Getting Away with Murder, Iranian Style

Posted by: Ion | September 22nd, 2007 · 5:26 PM

(photo: Headquarters Marine Corps)

It was once said that regional stability in the Middle East was impossible as long as Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. For me, given events, this was manifestly true. Faced with the situation we acted and acted decisively. Yet as nettlesome as Iraq under the Baath was, since its fall, Iran has proven to be a far more adept culprit in this area than Saddam ever dreamed of.

Fostering and fomenting serious shooting wars in at least three countries (Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen), flooding the region’s guerrillas with arms and materiel and using its geography to threaten and distort regional security in something that resembles a permanent prelude to war, Iran quite plainly makes our argument against Iraq look petty. Saddam’s prodigious efforts to infiltrate, manipulate and destabilize his neighbors were not in the Iranians league.

Yet for some reason –presumably out of fear of our domestic political situation– we’ve decided to meet their aggression against and subversion of regional security with equanimity, tolerance and at most, vague threats coupled to mild expressions of displeasure. The moment anyone in our military or government voices a thin hint of a will to arrest Iran’s efforts, attach meaningful consequences to their actions and confront the possibility of changing the political situation within that country, these men are immediately silenced, their strong words mitigated, their advice ignored.

This week Admiral William Fallon at CENTCOM became the latest example of this. Pointing out that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was directly supplying IED materials to the Taliban, he said the following:

“The Iranians are clearly supplying some amount of lethal aid,” Fallon told The Associated Press during a trip to Afghanistan. “There is no doubt … that agents from Iran are involved in aiding the insurgency.”

Fallon said the U.S. was carefully watching the flow of weapons from Iran and said the U.S. would “act decisively” if the cross-border flow continues.
(Newsday via TexasFred)

For a brief moment one is struck by the thought that there is recognition of the obvious here. Alas, the remarks were soon neutered by the weight of the understate:

His comments were not meant as a threat of military action against Iran but a suggestion that border interdiction efforts may need to be increased, Fallon’s aides said later.
(Newsday via TexasFred)

What’s sadly amusing about this reluctance to act meaningfully against our enemies, for fear of the domestic political repercussions, is how even the arguments of the antiwar movement, tend to mandate action. Here is a somewhat representative of what I mean:

There they go again. Those responsible for disseminating BS relative to Iran, in the present case Admiral William Fallon, are now accusing Iran of supplying the Taliban with materials used in producing “improvised explosive devices” or IEDs.

You might remember the Iranians werre previously accused of supplying IED parts to Iraqi rebels. An accusation that was discredited in short order upon its release through the usual propaganda channels.
(Ruminations of an Expatriate)

You’ve doubtlessly heard this sort of thing before with regard to Iran. But note his defense of inaction is predicated entirely on the assumption that the Iranian threat in Afghanistan is nonexistent, because the evidence of Iranian influence is supposedly manufactured as propaganda by the Bush administration. This is an enormously telling argument to adopt. The implication being that if Iran really were doing what it’s clearly doing, why, then we’d probably have to do something about it.

Thus, even among the adversaries of war, there is agreement that Iranian interference in Afghanistan is unacceptable. The opposition, such as it is, is merely arguing that Iran isn’t interfering. Yet it is such resistance as this, that somehow terrifies the Bush Administration into inaction. It’s a weak excuse.

The above blogger we used as a representative, is not making a logical argument. Well beyond the point that the evidence of Iranian supplies in Afghanistan is incontestable, the strategic rationale for it is just as obvious. The very stated policy of the Iranian Foreign Ministry is that the NATO presence in Afghanistan is imperialist and illegitimate and serves as a threat to Iranian interests and security.

To add insult to itself, later on in his post the blogger tries to reinforce his doubts (and make further excuses for Iran) by observing that the Taliban are Sunni and suggests that too much enmity exists between them and theocratically Shia Iran for military concord. We might observe here that Iran shows little compunction in writing large checks to Sunni Hamas, or Hamas in cashing them. The notion that we should disregard the evidence of Iranian munitions in Afghanistan, on grounds of the plainly false assumption that Iran would discriminate along sectarian lines against their own strategic objectives, is actually a weaker argument than those forwarded by the Iranians themselves.

Yet before such fantastically weak arguments the Bush administration cowers. With Iranian weaponry unquestionably killing our troops in Afghanistan, Iranian ambitions in Central Asia as plain as the slogans on their banners and their habit for sowing discord and disorder throughout the region, Bush’s inaction on Iran is beginning to border on a dereliction of duty.

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