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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA A bombshell
that nobody heard By Tom
Engelhardt
charges that the
Iranians are sending into Iraq advanced improvised
explosive devices, or the means to produce them,
are the rage, it seems a germane subject.
In the US, it's a no-brainer that the
Iranians have no right whatsoever to put their
people, overtly or covertly, into neighboring
Iraq, a country that, back in the 1980s, invaded
Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it,
resulting in perhaps a million
casualties; but it's just
normal behavior for the Pentagon to have traveled
halfway across the planet to dominate the Iraqi
military, garrison Iraq with a string of vast
permanent bases, build the largest embassy on the
planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and send
special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA
teams as well) across the Iranian border, or to
insert them in Iran to do "reconnaissance" or even
to foment unrest among its minorities. This is the
definition of an imperial world view.
Sleepless nights Let's leave
Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other
matters highlighted in "The redirection" that
certainly should have raised the odd red flag and
pushed the odd alarm button in the US far more
than his Iranian news (which did at least get some
attention).
Iran-Contra
redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that,
under the leadership of Elliott Abrams (who in the
Iran-Contra period pleaded guilty to two counts of
unlawfully withholding information from Congress
and was later pardoned), such a meeting was held?
Does no one want to confirm that this happened?
Does no one want to know who attended?
Iran-Contra alumni in the Bush
administration at one time or another included the
late president Ronald Reagan's national security
adviser John Poindexter, Otto Reich, John
Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his
post as director of national intelligence to avoid
the 21st-century version of Iran-Contra - "No way.
I'm not going down that road again, with the NSC
[National Security Council] running operations off
the books, with no [presidential] finding"), Roger
Noriega, and Robert Gates.
Did the vice
president or president sit in? Was either of them
informed about the "lessons drawn"? Were the vice
president's right-hand men, I Lewis "Scooter"
Libby and/or David Addington, in any way involved?
Who knows?
In the Iran-Contra affair, the
Reagan administration drew together the seediest
collection of freelance arms dealers, intelligence
agents, allies and - in the case of ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini's Iranian regime - sworn enemies
in what can only be called "amateur hour" at the
White House. Now, it looks as if the Bush
administration is heading down a similar path and,
given its previous "amateur hour" reputation in
foreign policy, imagine what this is likely to
mean.
Jihadis as proxies:
Using jihadis as US proxies in a struggle to roll
back Iran - with the help of the Saudis - should
have rung a few bells somewhere in US memory as
another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s
- on the theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend
- the fundamentalist Catholic CIA director William
Casey came to believe that Islamic fundamentalists
could prove tight and trustworthy allies in
rolling back the Soviet Union.
In
Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the
Saudi royals, who themselves represented an
extremist form of Sunni Islam, regularly favored
and funded the most extreme of the mujahideen
ready to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the
results? Today, according to Hersh, the Saudis are
reassuring key figures in the Bush administration
that this time they have the jihadis to whom funds
are flowing under control. No problem. If you
believe that, you'll believe anything.
Congress in the dark: Hersh
claims that, with the help of Saudi National
Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan (buddy
to the Bushes and Cheney's close comrade-in-arms),
the people running the black-ops programs out of
Cheney's office have managed to run circles around
any possibility of congressional oversight,
leaving the institution completely "in the dark",
which is undoubtedly exactly where Congress wanted
to be for the past six years. Is this still true?
The non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly
encouraging.
To summarize, if Hersh is to
be believed - and as a major journalistic figure
for the past near-40 years he certainly deserves
to be taken seriously - the Bush administration
seems to be repeating the worst mistakes of the
Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war
in Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the
greatest acts of blowback in US history.
Given what we already know about the Bush
administration, Americans should be up nights
worrying about what all this means now as well as
down the line. For Congress, the media and
Americans in general, this report should have been
not just a wake-up call, but a shout for an
all-nighter with NoDoz.
In my childhood,
one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran
cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in
a perilous situation - say, clinging to the ledge
of a tall building - would be screaming for help,
while passers-by were so engrossed in the paper
that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the
opposite situation: a journalist in essence
writing bloody murder in a giant media and
governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the
mainstream evidently cares - not yet, anyway - to
pay the slightest attention.
It seems that
there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn.
Note 1. For a review of
Ghost Wars, see The roots of 9-11, Asia
Times Online, April 10, 2004.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
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