So We Are At War With Iran Then: Let’s Get Over Our Denial And Do the Right Thing

July 5, 2008 | By Howard Salter |

The United States and its allies have been arguing for months that Iranian operatives are active in Iraq and that they are providing weapons[1], funds[2], and logistics[3] support to fuel the insurgency averse to U.S. dominated forces. While Presidential candidates have been running around purveying the emanation of reasonability in a war that has become increasingly unpopular at home[4], the current U.S. administration has been working diligently to support the fledgling democracy of Iraq against its more influential neighbor: Iran.

Iran’s economy is in the tank[5] as evidenced by record high inflation[6] and very high unemployment[7]. Iran is racing to war to relieve the burdens of economic isolation caused by its years of uncooperative behavior with the international community. This isolation is worsened from its continued course of clandestine nuclear weapons development[8], their insistence and willingness to export their Islamic revolution to the Middle East[9, 10] and lack of respect toward human rights[11]. While note nearly as atrocious as their neighbor, Saddam Hussein, the Mullah’s still used chemical weapons against the Iraqi’s during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s and Iran has participated incidents of genocide[12] against its own ethnic minorities.

The British, America’s staunchest ally in the War on Terror, have been the target of numerous attacks by the Iranians. In a battle that echoed the Iran-Iraq war’s Operation Dawn Two, Iranian troops attacked coalition troops near the town of Haj Omran. In another incident in the south of Iraq British troops reported multiple border skirmishes with Iranian troops who have purported to cross the Iraqi border into Iraq or have used surrogate forces to conduct operations against the British in the same providences. While U.S. Presidential Candidate, Barrack Hussein Obama, notes that the United States should diplomatically engage the regime in Tehran, he fails to acknowledge that our friends, the British, are under attack in Tehran and that Iranian diplomacy involved nothing more than a denial from Tehran regarding these kinds of attacks and issues.

In another related incident of non-diplomacy, when a Persian arms smuggler was arrested north of Baghdad in 2007, the thug-ocracy in Tehran responded diplomatically by closing of the border with the Kurds[13] in the north. This had a significant impact on trade in the North and hurt the Iraqi’s bottom line. According to Iran, this is what being a good neighbor is all about. The Iranians use middle-men to import arms into Iraq to kill Iraqi and coalition forces and then shut down the border on their end in response to the arrest of a spy in Iraq.

The Iranian people, not having the right of free association as they do in real democracies have staged protests. These are sponsored by the government and in Tehran there have been several of these kinds of protests that resulted in violence against our allies in the region. Iranian nationals have attacked the British embassy more than once and this violence wasn’t limited to stones. In an act of war against our allies in the region, the British embassy in Tehran was bombed! The British embassy has been shut down at least three times because of rioting and attacks as attributed in a 2007 Times Online article[14].

In a 2007 Army Times article, the architect of “the Surge,” and credited with the success of counter insurgency operations in Iraq, General Pretreus had this to say regarding the involvement of Iran inside the sovereign nation of Iraq. He attributed, “We have found out an enormous amount about what the Iranians have done, and it is staggering; it really is. It is unbelievable. They have trained dozens at a time over there [in Iran] — and dozens doesn’t sound like much, but dozens can just wreak havoc — on the use of explosively formed projectiles, rockets, mortars and IEDs, and how to do operations. They have been funding, over the last several years, certainly hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to different Shi’a militia groups, and we have found evidence very recently of assistance being provided to Sunni Arab groups as well. One of the Sunni insurgent leaders was just over in Tehran.”[15] It is in this light that the United States realizes that in order to win the peace in Iraq, much of the fight may involve Iran. If the United States fails to act toward Tehran, it will secure a victory for the state willing to export their version of Islamism into secular Iraq and the future of democracy in this fledgling state will be terminated.

The international tension between the Washington D.C. and Tehran has been at an all time high. Rumors of Israeli and or American plans to attack Iranian nuclear facilities have been in the works for months. Israel conducted mock bombings of Iranian nuclear facilities to demonstrate their serious intent of limiting Iranian nuclear capability. After all it was Iran who promised to wipe Israel off the map.[16] According to Mr. Hersh’s interview on National Public Radio regarding the clandestine operations of the CIA in Iran, Vice-president Cheney doesn’t want Israel to do this alone and that it would be better if the United States assisted in the effort. [17] Since it is evident that the United States, Israel, and Great Britain are already at war with Tehran the public denial of this reality must be ripped away. Clandestine operations while important in a time of war, and surprise being of utmost importance in securing a moral and military victory, the end shouldn’t justify the means and the enemy of my enemy shouldn’t always be my friend.

