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ANALYSIS
Bush administration
paralyzed over Iran
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Does the administration of US
President George W Bush still consider al-Qaeda and its
associates the main target in its almost three-year-old
"war on terrorism", or has its military victory in Iraq
whetted its appetite for bigger game?
That is in
effect the question that the powers-that-be in Iran
appear to be posing to Washington at a critical moment
in the war's evolution. The administration appears
deadlocked over an answer.
According to a series
of leaks by US officials, Iran has offered to hand over,
if not directly to Washington then to friendly allies,
three senior al-Qaeda leaders and might provide another
three top terrorist suspects that Washington believes
are being held by Tehran.
But its price - for
the US military to shut down permanently the operations
of an Iraq-based Iranian rebel group that is on the
State Department's official terrorism list - might be
too high for some hardliners, centered in the Pentagon
and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, who led the
charge for war in Iraq.
Members of this group
see the rebels, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), or
People's Mujahedin, as potentially helpful to their
ambitions to achieve "regime change" in Iran, charter
member of Bush's "axis of evil" and a nation that is
believed to have accelerated its nuclear-weapons program
in recent months.
The question of what to do
about the reported Iranian offer is one of the issues
being discussed this week in successive visits to Bush's
Texas ranch by Secretary of State Colin Powell (who
returned from there Wednesday night), Cheney, and
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
Iran has
confirmed that it is holding three al-Qaeda leaders,
including Seif al-Adel, considered the network's No 3
and chief of military operations who already has a US$25
million bounty on his head; its spokesman, Suleiman Abu
Gheith; and Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's
third-oldest son.
In addition, Washington
believes Tehran also has custody of three other
much-sought-after targets: Abu Hafs, a senior al-Qaeda
operative known as "the Mauritanian"; Abu Musab Zarqawi,
who has been depicted by the administration as a key
link between al-Qaeda and former Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein; and possibly Mohammed al Masri, an al-Qaeda
associate active in East Africa, according to a recent
report by a special investigative team of the Knight
Ridder newspaper chain.
"If Washington could get
its hands on even half these guys, it would be the
biggest advance since the fall of Afghanistan in the
fight against al-Qaeda," said one administration
official who declined to be identified. "If we could get
them all, that would be a huge breakthrough."
The State Department has been pushing the
administration to engage Iran more directly in pursuit
of the best deal possible and was reportedly authorized
to hold one meeting with the Iranians two weeks ago.
Washington and Tehran broke off bilateral
relations during the US Embassy hostage crisis in 1980,
but quiet meetings were held over the past year, until
they were broken off in mid-May after administration
hardliners charged that a series of terrorist attacks
carried out against US and other foreign targets in
Saudi Arabia on May 12 were organized from Iranian
territory, presumably with the approval of elements of
its government.
But the same hardliners
reportedly oppose a deal with Tehran, which they depict
not only as a sponsor of terrorism determined to acquire
nuclear weapons, but also an exhausted dictatorship
teetering on the verge of collapse that could be easily
overthrown in a popular insurrection, with covert US
help or even military intervention.
The hawks
are backed by the Likud government in Israel, which has
been urging Washington to go after Iran since even
before the war in Iraq. As soon as Iraq is dealt with,
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the New York Post last
November, he "will push for Iran to be at the top of the
'to do' list".
Pentagon hardliners, who exert
the greatest control over the occupation authority in
Iraq, last month authorized the rebirth of the arm of
Saddam Hussein's intelligence service - the Mukhabarat -
that worked on Iran, according to the Pentagon-backed
Iraqi National Congress (INC), which is helping in the
effort.
That was the same unit that worked
closely with the MEK under Saddam Hussein.
The
MEK, which began in the late 1960s as a left-wing
Islamist movement against the Shah but broke violently
with the leaders of the Islamic Republic after the
1978-79 revolution, was given its own bases, tanks and
other heavy weapons by the Iraqi leader during the
Iran-Iraq War, all of which it retained during his
regime to use in raids against Iran, but also to help
Saddam put down unrest, particularly after the 1991 Gulf
War.
US forces bombed the group's bases in the
initial phases of the Iraq campaign this year, but
negotiated a ceasefire and eventually a surrender as
Washington expanded its control over Iraq. Yet the group
has been permitted to retain most of its weapons, remain
together, and, despite its listing by the State
Department as a terrorist group and Tehran's demands
that it be completely dismantled, continue radio
broadcasting into Iran.
Although the MEK, which
displays many of the characteristics of a cult in its
hero-worship of its "first couple", Maryam and Massoud
Rajavi, appears to have intelligence assets inside Iran
- the group was the first to alert Washington to the
existence of a previously unknown nuclear facility this
year - most Iran specialists believe it has no popular
following there whatsoever, and is mostly despised
because of its alliance with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq
war.
"It's hard to see how they could ever be
seen as a political asset to the United States in Iran,"
one administration official who favors a deal said
recently. "The [MEK] is precisely the kind of common
enemy against which both the reformists and the
conservatives - and even the students - are likely to
rally against."
A deal would also reconfirm to
an increasingly skeptical Islamic world that al-Qaeda
was indeed the primary target of Bush's "war on terror"
and not simply a pretext for a major intervention in the
Middle East and the Persian Gulf to ensure US and
Israeli domination of the entire region, say analysts
here.
"Our priority should be al-Qaeda, and if
we can engage the Iranians tactically to get some
high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives, we should," Flynt
Leverett, the top Mideast expert on the National
Security Council under both presidents Bill Clinton and
George W Bush until his departure this year, told the
New York Times on Saturday.
The same analysts
argue that disbanding the MEK would help demonstrate
that Washington is not applying a double standard to
different terrorist groups, depending on their
usefulness. But the Pentagon reportedly remains
resistant to stronger action against the group.
"There is no question that we have not disbanded
them, and there is an ongoing debate about them between
the office of the Secretary of Defense and the State
Department," Vince Cannistraro, a former
counter-terrorism director in the Central Intelligence
Agency, told USA Today this week.
It appears
that some officials believe the MEK could yet serve some
purpose.
(Inter Press Service)
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