This story caught my eye this morning:

Update 2: Bombs Kill Six in Southwestern Iran

Two bombs exploded in a bank and outside a government building Tuesday, killing six people and injuring 46 in a southwestern city with a history of violence involving members of Iran’s Arab minority, the official news agency reported.

The president [i.e., Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] had been expected to meet his Cabinet in the city on Tuesday but canceled the visit.

Now, I wasn’t aware that Iran had terrorists operating in their country. How very odd. Except it seems the Iranian government doesn’t believe this incident is solely the result of home grown rebels:

Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said the attacks in Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province which borders Iraq, were foreign-inspired and related to last year’s bombings in the same city.

Ahvaz was the scene of bombings in June and October that the government blamed on Iranian Arab extremists who were allegedly trained abroad and maintained ties to foreign governments, including Britain. The October bombings killed six people and the June attacks killed at least eight. Britain has denied any connection. […]

Nezam Molla Hoveizeh, a Khuzestan lawmaker, alleged Tuesday’s explosions were the work of Iranian Arab separatists who have offices in London and are supported by Britain.

“The bombers are directed by the British. Britain is the main culprit behind the blasts. The British government offers financial and material support to these terrorists,” he told The Associated Press.

Iran has repeatedly accused Britain of provoking unrest in Khuzestan, which borders that part of Iraq where 8,500 British soldiers are based as part of the U.S.-led military coalition.

Oil-rich Kuzestan province? Arab separatists backed by the British? I wonder why the British are being accused of aiding Arab seperatists in this exotic sounding locale? And would it have anything to do with the recent racheting up of rhetoric from conservatives, both in

Secretary of State Condi Rice said last week, “There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment.”

and out

“If we don’t have a very serious systematic program to replace the government of Iran, we’re going to live in an unbelievably dangerous world,” Gingrich said during an exclusive interview with HUMAN EVENTS. “This is 1935 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to Adolf Hitler as we’ve seen.”

of the Bush administration regarding the grave danger of Iran’s nuclear program and the threat it poses to our national security?

Well, let’s see if we can find some answers, shall we?
First, is the situation really that grave? Over the past several weeks, Israeli officials have trumpeted that their armed forces are prepared to strike Iran at any time to eliminate this so-called nuclear weapons program. In addition, some American media reports have indicated that Iran is only months away from testing a nuclear bomb.

Yet, there is countervailing evidence that the danger is simply not that imminent. From the CIA’s own NIE report last year which stated that Iran is ten years away from succesfully producing nukes, to Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA (whose inspectors are monitoring Iran’s program) who told Newsweek recently that:

We are there on the ground and we are saying we don’t see a clear and present danger.

Soj has a good review of the arguments as to why Iran is unlikely to obtain the Bomb anytime soon in this blog post entitled Iran Mania. It’s well worth reading.

So, if the nuclear threat Iran poses is much less dangerous than we have been led to believe by our neoconservative brethren, what other possible reason could Bush have for wanting to initiate another war, and what possible connection could it have with the bombing incidents that have occurred in the Iranian province of Kuzestan?

To answer that question, we need to find out what importance Kuzestan has to both Iran and the world community.

Kuzestan is a small province located in the southwest part of Iran, bordering Iraq. Unlike the rest of Iran, it has a very diverse ethnic population which includes a number of Arab and Arabic speaking peoples. It’s also the place where most of Iran’s oil reserves are located:

The vast majority of Iran’s crude oil reserves are located in giant onshore fields in the southwestern Khuzestan region near the Iraqi border and the Persian Gulf. Most of Iran’s current oil production is accounted for by the following fields: Ahwaz-Bangestan . . . , Marun, Gachsaran, Agha Jari, and Bibi Hakimeh. . . . During 2002, Iran produced about 3.5 million bbl/d of oil.

Three things of note here which bear repeating. First, almost all of Iran’s oil reserves are located in Kuzestan. Second those reserves are right next door to Iraq, specifically the southeastern portion of Iraq now under British control. Third, Kuzestan has a significant Arab population (how much we can’t say because Iran doesn’t provide specific demographic information).

In fact, the US military has long had plans to invade Kuzestan in the event of a crisis that threatened the West’s access to the oil located there. The most recent plan is OPLAN 1002-04, also known as the “Kuzestan Gambit”:

OPLAN 1002-04 has probably been revised to reflect the American occupation of Iraq, and the power projection opportunities this provides against Iran. The Zagros Mountains form a natural pallisade defending Iran from incursions from Iraq. The Iranian province of Khuzestan is the one large piece of flat Iranian terrain to the west of the Zagros Mountains. American heavy forces could swiftly occupy Khuzestan, and in doing so seize control of most of Iran’s oil resources, and non-trivial portions of the country’s water supply and electrical generating capacity.

So, a war with Iran need not involve the invasion of the entire country to be a “success” from an American standpoint. By occupying Kuzestan, American and British forces could effectively pressure Iran’s government to abandon their nuclear ambitions, should they choose to do so, or they could pull a mini-Iraq and attempt to establish an independent “democracy” in Kuzestan, one which, of course would grant the US military bases and a right of occupation.

Of course this isn’t some brilliant analysis I just came to on my own. I have to give credit to Zoltan Grossman, a a Member of the Faculty in Geography and Native American Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Specifically, this article published on the web at ZNet:

As their forces are increasingly bogged down in Iraq, George W. Bush and Tony Blair are laying the groundwork for their next military expansion, next door in Syria or Iran.

