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Bush Provokes Iranians in Iraq

Comment by Larry Ross, January 26, 2007

The Washington Post article shows that Bush has started his war on Iran by kidnapping, imprisoning and threatening to kill Iranians who are openly and legally in Iraq.

He is doing everything he can to provoke some kind of reactions by Iran, so that he can blame "Iranian terrorism" and opposition to his war as an excuse for the quagmire he has created.

Bush and US media are stepping up their campaign to demonise Iran to Americans in order to gain their support for any future big incidents blamed on Iran, as a justification for his planned attack. 

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U.S. Troops Authorized to Kill Iranians in Iraq

Policy on operatives stirs concern among some U.S. officials

by Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, January 26, 2007

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran 's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country's nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

"There were no costs for the Iranians," said one senior administration official. "They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

Three officials said that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran 's Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time. There is no evidence the Iranians have directly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, intelligence officials said.

But, for three years, the Iranians have operated an embedding program there, offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias connected to the Iraqi government, to the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, told the Senate recently that the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking."

" Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," Hayden said.

‘Kill or capture' program
The new "kill or capture" program was authorized by President Bush in a meeting of his most senior advisers last fall, along with other measures meant to curtail Iranian influence from Kabul to Beirut and, ultimately, to shake Iran's commitment to its nuclear efforts. Tehran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful, but the United states and other nations say it is aimed at developing weapons.

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