The ongoing war against Iran?

Photo credit: U.S. State Department

In January 2005, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush had authorized the Pentagon to conduct all sorts of off-the-book ("black") operations inside a variety of Middle Eastern nations -- beginning with Iran. Hersh mentioned "commando" and other types of secret operations that would be part of the "war on terrorism," not merely intelligence-gathering.

How goes that war?

Well, in his profile of Condi Rice in the June Atlantic, journalist David Samuels noted that public "American-led effort to 'push back' Iran" such as the UN sanctions linked to Iran's nuclear program "have been accompanied by other, more active measures." His sources

pointed to an upsurge in antigovernment guerrilla activity inside Iran, including a bomb in Zahedan, the economic center of the province of Baluchistan, that killed 11 soldiers in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on February 14; the mysterious death of the Iranian scientist Ardashir Hosseinpour, who worked on uranium enrichment at the Isfahan nuclear facility; and the defection of a high-ranking Iranian general named Ali Asgari, a former deputy minister of defense who was also the Revolutionary Guard officer responsible for training and supplying Hezbollah during its war against the Israelis in southern Lebanon in the 1980s.

A bombing (campaign?) and maybe an assassination. Hmmm.

Could the "war on terror" be morphing into a "war of terror"?

Some sources attribute the alleged Hosseinpour murder to the Mossad.

Incidentally, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz pointed out to Samuels that the U.S. could wreak all sorts of havoc in Iran without too much trouble: “it’s not difficult for somebody to sabotage those refineries.” I wrote something similar in regard to Iraq's oil facilities back in January. They're relatively soft targets and could be eliminated rather easily.


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