this just isn't good at all.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,248791,00.html

Officials: White House Holding Back Report Detailing Iran's Meddling in Iraq

Tuesday , January 30, 2007

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A plan by the Bush administration to release detailed and possibly damning specific evidence linking the Iranian government to efforts to destabilize Iraq have been put on hold, U.S. officials told FOX News.

Officials had said a "dossier" against Iran compiled by the U.S. likely would be made public at a press conference this week in Baghdad, and that the evidence would contain specifics including shipping documents, serial numbers, maps and other evidence which officials say would irrefutably link Iran to weapons shipments to Iraq.

Now, U.S. military officials say the decision to go public with the findings has been put on hold for several reasons, including concerns over the reaction from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as well as inevitable follow-up questions that would be raised over what the U.S. should do about it.

U.S. reaction to continued Iranian meddling in Iraq also was the subject Tuesday of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing for John Negroponte, in line to become the nation's No. 2 diplomat.

During pointed questioning, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Negroponte, "What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches, without the American people understanding exactly what's taking place."

U.S. offiicals charge Iran is supplying explosives used to make the roadside bombs causing 70 percent of the deaths of U.S. troops and backing Shiite militias opposed to the Maliki government.

The United States also accuses Iran of secretly developing atomic weapons — an allegation Tehran denies. Iran's refusal to suspend uranium enrichment lead the U.N. Security Council to impose limited economic sanctions.

One military official pointed to recent anti-Ahmadinejad comments coming from inside Iran — including from former President Mohammad Khatami who has urged a reduction in tensions with the United States — as an indication that Ahmadinejad may already be under growing domestic pressure. Given that, there is some feeling that now may not be the best time for the U.S. to be making a public case against the Iranian leader without risking an anti-U-S backlash.

Obama, a candidate for president in 2008, warned during the hearing that senators of both parties will demand "clarity and transparency in terms of U.S. policy so that we don't repeat some of the mistakes that have been made in the past," a reference to the intelligence questions still dogging the administation's decision to invade Iraq.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a possible presidential candidate, asked Negroponte if he thinks the United States is edging toward a military confrontation with Tehran. In response, Negroponte repeated President Bush's oft-stated preference for diplomacy, although he later added, "We don't rule out other possibilities."

Separately, the Navy admiral poised to lead American forces in the Middle East said Iran wants to limit America's influence in the region.

"They have not been helpful in Iraq," Adm. William Fallon told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It seems to me that in the region, as they grow their military capabilities, we're going to have to pay close attention to what they do and what they may bring to the table."

The Bush administration has increased rhetorical, diplomatic, military and economic pressure on Iran over the past few months, in response to Iran's alleged deadly help for extremists fighting U.S. troops in Iraq and the long-running dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

Bush said Tuesday the United States "will deal with it" if Iran escalates military action inside Iraq and endangers American forces.

A day earlier, the president acknowledged skepticism concerning U.S. intelligence about Iran, because Washington was wrong in accusing Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. "I'm like a lot of Americans that say, 'Well, if it wasn't right in Iraq, how do you know it's right in Iran,'" the president said.

Senators including Hagel, George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., sounded frustrated with the administration's decision not to engage Iran and fellow outcast Syria in efforts to reduce sectarian violence in Iraq.

Negroponte, a career diplomat who is leaving a higher-ranked job as the nation's top intelligence official, gave only a mild endorsement of the administration's diplomatic hands-off policy toward Damascus and Tehran.

Negroponte would lead the department's Iraq policy if confirmed, as expected. He said Syria is letting 40 to 75 foreign fighters cross its border into Iraq each month and repeated the charge that Iran is providing lethal help to insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq. Iran and Syria are not helping promote stability and peace in Iraq and understand what the United States and other nation expect of them.

"I would never want to say never with respect to initiating a high-level dialogue with either of these two countries, but that's the position, as I understand it, at this time," Negroponte said.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to approve Negroponte quickly for a job vacant since July.