America, Britian, Israel and Iran are diametrically opposed to each other. In their view of themselves, the oil in the Middle East and the world’s reliance on this resource is seen as a power struggle between Iran and the West. It was the West who discovered it and for Tehran, the nationalization of those resources was a reason for revolution many years ago against the British whom they felt were not treating their people or their government fair. This power struggle goes back decades and right now every time Iran gets the whim to affect the supply of oil, it threatens the flow of oil via tankers in the straights of Hormuz as it did with the Tanker wars in the 1980’s.

Parenthetically, Iran wishes to export its version of Islamicism to the rest of the Middle East while the United States wishes to create democratically elected states. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only surrounded and isolated Tehran and have bolstered concern from other Middle Eastern states regarding this export from the Mullah’s. The United States has stepped up its sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia as a result of these Iranian threats to their livelihood and economy. Iran threatened to send missiles through out Saudi Arabia if attacked.

Diplomacy hasn’t worked with Tehran regarding the United States. The only concord that the United States has known with Iran has been when the pro-soviet government was overthrown by the CIA in 1953. When this happened the people of Iran and the United States had better relations and diplomacy worked. This is because the Mullah’s weren’t in power and the royalists were. It needs to be said, we are at war with Tehran and the Congress of the United States, the war-weary people of the United States and those in the military who continue to do what their country asks of them need to have it stated for the record. If we shall change the régime in Tehran, the gloves, the blinders need to come off and our pocket books need to be opened. In a war that costs billions every month, the world stands to lose trillions if Tehran continues to threaten the supply of oil in the world and drive prices up with its own Oil Borse. To fight Iran, the coalition of the willing needs to reinstitute the mandatory conscription of men and women and get this job done so that the Tyrants of Tehran cannot terrorize the world’s oil supply by driving up prices merely by threatening to control the straights of Hormuz. The Iraqi’s and other American allies in the region need to be able to defend themselves and we must work to support them.

In order for the United States military to conduct clandestine operations they must receive orders from the President of the United States. Sometime last year, the Bush administration requested some $400 million dollars from Congress to conduct clandestine operations against the régime in Iran. This was recently made public in the New Yorker Magazine by author Seymour Hersh. The New Yorker Article purports, “United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of ‘high-value targets’ in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.” [18] In an analogous interview on National Public Radio, Mr. Hersh echoed this sentiment. [17]

While this money is extraordinary it is an acknowledgement at least without a constitutional declaration of war that the United States is intent on solving the Iranian crisis. The current presidential administration has determined that force is necessary. American military leaders have had enough of Iranian interventionism and have enough proof noting that, “Iranian personnel have established safe houses throughout southern Iraq. They monitor the movement of coalition forces, tend weapons caches, facilitate cross-border travel of clerics, smuggle munitions into Iraq and recruit individuals as intelligence sources. Presumably, Tehran has recruited networks within U.S. military bases and civilian compounds that could be activated on short notice. Iran is also believed by regional intelligence agencies to have armed and trained as many as 40,000 Iraqis to prevent an unlikely rollback of Shiite control.” [19]

