The establishment media have been cheerleading for military action against Iran for some time now. In October, the Justice Department announced it was charging two men in connection with a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Despite the clear absurdities of this charge — that a clumsy used-car salesman from Texas met with undercover DEA agents posing as members of narcotics cartel to try to hire Mexican hit men to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., all under the direction of the Iranian government through an illegally travelling member of its Quds security force — the scaremongering was off to the races. The day the DOJ announced the charge and arrest of the car salesman at JFK airport, the Wall Street Journal published this op-ed, calling the affair “a sobering wake-up call” and instructing us that this “appalling news needs to be placed in the broader context of Iran’s behavior.”
WSJ was referring to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which have been a source of ongoing tension and increasing sanctions. Last June, the IAEA released a report (pdf) indicating Iran had declared plans to enrich uranium to as high as 20%. Then, last month, it was revealed that Iran had succeeded in doing what it said it would, setting off a faux controversy that I wrote about at the time. The Washington Post reported on the last day of January about a US Intelligence report also tying these threads together. Behold this bizarre bit of cognitive dissonance:
U.S. officials said they have seen no intelligence to indicate that Iran is actively plotting attacks on U.S. soil. But Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said the thwarted plot “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”
Despite “no intelligence to indicate Iran is actively plotting attacks on U.S. soil” the Director of National Intelligence believes the highest Iranian officials, “probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei… are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States.” Interesting enough, but why might they do that? “In response to real or perceived” threatening actions, of course. Surely no one in the United States would advocate an attack on another country in response to a real or perceived threat!
On the 13th, a pair of terror attacks happened in Georgia and India against Israeli diplomats. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to blame Iran, calling it the “largest terror exporter in the world.” This despite no clear links to Iran: the Indian investigators immediately suspected domestic “Indian Mujahudin” based on similarities to previous attacks, and attacking India seems an odd ploy for Iran given that they are facing western sanctions and sell a great deal of oil to India. The next day, another attack occurred in Thailand which resulted in the would-be assailant blowing off his own legs with a grenade as he tried to flee police following an apparently premature bomb detonation. In all, three Iranian men were detained over this Valentine’s Day attack, so both Thailand and Israel were quick to blame Iran for it, and Israel declared that all three attacks originated from the Iranian government.
So Israel wants to claim that Iran is responsible for all three of these attacks. Surely the involvement of Iranian men in closely timed and similarly executed attacks makes the accusation not entirely without basis. But considering the sophistication of the Indian attack, does it make sense that the member of another cell of the same group would destroy his own legs with a grenade? Allegedly the CIA shared intelligence with the Indians about an Iranian link in that attack, but “informed sources.. did not comment on how credible the information is” that the “Indian intelligence agencies have confirmed and corroborated.” Interestingly, the style of the attacks in Inida and Thailand — sticky bombs on vehicles — closely mirrors the ongoing attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists.
And who is behind those attacks targeting Iranians? According to an MSNBC bombshell report from the Thursday before last, it’s Israel herself through her bankrolling of an organization that the the United States has long officially considered a terrorist group, “People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known by various acronyms, including MEK, MKO and PMI.” The MEK has an interesting relationship with numerous prominent American political actors, including Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani, seemingly in contravention of US law. Is it so unreasonable to suppose that such a group might be engineering minor attacks, even against Israeli diplomats in relatively unimportant areas close to Iran like Georgia, in order to implicate Iran?