U.S.-Iran tensions may trigger war
By JIM KRANE and ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press Writers

Citing Iranian involvement with Iraqi militias and Tehran's nuclear ambitions, the Bush administration has shifted to offense in its confrontation with Iran — building up the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf and promising more aggressive moves against Iranian operatives in Iraq and Lebanon.

The behind-the-scenes struggle between the two nations could explode into open warfare over a single misstep, analysts and U.S. military officials warn.

Iraq has become a proxy battleground between Washington and Tehran, which is challenging — at least rhetorically — America's dominance of the Gulf. That has worried even Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite prime minister, who — in a reflection of Iraq's complexity — also has close ties to Iran.

Iran and the United States are already sparring on the ground.

On Jan. 20, militants kidnapped and killed four American soldiers in a raid in Karbala, and a fifth American was killed in the firefight. The attack was so well planned and executed that Iraqi officials suspect Iran may have helped Shiite militiamen carry it out, perhaps in retaliation for the arrest of five Iranians by U.S. troops in northern Iraq.

Those five Iranians, who were arrested in the northern city of Irbil, included two members of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard force that provides weapons, training and other support to Shiite militants in the Middle East, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said last week. Iraqi and Iranian officials maintain the five were diplomats.

Since the Karbala raid, U.S. saber-rattling has intensified. President Bush said this week that U.S. forces in Iraq would take action against Iranian operatives in the country, while insisting he had no intention of attacking Iran.

"If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly," Bush told National Public Radio.

Although little evidence has been made public, U.S. officials have long insisted that Iran was supplying weapons and training to Shiite militias in Iraq, including some that have killed American troops.

The No. 2 U.S. general in Iraq told USA Today in an interview published Tuesday that Iran was supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with a variety of powerful weapons, including Katyusha rockets and armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades.

"We have weapons that we know through serial numbers ... trace back to Iran," Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said.

The Air Force is considering more forceful patrols on the Iraqi side of the border with Iran to counter the smuggling of weapons and bomb supplies, The Los Angeles Times reported, citing senior Pentagon officials.

The U.S. is also building up its military presence in the Gulf in what it says is a show of strength directed at Iran. A second aircraft carrier is heading for the region, and Patriot missile batteries are being deployed.

Since Bush announced his new Iraq strategy in early January, Iranian officials have raised the alarm repeatedly that the U.S. intends to attack. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran is "ready for anything" in its confrontation with the United States.

A newspaper close to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week threatened retaliation for any U.S. military action — including stopping oil traffic through the Gulf's strategic Hormuz Straits and attacks on U.S. interests. The top editor of the Kayhan daily warned that Iran will turn the Middle East into "hell" for the United States and Israel if America attacks.

Iran and the U.S. also are in dispute over Tehran's nuclear program. The United States accuses Iran of secretly developing atomic weapons — an allegation Tehran denies. Iran's defiant refusal to suspend uranium enrichment prompted the U.N. Security Council to impose limited economic sanctions.

The U.S. has also beefed up support for Lebanon's government in its power struggle with Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that Washington accuses of acting in Iran's interests.

The war of words has raised fears among both Democrats and Republicans in Congress that the United States and Iran are drifting toward armed conflict at a time when America is struggling against determined foes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches," Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) said Tuesday.

It has also unnerved the Iraqi government, many of whose members have close ties to Iran.

"We have told the Iranians and the Americans, `We know that you have a problem with each other but we're asking you, please, solve your problems outside of Iraq,'" Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, told CNN on Wednesday. "We do not want the American forces to take Iraq as a base to attack Iran ... we will not accept Iran using Iraq to attack American forces. But does this exist? It exists and I assure you it exists."

As the rhetoric grows more strident, a U.S. military official in the Gulf likened the U.S.-Iran standoff to the buildup in hostility in Europe before World War I, when the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne triggered a tragic war that engulfed a continent.

"A mistake could be made and you could end up in something that neither side ever really wanted, and suddenly it's August 1914 all over again," the U.S. officer said on condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the issue. "I really believe neither side wants a fight."

