordan - which hardly helps the case for war against Iran.

 

[fossten]

What a bunch of bull. If the Sunnis are behind this, why are they not claiming responsibility after each bombing?

 

[MonsterMark]

The White House line that Iraq’s extremists are all backed by Iran is a myth, writes robert fox...

I wish you would go over there Phil and negotiate a peace treaty for us. Please.

I can already sense your reluctance because I know you know in your heart that you would become another Nick Berg (God rest his soul) if you tried to reason with these people.

The funniest damn thing about this whole discussion and basically every political discussion is that you will change your point of view based on who is in office and who is in power. If a Dem were in office, you'd be all for the 'surge' in troops, dropping bombs on innocents, blah blah blah blah blah.

 

[97silverlsc]

Michael Winship: Barbarians at Both Sides of the Gate
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 02/13/2007 - 9:48am. Guest Contribution

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

And how come a grenade is dated "5-31-2006?"

Speaking with a journalist friend over the weekend, just back from his sixth or seventh trip to Iraq, my mind flashed to a moment in James Goldman's play and movie "The Lion in Winter."

The English King Henry II's sons and wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, are scheming against the monarch and plotting against each other. One of the boys, Prince John (whose perfidy as king three decades later will lead to the Magna Carta) is accosted by his brother Richard (as in "the Lionhearted"). "He's got a knife!" John shouts.

"Of course he has a knife," Eleanor replies. "He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians!"

Nearly eight and a half centuries later, we're still barbarians, and I'm not just talking about the rabid Islamic extremists who make life miserable for the rest of us, including their fellow Muslims.

Okay, there are some good signs. My friend told me about being in a U.S. military hospital when a badly wounded Sunni insurgent was brought in, a guy who had been shot while planting a roadside bomb. He was given 30 units of blood but he still was fading fast. A call for donors went out and within minutes, there was a line of GIs ready to give. A life's a life, they said.

On the other hand, my friend and colleague said he has never seen as much gore and carnage as he did on this trip. The situation continues to deteriorate and Afghanistan is rapidly going down the tubes, too. In turn, this is critically threatening the stability of Pakistan. And so on and so on and so on...

Our own barbarism manifests itself in our continuing ignorance of the Middle East, despite our many years bogged down there. Nowhere is that lack of knowledge more manifest than in our seeming, even willful inability to make sense of the intramural fighting within the Islamic religion that is so key to understanding the region.

The split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims dates back four hundred years before Eleanor of Aquitaine was verbally going medieval on her offspring, and has to do with the line of succession from the prophet Mohammed. Over the centuries, some of the differences have blurred and often there have been intermarriage and good feelings. But our recent actions have stirred the pot beyond our powers of comprehension.

Reporting in Monday's Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid, author of a superb book about Iraq ("Night Draws Near"), wrote, "The growing Sunni-Shiite divide is roiling an Arab world as unsettled as at any time in a generation. Fought in speeches, newspaper columns, rumors swirling through cafés and the Internet, and occasional bursts of strife, the conflict is predominantly shaped by politics: a disintegrating Iraq, an ascendant Iran, a sense of Arab powerlessness, and a persistent suspicion of American intentions. But the division has begun to seep into the region's social fabric, too. The sectarian fault line has long existed and sometimes ruptured, but never, perhaps, has it been revealed in such a stark, disruptive fashion.

"... Rarely has the region witnessed so many events, in so brief a time, that have been so widely interpreted through a sectarian lens: the empowering of Iraq's Shiite-led government and the bloodletting that has devastated the country; the lack of support by America's Sunni Arab allies -- Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia -- for the Shiite movement Hezbollah in its fight with Israel last summer; and, most decisively, the perception among many Sunni Arabs that Saddam Hussein was lynched by Shiites bent on revenge. In the background is the growing assertiveness of Shiite Iran as the influence of other traditional regional powers such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia diminishes."

That last sentence is especially relevant amidst our current saber rattling toward Iran and this past Sunday's bizarre press conference in Baghdad's Green Zone. Reporters' cellphones were seized, no one was allowed to shoot photos or video, and the briefers insisted on anonymity.

Our military presented alleged evidence of Iran's ties to Shiite militias in Iraq -- in the form of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), mortar shells, and especially vicious devices that tear through armor called EFPs -- explosively formed penetrators. All are said to be of Iranian manufacture, purportedly brought into Iraq by the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

(I'm just wondering, by the way, not judging: According to The New York Times, "The shells had serial numbers in English in order to comply with international standards for arms, the officials said. One grenade, for instance, was marked with the serial number P.G.7-AT-1 followed by LOT:5-31-2006." Numbering month-day-year is an American standard. Virtually every other country, including English-speaking ones, uses day-month-year: 31-05-2006. I asked two Mideast native speakers if the day-month-year standard was also true in Iran's Farsi language and Arabic. They answered yes.)

It would be foolhardy to dismiss the reports totally out-of-hand, just because this administration's truth-telling track record rivals Baron Munchausen's. We've all heard the story of the little-boy-who-cried-Wolf-Blitzer.

