Attacking Iran

Robert Baer says that we're seeing the Prelude to an Attack on Iran Time 08/18/07. The "money quote" comes the omnipresent anonymous "Administration official" who told Baer, "There will be an attack on Iran."

The excuse given by the prowar flacks in Baer's column is that IEDs are supposedly being supplied to anti-American fighters in Iraq by Iran, specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). The Iraqis, it seems are too stupid to make their own IEDs. Even though there was an IED factory somewhere in southern Iraq busted this year that, at least from what was reported, didn't show any signs of being run by Iranians.

One "former CIA explosives expert" says that he's not only sure about the IEDs. But he also is sure that the pattern of mortar strikes in the Green Zone shows Iranian involvement."The way they're dropping them in, in neat grids, tells me all I need to know that the Shia are getting help." Evidently the Iraqis are also too stupid to fire their own mortars. I guess those 400,000 soldiers in Saddam's army and the tens of thousands in the "elite" units, all of which were demobilized by our wise Iranian viceroy Paul Bremer back in 2003, didn't know anything about mortars or planning out patterns of fire. It's probably also worth asking just how many mortar attacks had to strike the Green Zone for this "expert" to discern a specific Iranian national trademark on the firing patterns.

Two reality-check items. One is that our allied government in Iraq is Shi'a dominated and pro-Iranian. The two leading Shi'a parties in the Iraqi government are SIIC, which was founded in Iran, and Da'wa, which was sheltered in Iran for years along with SIIC (formerly SCIRI). If we wanted to isolate Iraq from Iran, permitting a Shi'a government dominated by those two parties was probably not the best idea.

We should also remember this from The surge: a special report by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 08/07/07:

Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US, which were passed on or sold to insurgents.

Tags: iran war, robert baer