From Ray Close, via Larry Johnson.

A few days ago, I received a report from a friend in Washington who
has very close connections to high-ranking intelligence analysts at
the Pentagon. I will omit the names of the individuals identified, but
will summarize the information that this excellent source provided to
me. (Please note: This source is NOT the one who told me a couple of
days ago that the US would indeed be prepared to send a contingent of
American troops to serve in southern Lebanon as an incentive to
others, if necessary, to join an international force to impose and
then help maintain a ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah.)

My source confirmed in detail the fact that intelligence being
produced for the Bush Administration by the Pentagon strongly supports
the thesis that Hizballah operations are directly controlled and
closely managed from Teheran. My source considers this an exaggerated
picture of the real situation. He believes that this assessment
contributes to an unhealthy and even dangerous mindset in Washington,
leading to potentially serious miscalculations and errors of judgment
by President Bush and his closest advisors at this very critical time.

My source, who is much more of an expert on Iran and Hizballah than I
am, believes that, dangerous and damaging as Hassan Nasrallah’s
actions may be to U.S. interests in the region, he and his movement
are not totally under Iran’s direction and control. He holds the view
that although Hizballah, Hamas, al-Qa-ida, and the Salafi elements of
the Iraqi insurgency (among others) may have many important interests
and objectives in common, they should not all be regarded (and dealt
with) as if they were tightly interlocking parts of a single worldwide
conspiracy. This is apparently how the intelligence experts in the
Pentagon tend to assess the phenomenon called International Terrorism,
most particularly and immediately in the case of Hizballah’s
relationship with Iran.

When I received today’s report, I wrote the following message back to
my source. This is exactly what I said:


I agree with your estimate that Nasrallah makes his own decisions, and
would not necessarily ask for approval in advance or accept direction
from Iran on all operational matters. That would not fit my experience
with any Arab who recognizes that a foreign party (Western or Persian)
was trying to control and manage his affairs.

I also fully agree with your estimate that the enthusiastic acclaim
that Nasrallah is receiving from both Shiite and non-Shiite Arabs
across the region will intensify his natural tendency toward
self-importance and independence of action. (His logistical dependence
on Iran is not enough of a handle; Iran’s leaders could not now
succeed in imposing their will on Hizballah’s leader any more than
they could successfully challenge the authority and independence of
the most prominent Shiite leaders in Iraq. In both cases, events have
proceeded too far for that.) Nasrallah will, I’d guess, become
increasingly more secular — less the Shiite religious cleric, and
more the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic leader in a bid to become the
primary champion and action hero of both Arab and Muslim nationalism.
(A European friend of mine, who lived in Damascus for several years
studying the Palestinian rejectionist movement based there, tells me
that for the past five years or more, when he walked into any
Palestinian office in Damascus, from PDFLP to Hamas, the picture he
saw on the wall was that of Hassan Nasrallah, not Assad or Arafat or
anyone else.)

Nasrallah’s charismatic popular appeal goes considerably beyond his
Hizballah and Shiite constituencies, and recent “glorious victories
over the Zionist enemy” cannot help but inflate this image further.
Worrisome as that may be, our ability to influence the course of
events will not be helped if we fail to understand what motivates him
and who controls his agenda. He is not, and never will be, a little
puppet of the Persians.

I am fascinated to hear your opinion that analysts in the Pentagon are
such strong advocates of the view that Nasrallah is primarily an agent
of the clerics in Teheran, and I am disturbed to learn that this
analysis enjoys so much credibility at the senior levels of the USG.
This is, of course, the point of view being pushed so hard by both the
Israelis and the neocons in Washington.

I was equally upset to hear this view repeated unanimously (and
identically) by a variety of people on national TV yesterday, coming
from Senators McCain, Schumer, George Allen and John Warner as well as
official spokespersons from State and the NSC. It was as if they were
all reading from the same artfully crafted briefing sheet handed to
them by some staffer who got it straight from either JINSA or the
Washington Institute.

It is a dangerously one-sided point of view that furthers Israel’s
long-standing objective of luring the US into a violent confrontation
with Iran. The ultimate consequence could be that everyone in the USG
— Democrats as well as Republicans — from the President on down
— will, by such dangerously oversimplified logic and careless
rhetoric, accelerate America’s momentum toward:

(1) officially defining and treating Hizballah’s actions
against Israel just as if they were atrocities by international
terrorism aimed directly at the people of the United States, and
thereby:

(2) making it almost inevitable that both political parties in the US
will talk themselves into a “moral” commitment to aggressively
confront those who encourage, support and harbor Hizballah terrorists
(i.e. Syria and Iran), and thereby:

(3) making impossible the establishment of any constructive dialogue
with either Iran or Syria in which other critical issues, such as Iraq
and nuclear proliferation, for example, might be dealt with by means
short of violence. In other words, this widely-supported urban legend
is rapidly becoming another potentially disastrous conflation of
biased intelligence analysis, simplistic political bombast and lunatic
fringe right-wing Christianity that could drive us toward another
major military confrontation — whether or not that was really our
carefully considered and intelligently reasoned objective.

I do not think I am overstating the danger here. Once momentum starts
moving in that direction, we might soon find ourselves in another
situation where stubborn pride, as much as anything else, would make
it hard for us to modify our rhetoric and admit our inability and that
of our Israeli allies to disarm and dismantle the military arm of
Hizballah. It’s a proxy war right now, but if our surrogates (the
Israelis) fail to achieve their objectives, they will attempt very
purposefully to broaden the conflict into a much larger one directly
involving the United States and Iran.

We may be thoughtlessly maneuvering ourselves into another situation
in which critical United States national interests are subordinated to
the much narrower interests of Israel.

…………….

Ray Close is a former CIA analyst in the Near East division and a
member of the steering group for Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity; his recent posts at No Quarter include “Bush
and Blair Blowing Bubbles,” “Truth
in Simplicity,” “From
Rasha in Beirut,” “U.S.
Policy in Lebanon,” and “HUMINT
in History.”