As of this writing, the situation in Lebanon outlined in my last post in this series has considerably worsened. Open fighting has broken out on the streets of Beirut, refugees are starting to mass at the Syrian border, and Western governments are planning evacuations. In addition, a former administration insider and U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, openly voiced what an increasing number of opponents of Iran’s nuclear programs seem to be thinking.

Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.

“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”

Getting back to the case and background of what appears to be playing out, Gareth Porter at the Asia Times has done the best work sifting through Douglas Feith’s recently released account of the first two years of the War on Terror and reports the following:

Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.

Feith’s book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing “new regimes” in a series of states by “aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism”.

In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase “some other states” in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon “campaign plan” document, the Taliban and Saddam regimes are listed as “state regimes” against which “plans and operations” might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out “for security reasons”.

General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.

Clark writes that the list also included Lebanon. Feith reveals that Rumsfeld’s paper called for getting “Syria out of Lebanon” as a major goal of US policy.

When this writer asked Feith after a recent public appearance which countries’ names were deleted from the documents, he cited security reasons for the deletion. But when he was asked which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, “All of them.”
…
Feith describes the policy outlined in the paper as consisting of “military action against some of the state sponsors [of terrorism] and pressure – short of war – against others”.

While this does not prove that the U.S. has been planning to attack Iran from the beginning, it does show that actively deterring Iranian sponsorship of terrorism was a major U.S. objective as early as 2001. And it’s easy to imagine how Iran’s subsequent support of anti-U.S. militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, and attempts to fill the power vacuum in Lebanon after the departure of the Syrians, might have led the administration to conclude that strikes against Iran may be the only viable option. One other indicator that Iran has been doing exactly this percolated to the surface recently, this time coming from an observer who presumably has no interest in supporting American goals.

A Sunni fundamentalist from Kuwait who has been linked by the United Nations and the United States to Al Qaeda, said in an interview published Wednesday that Iran is supporting Sunni Arab insurgents fighting American troops in Iraq.

The comments by Mubarak al-Bathali came just days after reports surfaced here that three Kuwaitis recently carried out suicide bombings in Iraq, including a Kuwaiti who was a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner. Kuwaiti authorities have not confirmed those reports.

The U.S. has accused Iran — which is predominantly Shiite like Iraq — of supporting Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran denies this and blames the U.S. troops presence for the violence in Iraq.

The accusations by al-Bathali were a rare occasion that a Sunni fundamentalist claimed Tehran also backs Sunni extremists, linked to Al Qaeda. In the battlefields of Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites are archenemies.

In the interview in Kuwaiti Al-Qabas daily, al-Bathali said that Tehran is supplying Al Qaeda fighters and other Jihad movements in Iraq with “weapons and money” and claimed he has personally sent fighters to Iraq by way of Syria.

Al-Bathali alleged that Iran’s motivation for backing both the Sunnis and Shiites opposed to Washington, was because Tehran is eager to “place hurdles in front of America” so that the U.S. would be “too busy to fight” Iran. He also said Iran facilitates the entry of fighters into Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, there are two more indicators that key Arab regimes in the region might be backing a U.S.-led strike on Iran to stem Tehran’s meddling in the region. First, Saudi Arabia issued a warning to Lebanon, and indirectly, Iran.

Saudi Arabia urged Thursday Lebanese powers behind the current escalation to reconsider their moves and warned them against serving the interests of “foreign forces of extremism”.

“The kingdom is following with extreme concern and resentment the current regrettable escalation in Lebanon,” an official statement carried by the Saudi SPA news agency said.

Saudi Arabia, a power broker with clout among Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims, urged powers standing behind the escalation “to reconsider their calculations.”

Riyadh warned those powers against “pushing Lebanon into a blind strife, which will only be a victory for foreign forces of extremism.”

Those forces have prevented all efforts aimed at solving the political standoff in Lebanon and obstructed the Arab League initiative, the statement said.

Saudi Arabia’s warning is directed at Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah whose loyalists are now embroiled in a confrontation with Sunni supporters of Lebanon’s US and Saudi-backed government in the eastern Bekaa valley.

And another observer of these events relates the following:

The risk of a U.S.-Iranian confrontation is growing in part because Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Middle East are so eager for it. “Behind closed doors, we are praying that the Iranians will make a mistake so that you will have a reason to attack,” one Saudi told me this week. Another prominent Arab official said he hopes the United States will strike Iranian training camps just over the border from Iraq.

Read part 4 in this series.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 and is filed under Foreign Policy, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.