Their confrontation with Iran, in particular, has long been in the cards. Three years before the invasion of Iraq, the Project for the New American Century asserted that Iran “may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has.”

When the U.S. media reports on the growing confrontation with Iran, it invariably focuses on Tehran’s nuclear program, Iranian leaders’ verbal sparring with Israel, and how both outside challenges are strengthening the hand of Iranian “conservative” hardliners against “moderate” reformers.

Yet little attention has been paid to the potential role of ethnic minorities in the Iran crisis, particularly of the Iranian Arab minority, centered in the southwestern province of Khuzestan. Events in the oil-rich province bordering Iraq could serve as a harbinger of U.S.-British intentions in Iran, and expose Khuzestan as Iran’s Achilles Heel. Recently, a series of bombings and ethnic clashes has begun to show that something is rotten in Khuzestan, which could be an early warning of a coming war.

These are the bombings that I refereed to at the beginning of this diary. All occurred in Kuzestan, all supposedly set off by “Arab seperatists” and all alleged by the Iranian government to have been intigated/supported by the British government. As Grossman notes, they may have good reason to make such claims:

In 2005, the conflict between Iraqi Shi’ites and the occupation forces has grown more intense, particularly in the oil-rich British occupation zone around Basra. A violent series of events has oddly pointed toward neighboring Khuzestan as (once again) the best barometer of conflict along the Iran-Iraq border.

In Basra on September 19, British troops clashed with Iraqi police and Shi’ite militia, who had ironically welcomed the toppling of Saddam two years ago. The police had arrested two British undercover commandos who possessed suspicious bomb-making materials. British troops launched an armored raid on the jail to free their agents, fighting the same Iraqi police they had earlier trained. Iraqis had thought it strange that British agents would be caught with the types of bombs associated with insurgents attacking “Coalition” troops, and some assumed that the agents were trying to pit Iraqi religious groups against each other.

Yet at the same time, bombs were going off across the border in Khuzestan. In June, a series of car bombings in Ahvaz (75 miles from Basra) killed 6 people. In August, Iran arrested a group of Arab separatist rebels, and accused them of links to British intelligence in Basra. In September, explosions hit Khuzestani cities, halting crude oil transfers from onshore wells. On October 15, two major bomb explosions in an Ahvaz market killed 4 and injured 95. A November 3 analysis in Asia Times blames Iraqi Sunni insurgents for the bombings.

Iranian officials accused Britain of backing the attacks, and tied the rebel bombs to the British commando incident in Basra. The Daily Star of Beirut reported on October 17 that Iranian officials “point to Western collusion in the sudden spike this year in ethnic unrest in the strategic, oil-producing province of Khuzestan and describe it as proof of a shadowy war that is receiving far less coverage in the international press than events in Iraq. Since the beginning of 2005, riots and a bombing campaign timed to coincide with the June presidential elections rocked Khuzestan’s major cities.“

Indeed, Grossman is not the only person who has seen a “foreign influence” (i.e., American and/or British) in this sudden wave of bombing attacks and unrest. American Scott Ritter also warned last year that the Bush administration was alreeady secretly engaged in fomenting opposition to the regime in Iran, long before the recent warnings regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The following excerpts are from his article, dated June 20, 2005, entitled “The US War with Iran has Already Begun.”

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. […]

American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.

In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.

No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Arab Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.

A much shorter route to Tehran now exists – the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.

US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.

Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.

And Ritter is not the only American who thinks Bush and the neoconservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld have long planned for a war against Iran. Seymour Hersh also made the same allegations last year in the New Yorker:

George W. Bush’s re-election was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control – against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism – during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way…. “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah – we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Yes, I know that a Bush spokesperson, Dan Bartlett, said Hersh’s report was riddled with inaccuracies.” Notably, however, he never came straight out and denied that the Bush administration and the Pentagon were planning for a war against Iran. It was a classic case of a non-denial denial that looks good initially, but upon reflection seems rather hollow.

This is what I think is going on. Admittedly it’s speculation, but not without a basis in reality, as we know it.

I think Bush and Cheney had plans to go after Iran, possibly last year, but more likely this year, to coincide with the 2006 mid-term elections. After all, Bush is at his best wearing the Commander-in-Chief hat (in Rove’s view), so I’m sure that political considerations would come into play as to the timing of any attack or threat of attack.

I also think that intially they hoped to use “ethnic strife and unrest” in Kuzestan as a causus belli, but that recent developments following the Iranian elections (which it seems likely they attempted to influence through the use of violence by opposition groups) have given them an even better excuse: Iran’s so-called nuclear threat resulting from its decision to resume uranium enrichment.

The statements made by Mr. Ahmadinejad regarding the Holocaust and his desire to wipe out Israel, have also played nicely into their hands. Such comments allow them to put Newt Gingrich out on the stump calling the Iranian President the reincarnation of Hitler, and no one even bats an eye at the comparison.

I don’t know how long they will let this play out diplomatically, in the UN or otherwise, but I’m willing to bet that this Fall, at the latest, we will see a call for Congressional authorization to attack Iran. That’s assuming, of course, that Bush deems it necessary to even seek such an authorization. After all, the war on terror was declared back in 2001, and as we all know Bush thinks that gives him the authority to do any damn thing he wants.

It’s likely to be a rough ride this year, folks.