Iranian coast guard vessels recently veered into territorial waters on the Arab side of the Gulf, an event that could have been viewed as either a mistake or a provocation, the officer said. Both sides are on tenterhooks. "A boat crosses a line ... but what does it mean? You've got to be very careful about overreacting," the officer said.

Even if Iran pulled back from Iraq's conflict, it might not end the country's violence, said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

"The truth is that Iraq is a mess. It is in a state of low-level civil war. And all of these groups are largely self-motivated," he said on the Council on Foreign Relations Web site. "But its much easier to blame it on the Iranians."

In Tehran, political analyst Hermidas Bavand said U.S. force increases were leading many Iranians to believe Washington is looking to pick a fight.

"It's an extremely dangerous situation," Bavand said. "I don't think Tehran wants war under any circumstances. But there might be an accidental event that could escalate into a large confrontation."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070131/ap_ ... war_clouds

Even W. is not retarded enough to take on Iran right now. This is a non-story.

Is the question in this thread title a serious one? It's been know for some timet that Iran is actively involved in the Iraqi insurgency.

The Bush-Bash aside, this is essentially correct. President Bush has neither the desire nor the plans to invade Iran. That being said, let's hope that Iran does not continue to inflame tensions and provoke the United States.

iran

numbvher vhun

You're not familiar with the thread starter, obviously.

And who said that they need to invade Iran to defeat Iran? Just bomb that shit with the air force, it wont take the government down, but will fuck their infra-structure big time.

Dropping bombs on a country counts as "invading".

i'm familiar with c_b. he seems like a smart enough guy, and i know he works in the news bidness, so i guess i was just surprised someone with that profile wouldn't have known this. maybe he thinks the reports that Iran is funding much of the insurgency are conspiratorial or something - i dunno.

http://www.slate.com/id/2158733/

The Two Clocks
Getting Iran wrong, again.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007, at 4:02 PM ET



In his book The Persian Puzzle, Kenneth Pollack aptly frames the problem of Iran as a "race between two clocks." One clock counts down the time until Iran enriches enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon. The other ticks off the hours remaining for its corrupt and dysfunctional clerical regime. The danger confronting the United States, Israel, and the world is that the alarm on the first clock seems set to go off before the alarm on the second.

A sensible way to think about policy toward Iran might be to consider ways to reverse the order—to stretch out the nuclear timetable while accelerating the demise of an Iranian government bent on proliferation. The most common estimates of the time needed for Iran to get enough fissile material and assemble a bomb range from three to eight or 10 years. (The Iraqi example counsels skepticism about all such forecasts.)

Predicting the durability of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rule, or that of the Islamic Republic as a whole, is an even trickier business. Depending on which demise one is talking about—Ahmadinejad's presidency or the mullah-state—and a variety of imponderables, it could be a matter of months or of generations. But there may be a considerable window for political change to occur before the nuclear point of no return.

At the moment, the Bush administration's policy seems to be taken straight from the self-sabotage playbook—quite a thick volume when it comes to America's relations with Iran. Were our goal to persuade the Iranian regime to hasten its nuclear race while binding it more closely to a weary and discontented populace, it's hard to see how we could be advancing it more effectively. Especially in the past month, American policy has seemed more about rattling sabers than carrots and sticks. In this week's installment, Vice President Cheney, who may just be twisted enough to want a military confrontation with Iran, underscored that the aircraft carrier USS Stennis is being sent to the Persian Gulf as a "strong signal" of warning. This comes on the heels of our detention of several Iranian "diplomats" in Iraq on suspicion of aiding anti-American insurgents.

Such belligerence seems unlikely to produce the result we desire for a variety of reasons. For one, our bluster is essentially empty. The United States lacks plausible military options for taking out Iran's nuclear program and dealing with the potential reaction, especially now that we are bogged down in Iraq. It is also proving extremely difficult to get the rest of the world to go along with the kind of comprehensive sanctions that would bite. Meanwhile, America's hostility is supplying Ahmadinejad with an external demon for his propaganda and helping him cover over his domestic failures. This American push for futile sanctions follows a familiar pattern, extending from Cuba to Burma to North Korea to pre-invasion Iraq—places where economic isolation and threats have fueled not regime change but regime stabilization.

