After the surge ... what next? (The Observer)

[Eugene]

After the surge ... what next?

President Bush, under fire for sending 20,000 extra troops into Iraq, is now ready
to target Iran for the chaos in Baghdad and beyond

Peter Beaumont in London, Paul Harris in New York, and Robert Tait in Tehran
Sunday January 14, 2007
The Observer

-snip-

But in the past few months, George W Bush, has signed a presidential order targeting
another group that his administration alleges is in Iraq: Iranians - Revolutionary
Guards and intelligence officers. Iran, the Shia state, is destabilising Iraqi politics
and co-ordinating attacks on US forces by Shia insurgents, claim the Americans.

-snip-

Last week, US troops in helicopters launched a raid on an Iranian facility in Kurdistan
-claiming afterwards that they had arrested a high-ranking Revolutionary Guard officer
among six Iranians seized and found maps of neighbourhoods in Baghdad in which Sunnis
'could be' evicted. US officials also claimed they had found proof there of Iranian
involvement in last summer's conflict in Lebanon. None of this 'evidence' has yet been
produced for public scrutiny.

-snip-

What is clear is the US intention. In a newspaper interview on Friday, US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice revealed that Bush had decided to undertake a broad military
offensive against Iranian operatives in Iraq. 'There has been a decision to go after
these networks,' Rice said, adding that Bush had decided to act acted 'after a period
of time in which we saw increasing activity' among Iranians in Iraq, 'and increasing
lethality in what they were producing'.

-snip-

But there is another crucial issue - of perception. For what America sees as 'evidence'
of Iranian meddling, including the presence of numbers of Iranian officials, in Iraq,
is not quite so obvious viewed from the perspective of Iraq's Shia political parties,
many of whose senior figures lived for two decades and more in exile in Iran, and look
to its powerful Shia neighbour as both a friend and a religious and political exemplar
in the midst of crisis. Iraq's most senior Shia cleric was born in Iran - although he
rejects the role of the clerics in the Iranian state. Many of the returning 'Iranians',
as Iraqis who stayed under Saddam have dubbed the returning exiles, speak Farsi as
comfortably as Arabic and when they want a break from the violence they holiday
in villas in Iran.

-snip-

Full article: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1989912,00.html

[IndianaGreen]

1. An excellent article that illustrates American's ignorance about Iraq

and how that ignorance, has fueled the disastrous foreign policy decisions we have made in Iraq and in the Middle East as a whole.