"The Iranian penetration of Iraq was a long time in planning” (Michael Ware, Time, Aug. 14, 2005)
On Sept. 9, 2002, with U.S. bases being readied in Kuwait, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei summoned his war council in Tehran. According to Iranian sources, the Supreme National Security Council concluded, "It is necessary to adopt an active policy in order to prevent long-term and short-term dangers to Iran." Iran’s security services had supported the armed wings of several Iraqi groups they had sheltered in Iran from Saddam.
Iranian intelligence sources say that the various groups were organized under the command of Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani, an adviser to Khamenei on both Afghanistan and Iraq and a top officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps." Ware
"Brigadier General Sullaimani ordained in a meeting of his militia proxies in the spring of last year that "any move that would wear out the U.S. forces in Iraq should be done. Every possible means should be used to keep the U.S. forces engaged in Iraq."" Ware
"Secret British military-intelligence documents show that British forces are tracking several paramilitary outfits in Southern Iraq that are backed by the Revolutionary Guard. Coalition and Iraqi intelligence agencies track Iranian officers’ visits to Iraq on inspection tours akin to those of their American counterparts." Ware
Michael Ware is the best of the reporters working now in Iraq. His "reach" into the world of the coalition forces as well as that of the insurgents is impressive.
MORE BELOW:
There has been a kind of coalition of silence in the world of the American media with regard to the obvious and growing influence of Iran in the Iraq of today. Most of the media are holed up in hotels in Baghdad afraid for their lives and happily collecting their hazardous duty bonuses while they wait for their "tour of duty" to end. Their principal sources of information have been coalition forces and embassy PR officals. These officials inevitably project the viewpoint of the US Government at the moment of discussion.
Until recently it has been the "received wisdom" of the US Government that Iraqi Shia are Iraqis first and always, and Shia in the same way that Americans are Presbyterians or Baptists. In other words, the US establishment, taking its clue from the US Government has maintained that Iraqi Shia would never let themselves be dominated by Iran because the Iranians are Persians and the Iraqi Shia are Arabs and never the two shall identify with each other. It has also been maintained that Iraqi Shia (and Sunnis) are so universally secular that they would "never" accept a theocratic state in Iraq, and most especially one aligned with Tehran.
What a crock!! First of all, the idea that you would accept as true the unverified statements of a group about themselves, (any group) is ludicrous. People lie about such matters to outsiders with great dependability. They are especially prone to lying about themselves when they perceive that they are talking to the gullible (us). Secondly, anyone who knows anything about the pre-war Shia population of Iraq knows that they were deeply divided between those who were secular and felt themselves primarily Iraqi (many of these were members of the Baath) and those who were always primarily Shia in loyalty and who resisted the influence of Iraqi nationalism. Many of these people went into exile in Iran and actually fought against Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War.
NOW. They’re Back!!!
Why did the US propagate the patent untruth of Iraqi Shia independence of spirit? Ask the Jacobins. It suited their purposes. Now this tissue of delusion and falsehood is collapsing.
Who will pay the price?
Pat Lang
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My blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio
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Jacobins, not Jacobites
I am asked what “Jacobins” might be —
“In the context of the French Revolution, a Jacobin originally meant a member of the Jacobin Club (1789-1794). But even while the Club still existed, the name of Jacobins had been popularly applied to all promulgators of extreme revolutionary opinions; “Jacobin democracy” for example is synonymous with totalitarian democracy. In contemporary France this term refers to a centralistic conception of Republic, with a lot of power vested in the national government, at the expense of local governments.” Wikepedia – The Free Encyclopedia
In the present context, I think, (as do others) that this is a more accurate description of the group of people who are variously called; “neocons,” “Vulcans,” “neo-imperialists,” etc.
These people do not want anyone to think of them as a group, much less describe them as a group. They react with hostility to the term, “neocon,” often playing the “anti-semite” card as Eliot Cohen did with me once, saying that this was code for “foreign policy Jew.”
Nevertheless, I think the Jacobin tag is useful in understanding them because they are not, in fact, conservative as John Adams or Margaret Thatcher would have understood the term. Rather, they are radical revolutionaries descended more or less directly from the thinking of the radicals of the French Revolution through European influence in the 20th century. They strongly believe in the use of force and cunning in forging a dominant role for the US in world affairs. They believe in strong central government at the expense of the states and are not terribly concerned with citizen rights if they think such rights interfere with their “larger” goals. They have a simplistic belief in the universal curative powers of “pure” democracy which the framers of our constitution never entertained. It is for that reason that our constitution is carefully constructed to prevent the attainment of more than indirect power by the “masses.”
They are foreign policy oriented. Domestic conservative issues largely bore them unless the political “backblast” from failure to attain the goals of heartland conservatives is thought politically “dangerous.”
The best possible reason for not calling them “neocons” is that there is nothing conservative about them. The closest that one could get on that “tack” would be to call them radical right wing revolutionaries. pl
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My blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio