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US wages war from within
Iran
By Richard M Bennett
With
commendable stupidity usually only reserved for the most
powerful and isolated from reality, President George W
Bush has managed to go some way towards repeating the
catastrophic mistakes of Lyndon Johnson and ensnare the
United States in an increasingly unpopular and probably
unwinnable foreign military involvement. Just two months
after the sudden collapse of organized Iraqi resistance
to the US-led invasion, US troops are back in a
Vietnam-scenario with the ambushing of military convoys,
the regular use of grenades and rocket launchers against
isolated American targets and indeed suicide bombers.
It has always been a truism that if you cannot
avoid wars, then at least learn the lessons of previous
conflicts. This, however, the US has signally failed to
do. Not content with the ultimate failures of the
campaigns in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, of Somalia, and
indeed even Afghanistan, to achieve the stated aims and
the supposed improvement in the state of the inhabitants
of those nations, the US has blindly embarked on a
dangerous and unsound course of action. US forces are
already launching operations suspiciously similar to the
"search-and-destroy" tactics of 40 years ago and with a
similar response from an increasingly hostile civilian
population.
Using a marked degree of devious
propaganda about the imminent threat of weapons of mass
destruction and largely in the dark about the true
allegiance and likely response of the majority of
Iraqis, the US has now succeeded in alienating much of
both the developed and Third World, and indeed signaled
to both Russia and China that Washington's new-found
military belligerence and diplomatic toughness are a
profound threat to their influence and future powerbase.
Not content with expending much of America's wealth and
the lives of its young service personnel in largely
fruitless campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington
is now clearly preparing the ground for an attack on
Iran.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has
been in contact with senior Iranian military personnel
for several years and are believed to have developed a
number of highly valuable operations to undermine Iran's
defenses. However, and crucially, they have so far
failed in similar attempts with the Islamic Republican
Guards or Pasdaran. Aware of the US intelligence
agency's success in "turning" large numbers of key Iraqi
commanders, the Iranian government has quietly
contemplated a mass purge of the possibly "infected"
army high command and senior field commanders. This
would of course still suit the Pentagon as it would
severely disrupt Iranian war planning, the command
structure and the likely performance of its combat units
in battle.
The course that the mullahs have
apparently decided on is to ensure a higher degree of
integration between Pasdaran and regular army formations
in conflict situations and to increase both the
penetration of the army by the internal security branch
of the intelligence service, SAVAMA, and vastly increase
the numbers of trusted Pasdaran officers positioned at
brigade and divisional-level headquarters to watch for
any signs of treachery by regular officers, much in the
manner of commissars or political officers that the
Soviets used to deploy.
The Iranian government
has moved hundreds, if not thousands, of trusted Islamic
officers and Pasdaran fighters into the Shi'ite areas of
Iraq in order to create a massive subversive campaign in
the event of a US attack on their country. However,
Washington has more than paid back this action in kind.
CIA officers and dissident Iranian agents have expended
millions of dollars in recent weeks to foment trouble
throughout Iran, and indeed have had some success in
Tehran and a number of other cities. In a re-run of the
classic campaign that successfully overthrew the regime
of prime minister Mohammed Musadeqq in 1953 and which
resulted in the return of the Shah, American
intelligence operations have been focused mainly on the
protesting students, the police and those troops used
for internal security.
While not expecting the
Tehran regime to be toppled easily or quickly, the CIA
operations are the beginning of a determined effort to
subvert the armed forces of Iran and significantly
undermine the ability of the government in Tehran to
resist increasing diplomatic pressure to disarm or to
organize successfully to resist a US military invasion,
perhaps as early as 2004.
However, judging by
the failure to complete the victories won on the
battlefield in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the portents
for the coming war with Iran are ominous. Both
Afghanistan and Iraq now have developing major
insurgencies with which US forces are showing few signs
of coming to terms, and without doubt Iran will be a
much harder nut to crack. The drain on US resources and
lives will almost certainly be that much greater. Any
one of these campaigns may indeed be winnable, two are a
serious problem, however three may well prove to be just
one war too far, even for the world's only superpower.
(AFI Research, a leading
source of specialist intelligence, defense, terrorism,
conflict and political analysis. (C) Richard Bennett
Media 2003, rbmedia@supanet.com
)
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