What might an alternative strategy—one framed explicitly in terms of reversing the speeds of the two clocks—look like? To begin with, it would emphasize America's preference for diplomacy over brinksmanship. Secretary Rice would embrace the "time out" deal recently proposed by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Under this proposal, Iran would suspend its efforts at uranium enrichment, the United States would hold off pushing for further U.N. sanctions, and we'd all settle in for a long palaver over mint tea and pistachio nuts. The ultimate goal of these negotiations would be a compromise whereby Iran agreed to remain bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the United States dropped not only international sanctions but also the bilateral ones in place since the hostage crisis.

Expressions of dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad's leadership are already being heard inside Iran from both hard-liners and reformers. Iran's internal political dynamics are opaque, to say the least, but conciliation with the Great Satan would probably make it harder for him to divert attention from the costs his people are paying for his mischief-making, domestic repression, and inability to reform the economy. As we pushed diplomacy, we would also challenge the regime on moral grounds, emphasizing international support for human rights, civil society, and solidarity with the oppressed Iranian people, who are being bled for the sake of their president's hegemonic ambitions.

We know well the effect that this kind of rhetorical stance can have. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who died in December, became famous for an article she wrote arguing that Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights helped bring down the shah and usher in the Iranian revolution. As ambassador to the United Nations during Ronald Reagan's first term, Kirkpatrick eloquently challenged the legitimacy of totalitarian regimes. After the fall of communism, opposition leaders from Poland to Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union testified that Western support—including from the BBC and Radio Free Europe—made a tremendous difference in their struggle for liberation.

George Bush pays lip service to these sentiments, routinely hailing the greatness of the Iranian people and their struggle for freedom. But for the past three years, the president has failed to mention in public the name of Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights lawyer. Ebadi is the closest thing Iran has to an Andrei Sakharov, but she is hardly an ally of the current U.S. administration. She is a critic of the Iraq war, the war on terrorism, and our stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because of sanctions, it took a lawsuit against the Treasury Department for Ebadi to publish her memoirs in the United States. Bush didn't raise a finger on her behalf.

But perhaps it would be worse if he had. The president, who has managed to make democracy a dirty word in many parts of the world, may by now retain only the ability to taint liberal heroes with guilt by association. Last summer, Iran's other leading dissident, Akbar Ganji, declined to meet White House officials when visiting Washington, saying—with reference to both Iraq and Iran—that "you cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it." The only encouraging news may be that Bush's clock, with just 103 weeks to run, is ticking even faster than the other two.

a good interview with noam chomsky on iran etc: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3999

worth reading

worth?! I stop reading that shit when he started to brag about how "free" Venezuela is.

whoa whoa whoa.

maybe the question is phrased wrong but it stands. there are no links to the iranian government being actively involved in iraqi violence.

I hear that 90% of the weapons used by the insurgents were manufactured in teh United States. Therefore the US gov't is arming teh insurgents and killing American troops.

That is the administration's logic.

I would certainly hope that the Iranians are better at keeping track of weapons than our own Defense Department.

Are you guys kidding me? Iran's involvement in Iraq, supporting both Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents, has been documented for some time. It's discussed in the Study Group Report. They've arrested high ranking IRG officials within Iraq. No links? That's a joke, man.

So, when we say Iran is supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgency, ...

are we "Iraq has WMDs" sure or just "they'll great us as liberators" sure??

of course they are trying to influence their neighbor. anyone who made it past 8th grade knew very well that Iran would be a factor in this war and would certainly try to monopolize on the situation we created. the funny thing is the leaders of this country are acting surprised about this?


alternative fuels...aka the sun!

oh, thats right. the energy industry controls this country, i almost forgot.