Getting out of denial is the first step towards recovery in securing a peacable future in the Middle-East. This is especially true with the trillions of dollars we’ve invested in the futures of Iraq and Afghanistan. This involves taking the blinders from Presidential Candidate Barrack Hussein Obama who still conjectures that talking with a régime that bombs our allies’ embassies and attacks coalition troops across international borders is the way out of this fight. This involves encouraging the Bush Administration, bent on reshaping the Middle East for the New American Century, to take their actions public and to deal with Tehran in a constitutional fashion. The U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency, is currently funding un-american activities with groups that are definitely not pro-democratic or pro-american in their ambitions or goals inside Iran. It is by this measure that the people of Iran will judge the United States. If Americans side on the right side of human morality in this issue, America will be victorious. We should not fuel the future insurgency of Tehran by paying off terrorist groups, like the M.E.K. Americans and reasonable Iranians cannot support terrorists in the M.E.K. and the CIA’s support of these groups, under the guise that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ is a falsehood that neither the American public, its uniformed military who have sworn to uphold the constitution, nor the pro-democratic forces in Iran should tolerate. Americans should learn from the mistakes of the 1953 coupe and ensure that the democratic forces of Iran are properly supported in the great country of Iran. Americans should note that support of Minority interests in Iran will only divide a great people and may serve to back fire against the interests of the United States. Helping only the democratic interests and using military force to topple a regime while working hard to limit the exposure of innocents in this conflict, will restore some of badly needed politico gravitas that was once the United States in the post World War II era of reconstruction. This is not something that the United States can do half-hearted or in public denial. If war is the course that we are determined to be on, then send in everything we have and be above board about it.

This is the only way that we can successfully accomplish our goals and still win the hearts and minds of a people who remember our involvement in 1953 and how the United States didn’t stop the tyrants from taking over in 1979. When they jailed women and took away people’s civil rights because it was pro-western and non-islamic, we stood by. When millions of Iranians and Iraqi’s killed each other in the 1980’s Americans didn’t come to their rescue as they had France and England in WW II. Why, we’re sure they must be asking, would it be any different with George Bush in office and soon to leave?

Sources

1. US, Iraqi raid in Mahmudiyah nets Iranian-marked rockets, mortars. 2007, Multi-National Corps – Iraq, Public Affairs Office, Camp Victory, APO AE 09342: Mahmudiyah, Iraq
2. HP-759: Treasury Designates Individuals, Entity Fueling Iraqi Insurgency, U.S.D.o.t. Treasury, Editor. 2008, U.S. Department of the Treasury.
3. U.S. Military: Iran Training Iraqi Insurgents in Using Roadside Bombs, in Associated Press. 2007: Baghdad, Iraq.
4. Schneider, B. (2007) Poll: Support for the Iraq war deteriorates. CNN Dot Com Volume,
5. Beehner, L., What Sanctions Mean for Iran’s Economy. 2006, The Council on Foreign Relations: Washington, D.C.
6. (2008) Iran’s inflation skyrockets. Arabian Business Dot Com Volume,
7. Amuzegar, J., Iran’s Unemployment Crisis. Middle East Economic Survey, 2004. XLVII
(41).
8. Jerome R. Corsi, P., Iran’s Quest For Nuclear Weapons, in Atomic Iran. 2005, Cumberland House Publishing: Nashville, TN. p. 25.
9. Komehni, I., The Exportation of Islam in the World, Iranian Dot Com.
10. Schuster, M., Export of Iran’s Revolution Spawns Violence. 2007.
11. Afshari, R., Human Rights In Iran. 2001, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. p. 27.
12. Tehrani, H. (2007) Iran: Families remember mass executions of 1988. Volume,
13. Official: Iran shuts border with northern Iraq, in USA Today. 2007: SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq
14. Diplomatic efforts hampered by attacks on British Embassy, in Times Online. 2007.
15. Naylor, S.D., Iran deeply involved in Iraq, Petraeus says, in The Army Times. 2007: Baghdad, Iraq.
16. Report: Israel held military drill as prep for attack on Iran, in Haretz.com. 2008.
17. Seymour Hersh On Covert Operations In Iran. 2008, National Public Radio: United States. p. 44 minutes 41 seconds.
18. Hersh, S.M., Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran., in The New Yorker. 2008.
19. Takeyh, S.S.a.R., Iran’s Iraq Strategy: Tehran Could Retaliate Against Washington by Striking Next Door, in The Washington Post. 2006: Washington, D.C.

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Howard Salter is a writer, web developer, musician, and analyst on Middle Eastern Issues with his recent award winning book defending the Iraqi invasion: Defending Liars. He regularly contributes Opinion pieces on 762mm justice and is working on a second book regarding Iran. Please visit his webpage: http://www.howardsalter.com for details

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Tagged with B-2, Bombing Iran, Bombing Tehran, Constitutionality of War, Iran's Threats of the Straights of Hormuz, Jus Ad Bello, Mullah's Reign Over, Nuking Iran, Oil In the Middle East, Regime Change, War with Iran |