Nevertheless, as Tuesday's New York Times reported, "Both Democratic and Republican officials on Capitol Hill said that while they do not doubt that the weapons are being used to attack American troops, and that some of those weapons are being shipped into Iraq from Iran, they are still uncertain whether the weapons were being shipped into Iraq on the orders of Iran's leaders."

George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace added, "I'm not doubting the provenance of the weapons, but rather, the issue of what it says about Iranian policy and whether Iran's leaders are aware of it."

As has been suggested, this administration may just be trying to scapegoat Iran for America's failures in Iraq. But if they are hell-bent on using these allegations as part of a pretext for military action against Iran and, not coincidentally, its nuclear program, they would do well not only to remember the gross errors of far too recent memory ("slam-dunk," anyone?) but also the socio-cultural implications of what Iran may or may not be up to. They could be trying to create regional havoc and increase their status as a regional superpower, but their motivations are also about protecting the religious interests of Shiite Muslims. Until we comprehend that, we should move with the most extreme caution or not at all.

The consequences of a misstep are perilous, and yet our foolish barbarians blunder on. Conservative cold warrior Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-at-large for UPI and the right-wing Washington Times, reported the following (as noted by Dan Froomkin's "White House Watch" column on the Washington Post Web site):

"At a farewell reception at Blair House for the retiring chief of protocol, Don Ensenat, who was President Bush's Yale roommate, the president shook hands with Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi. 'I'm the grandson of one of the late Shah's ministers,' said Soroush, 'and I simply want to say one U.S. bomb on Iran and the regime we all despise will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized.'

"'I know,' President Bush answered.

"'But does Vice President Cheney know?'' asked Soroush.

"President Bush chuckled and walked away."

copyright 2007 Messenger Post Newspapers

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.

 

[97silverlsc]

What a bunch of bull. If the Sunnis are behind this, why are they not claiming responsibility after each bombing?

Why would they want to? Seems to me our continued destabilization of the region is playing out their desires for the region.

 

[97silverlsc]

The funniest damn thing about this whole discussion and basically every political discussion is that you will change your point of view based on who is in office and who is in power. If a Dem were in office, you'd be all for the 'surge' in troops, dropping bombs on innocents, blah blah blah blah blah.

First of all, I vote for the candidate based on where he stands on the issues that concern me, not by his party affiliation. Second, I doubt any of the other candidates running in 2000 or 2004 would have been STUPID enough to invade Iraq on cherry picked and erroneous intel, especially when you consider Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11.

 

[fossten]

First of all, I vote for the candidate based on where he stands on the issues that concern me, not by his party affiliation. Second, I doubt any of the other candidates running in 2000 or 2004 would have been STUPID enough to invade Iraq on cherry picked and erroneous intel, especially when you consider Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11.

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003 | Source

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002 | Source

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
- President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998 | Source

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
- President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998 | Source

"We must stop Saddam from ever again jeopardizing the stability and security of his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction."
- Madeline Albright, Feb 1, 1998 | Source

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
- Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998 | Source

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton.
- (D) Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, others, Oct. 9, 1998 | Source

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998 | Source

"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
- Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999 | Source

"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and th! e means of delivering them."
- Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002 | Source

"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002 | Source

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002 | Source

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002 | Source

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..."
- Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002 | Source

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002 | Source

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002 | Source

"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002 | Source

*owned*

Go back to truthout.org, Phil, I hear that KKKarl Rove is going to be indicted. :bowrofl:

 

[97silverlsc]

Any of these statements that occurred after 9/11 were made based on the cherry picked and erroneous intel spread by shrubster, shotgun boy and the rest of the administration. Although the people you quote did make those statements, they since have changed their position on the subject once they became aware that the intel presented was false. Nobody in the shrubster/ elmer fudd administration is willing to do the same.

Fossie, were there any slave owners in your family? I ask because you seem to get a childish thrill out of your constant use of "Owned".

 

[fossten]

Any of these statements that occurred after 9/11 were made based on the cherry picked and erroneous intel spread by shrubster, shotgun boy and the rest of the administration. Although the people you quote did make those statements, they since have changed their position on the subject once they became aware that the intel presented was false. Nobody in the shrubster/ elmer fudd administration is willing to do the same.

Fossie, were there any slave owners in your family? I ask because you seem to get a childish thrill out of your constant use of "Owned".

Waaaaaaahhh! Waaaaaaaaahhhh! You want some cheese with that whine, Phil?

You seem to get a childish thrill out of your pathetic avatar, your constant use of "Shrub", your constant mangling of my screen name, your consistent mangling of the truth, and your inability to pursue an argument on the merits. I can't help it that you're my beotch, that's a role you've chosen by being wrong all the time.

 

[formerknown]

Take out Iran, then move on to Saudi Arabia!

 

[97silverlsc]

I can't help it that you're my beotch , that's a role you've chosen by being wrong all the time.

And you're gay as well, fossie?

 

[fossten]

And you're gay as well, fossie?

Nice of you to come out of the closet, Philistine.

But no, I'm not gay. Sorry, you will still be stuck only with your fantasies.