Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Building a Case for War with Iran: Jafarzadeh and the Downing Street Dossier Redux

Tuesday January 30th 2007, 12:40 pm

Is it possible we are stupid enough to fall for it again?

“US officials in Baghdad and Washington are expected to unveil a secret intelligence ‘dossier’ this week detailing evidence of Iran’s alleged complicity in attacks on American troops in Iraq. The move, uncomfortably echoing Downing Street’s dossier debacle in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is one more sign that the Bush administration is building a case for war,” reports the Guardian.

Not to worry, declares Nicholas Burns, the senior diplomat in charge of Iran policy and, hardly coincidentally, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Order of St. John, the latter run by the ruling houses of Europe, headed until his death by the former SS official, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

The neocons are “not looking for a fight” with Iran (indeed, they don’t want to fight the Iranians, simply shock and awe them into submission) and instead are eager to “push back,” never mind there is no defensible reason to do so. “Primarily that means Tehran’s perceived meddling in Iraq, where its influence with the Shia-led government and Shia majority population appears to be increasing as Washington’s weakens,” the Guardian would have us believe.

Once again, we are subjected to the discredited accusation “Iranians are smuggling into Iraq sophisticated explosive devices, mortars, and detailed plans to wipe out Sunni Arab neighborhoods,” never mind that Pentagon has done a mighty fine job of accomplishing the latter without the help of Iran.

“But as was also the case in the days before Saddam Hussein fell, powerful external forces, ranging from exiled Iranian opposition groups to leading Israeli politicians, appear intent on stoking the fire—and winding up the White House,” an unabashedly fair assessment, although it would help if the Guardian told us the rest of the story, namely the so-called “case” against Saddam Hussein consisted of a transparent passel of lies, fabrications, and fairy tales.

“The al-Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards is stepping up terrorism and encouraging sectarian violence in Iraq,” Alireza Jafarzadeh—a US-based Iranian dissident who is linked to the Marxist cult Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), officially listed by the State Department as a terrorist group—told the Moonie, er Washington Times earlier this month. In essence, Jafarzadeh is but another Ahmed Chalabi, pedaling lies and exaggerations, the vile stuff of neocon pretext.

In the not too distant past, Jafarzadeh was happy to proffer scary stories about mullahs with nukes. Now, however, as a neocon team player, he has adopted the Iran meddling in Iraq theme, apparently the emerging rationale conjured up as a flimsy excuse to be used in the upcoming effort to shock and awe Iranian school children and grandmothers.

“There is a sharp surge in Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and sectarian violence in the past few months,” Jafarzadeh told a conference organized by the Iran Policy Committee, an organization connected at the hip to the American Enterprise Institute, a criminal operation where Bush’s get his psychopathic “minds.”

According to Right Web, the “two leading figures at IPC are Raymond Tanter, who cofounded the organization in January 2006, and Clare Lopez, IPC’s executive director. IPC members have close ties with the U.S. military, intelligence community, and high-tech military contractors,” death merchants who stand to profit handsomely from any attack launched against Iran. It is hardly a surprise that Clare Lopez, an operations officer with the CIA for two decades, is an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the AIPAC and Zionist created think tank.

“Israel is also pushing the intelligence case while upping the ante, claiming to have knowledge that Tehran is within a year or two of acquiring basic nuclear weapons-making capability,” explains the Guardian, trotting out what should by now be a threadbare and thoroughly discredited lie. “In a BBC interview last week former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu compared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime to Hitler’s Nazis. Speaking in Davos the deputy prime minister, Shimon Peres, demanded immediate regime change or failing that, military intervention.”

Finally, the New York Times, responsible for eagerly disseminating war propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, tells us “Bush and his aides [read: criminal neocons] calibrate how directly to confront Iran, they are discovering that both their words and their strategy are haunted by the echoes of four years ago—when their warnings of terrorist activity and nuclear ambitions were clearly a prelude to war…. To many in Washington, especially Mr. Bush’s Democratic critics, the new approach to Iran has all the hallmarks of an administration once again spoiling for a fight.”

Of course, there will be no “fight,” at least not in a traditional military sense, but rather a cowardly air bombardment, designed not only to take out Iran’s fictional nuclear weapons labs but also decimate the country’s civilian infrastructure, producing in essence a repeat of the situation in Iraq.

Although the perfidious neocons and their Fox News apologists and enablers tell us repeatedly they look forward to taking out Iran’s supposed nuke capability—and, in the process, deposing the mullahs for the sake of the poor besieged Iranian people—last year Seymour Hersh revealed the “U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity [include] the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran,” as should be expected, as the attack Iran plan is simply another step in the Zionist and neocon agenda engineered to decimate Muslim and Arab society and culture.

Addendum

If we are to believe “American analysts,” Iran manufacturers have carelessly left identifying serial numbers on “explosive devices used as makeshift roadside bombs,” according to the New York Sun, a notorious neocon disinfo outlet.

Of course, we will have to take these nameless sources at their word because “details may not be publicly disclosed if such a disclosure would tip off Iran’s intelligence services as to how America’s intelligence services collect information inside Iran.”

Moreover, the “protection of sources and methods is only one concern … for the directorate of national intelligence. Another issue is political. Some of the intelligence collected in the last six weeks from raids of Iranian outposts implicates the Islamic Republic in funding Sunni jihadists. Making this information public could jeopardize the political standing of some of America’s allies that have also forged alliances with Iran out of political necessity.”

As usual, it is not explained why the Shia of Iran would work with the Sunni resistance, comprised in large part of former Saddam loyalists. But then please remember no small number of Congress critters are unable to tell the difference between the two—or that they fought a bloody and bitter war in the 1980s—obviously considering one Muslim no different than another, a simplicity inculcated over the last few years by our corporate media.

In order to cover all bases, the anonymous sources mentioned above state the IEDs bearing convenient identifying serial numbers are also handed out to Jaish al-Mahdi, aka the Mahdi Army, a Shi’ite militia.

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