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COMMENTARY
May 28, 2003
Iran again
It is now emerging from intelligence sources that the reason the U.S. was able to give Saudi Arabia the heads-up it ignored on the terror bombings in Riyadh is because the CIA had been intercepting communications between Al Qaeda operatives in Arabia and Iran. The hits themselves helped to clarify co-ordinates; and there is thus little doubt remaining in American minds that Iran is sheltering senior Al Qaeda leaders. The ayatollahs are most likely trying to integrate surviving Al Qaeda resources with those of Hizbullah their own main horse in terror international. I read some hint of that into the strange remarks made by the Syrian President (Syria is Iran's closest ally) to the effect that Al Qaeda no longer exists. He spoke rhetorically as if Al Qaeda had been a figment of George Bush's paranoid imagination all along; but Bashir Assad who is not very intelligent has a track record for unconsciously spilling beans. Meanwhile in an event which deserved much greater media coverage the Israelis last Thursday intercepted a third ship delivering arms to Gaza. The Abu Hassan was in the Mediterranean outbound from Lebanon with a major Hizbullah arms expert on board. There were Iranian fingerprints all over the mission. Iranian opposition sources have helped identify two new uranium enrichment facilities previously undisclosed to the IAEA west of Tehran. A string of other sites are suspected. These are the latest indications of the Iranian regime's North-Korea-like obsession with speeding up its nuclear programme on the theory that once you have nuclear bombs there is nothing the Americans can do to hurt you. In Iraq the extent of Iranian meddling in the Shia community is driving independent Shia clerics into closer co-operation with U.S. occupation authorities. From his side the chief U.S. official on the ground Paul Bremer a seasoned counter-terrorism expert with experience going back to the Reagan administration is now devoting considerable resources to countering the latest Iranian moves and gathering fresh intelligence on it. The Iranians dispatched the demagogic Ayatollah Hakim and nearly a dozen other fanatic mullahs trained in techniques of revolutionary subversion during years of Iranian exile. We know that the U.S. State Department has broken off discreet talks with the Iranian regime. The points above give some idea why. Over the Memorial Day weekend various agencies were directed by the U.S. National Security Council to find answers urgently to a series of intelligence and policy questions; and a major White House review of Iran policy is in progress. It would appear a more aggressively confrontational U.S. position is coming; and that a tacit decision has already been made to give up on diplomacy with Iran -- whether through back channels or publicly with the powerless foreign ministry nominally under the direction of the elected President Mohammed Khatami. Ayatollah Khatami's role towards the end of the Islamist revolution in Iran has become increasingly like that of Ayatollah Mehdi Bazargan at its beginning: to be the pretty face shaking hands with everything that sticks out horizontally in the words of one Iranian commentator (Reza Bayegan). Khatami has no domestic credibility left and his credibility abroad is reduced to those countries which U.S. conservatives characterize as the "axis of weasels". The United States is not going to invade Iran however. I am aware of not even one hawk in the Pentagon who wants to do that to say nothing of the fey State Department. The consensus of policy wonks left and right is that invading Iran would be a foolish idea; and on the right that "regime change" can be accomplished without this. Nor even does Michael Ledeen want to invade. He is the "neoconservative" journalist historian and think-tanker who takes towards the ayatollah's regime the stance closest to that which Cato the Elder took towards the Carthaginians. He wants the Bush administration to speed things along by kicking away a few more of the struts that support the regime while providing the students in Iran's ragingly pro-Western campus underground with something more resembling material support. And as the Americans are still learning from their remarkably successful Iraq incursion external threats can in themselves undermine and discombobulate a regime that is in fear of its own people. It is among the chief reasons the Saddamites became frozen in the headlights with the approach of war. Therefore turn up the rhetoric. Mr. Ledeen is the best informed Western journalist on the situation in Iran with a range of contacts which I frankly envy. His view and mine is that the Iranian people are unlike the Iraqi capable of taking down their monstrous regime themselves. As in other Asian societies the students are the vanguard of a whole oppressed people. They are the proxies of their elders they come from the more "advantaged" families and by their demonstrations show that even those who endure the least material suffering want the dictatorship overthrown. July 9th is when the pot next approaches boil-over. That will be the third anniversary of the first major student insurrection. Each year the demonstrations reach crescendo on that date and my own Iranian correspondents hope that this is the year the lid comes off. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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