Predictably, none of this has prevented the seemingly inevitable media attack on Iran. The ‘director of intelligence analysis’ for NYPD, Mitchell Silber, lashed out in the Wall Street Journal with an op-ed on the 14th declaring that “Iran’s next target could well be on American soil” and asserting that “the NYPD must assume that New York City could be targeted by Iran or Hezbollah.” For evidence, he points first to the same Saudi assassination plot, then to some historical attacks in Argentina in 1993, and finally a few fleeting references to Hezbollah links to more recent international terrorist activities and a few trumped up and uncited domestic incidents. The strength of his argument seems to rest on New York’s “large Jewish population,” not on any credible evidence. MSNBC trumps the threat of Iran’s “massive stockpile of ballistic missiles” and Iran’s pledge of “all-out war” if Israel attacks their nuclear facilities (ignoring that such an act would, itself, constitute all-out war). ABC News continues to hype the threatening moves by asserting they exhibit “all the hallmarks of a concerted campaign that could extend to U.S. soil” while also noting that federal officials say “there is so far no specific intelligence of any threat to Israeli interests in the U.S.” CNN asserts that “no one buys Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes” and interviews Rep. Peter King, republican of New York, letting him opine that “even though there is no specific plot, the intelligence community does believe that an attack could very well happen.” Foreign Affairs doesn’t equivocate, saying attacking Iran now is the “least bad option.”
I was most surprised to see this bit of shoddy journalism on NPR yesterday. Entitled “On the Table: Options for Ending the Iranian Standoff,” referencing Obama’s ominous (but likely and hopefully posturing) State of the Union promise not to take any options off the table in preventing Iran from getting the bomb, the article seems to have been written by NPR’s Israeli bureau. Here’s an interesting passage:
The Iranians may be getting serious in their declared intention to retaliate for the assassination of some of their nuclear scientists. But Scott Stewart, a terrorism analyst with the intelligence firm Stratfor, says he was struck by the amateurish quality of this week’s bomb operations. Even rudimentary car bomb attacks, he points out, require some expertise.
At no time does this All Things Considered offering — full of ominous, single-sentence paragraphs like “In Washington, officials weren’t buying it” and “That [Israeli red] line isn’t far away, Rogers says,” and anonymously credited to “NPR Staff” — consider the possibility that the “amateurish” terrorists might not have been aligned with Tehran. The whole piece is a one-sided exploration of Washington’s options in unilaterally diffusing the growing Iranian menace, including simply allowing Israel to carry out “its own pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” An Iranian attack would be a fearsome and inexcusable event, but a preemptive Israeli attack is merely one among many containment strategies. The piece ends with a non-statement that if it does come to an all-out conflict, we won’t see “boots on the ground” but rather “a dismantling of their capability to continue down this dangerous path of a nuclear weapon” through totally unspecified means.
“No one” believes Iran is researching nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. We’re witnessing “all the hallmarks” of an impending terrorist attack on US soil. Iran is threatening “all-out war” against the west, and the US in particular. All this is coming from the “largest exporter of terrorism in the world.” It all sounds eerily familiar to the runup to the Iraq invasion, for which the NYT publicly apologized. CBS News polls have revealed that a majority of Americans view the invasion as a mistake. Yet here are the same media organizations bending over backward — despite our own officials warning what a disaster it would be, with choice phrases like “if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you will love Iran” — to cheerlead yet another war in the Middle East.
Interestingly, a google search on the terms “iran reminiscent of iraq” yields a number of results from 2006! The notion of attacking Iran isn’t new: check out this colourful take on the idea from 2003. The US has been meddling in Iranian affairs for more than half a century, beginning with a US-engineered coup in 1953 and continuing with the Iran-Iraq proxy war following the revolution of 1979, which led to the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-80s and ultimately the first Gulf war in 1991. So what makes this newest escalation special? The administration is privately horrified that Israel might attack Iran this spring, which might threaten to pull the US into the fray in an election year. Despite Obama’s pronouncement that the US is in “lockstep with Israel” on Iran, both the US and Britain today begged Israel not to attack Iran. I’m sure Obama would greatly prefer allowing the new sanctions a chance to bite, policing the Strait of Hormuz, and trying more negotiations.
So it would seem that despite a sea of jingoism, cooler heads responsible for states and not columns will prevail for the time being in holding off on attacks given the obviously tenuous connection between terrorism and Iran. I personally think this arrangement will last through the election, since the baggage of yet another war in the middle east would probably jeopardize Obama’s already somewhat uncertain reelection. Israel has to be doing the same calculus Obama has been, so I think an Israeli attack is unlikely before 2013. Here’s hoping Israel — or Iran for that matter — doesn’t throw a curveball that might upset this tenuous standoff.