Friday, January 26, 2007
If you know that you need to foster a re-birth in Iraq, and you know that its neighbors, Syria and Iran, are part of an Axis of Evil, two countries you can expect will subvert, destroy, wreck, murder...to stop it happening, but you know this mission is a world-historical import...why, oh why, weren't you pursuing policies like this from Day 1?
WaPo: Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq
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...
Why shouldn't they? We've let them get away with it.
Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear ambitions are speeding ahead, and they're confident enough to issue threats in response to sanctions:
Maybe Baker has/had too much influence until now with State and the family?
Syria and Iran should have been hit way back in 2003 when the States realised that they were doing everything to stymie America's efforts to control matters in Iraq.
To my way of seeing things GWB has been getting lousy "intel" all along.