It’s getting close to the Fourth of July and you can bet Vice President Cheney will be enjoying his secure undisclosed location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. You can also bet that he will be monitoring a bizarre secret dance with Al Qaeda that is currently going on. This morning’s New York Times reports the frustration CIA officers have in not being able to pursue Al Qaeda into the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
A (new plan) was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive. But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light.
This did not make much sense until I read Sy Hersh’s new piece in The New Yorker about Vice President Cheney’s secret war inside Iran. Here, Cheney is using Al Quaeda linked Sunni groups inside Iran to violently harrass the majority Shiite’s into over-reacting, thereby giving the US a “cassus belli” to attack Iran.
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baertold me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
While Cheney uses the Baluchi’s , supplied from their home base in Baluchistan in Southwest Pakistan, and the even more Al Qaeda trained, Jundallah, to kill Revolutionary Guards inside Iran, the normal military chain of command is kept completely out of the loop. Two months ago, Admiral William Fallon, head of Centcom, resigned over differences with Cheney on Iran policy.
Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility.
It’s bad enough that the commander of all forces in the Mid-East is kept out of the loop, but what’s worse is that congress is totally AWOL on this whole operation.
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.
My conclusion on this is that Cheney’s seeming Attention Deficit to capturing Bin Laden may have a darker side. His desire to provoke a war with the Shiite regime in Tehran, means he is willing to quietly ally with the perpetrators of 9/11 operating out of the Tribal Areas of Pakistan to achieve his larger goal. According to Hersh, four Democrats, in the so called Gang of Eight that signs off on top secret operations–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes–have gone along with Cheney and provided the $400 million for this operation. It’s time for Congress to make a decision whether we are going to war with Iran.
It is not for Dick Cheney and the Gang of Eight to decide.
12 responses so far ↓
goesdownbitter // June 30, 2008 at 8:22 am |
Congress in the form of both parties have rolled over and let the administration do whatever they wanted for the last seven and a half years. The economy is wrecked, the military is wrecked, the Constitution is wrecked and still there is no opposition to the ruinous policies.
Our only conclusion is that the conspiracy theorists are right. Bush and Cheney do own the media, corporate America, Democrats, Republicans and we are all unwashed peasants toiling in the fields of our overlords drugged by prescriptions.
“Will no one rid us of this troublesome administration?”
Alex Bowles // June 30, 2008 at 9:04 am |
Our Constitution anticipated people like Cheney and Bush. It did not anticipate ‘opposition’ like Pelosi and Reid.
Therein lies the fatal flaw.
Alex // June 30, 2008 at 9:51 am |
Alex, I agree, it’s just sickening how Pelosi et al are just rolling over for Big Daddy Cheney.
Incidentally, Reyes is pretty funny:
“In a December 2006 interview with Congressional Quarterly, Reyes said that al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, was “predominantly probably Shi’ite.” He also avoided answering the question whether Hezbollah, a Shi’ite organization, was Sunni or Shi’ite, answering now famously “”Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah? … Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?” Reyes, who has been a ranking member of the Select Intelligence Committee for a number of years, was criticized for the gaffe.[6]”
In the same interview, Reyes said he favors sending more troops to Iraq: “on a temporary basis, I’m willing to ramp them up by twenty or thirty thousand … for, I don’t know, two months, four months, six months – but certainly that would be an exception.”[7] Yet, a month later, when President George W. Bush proposed sending approximately 21,500 more troops, Reyes said to the El Paso Times, “we don’t have the capability to escalate even to this minimal level.”[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvestre_Reyes
STS // June 30, 2008 at 10:53 am |
Sadly, a big section of the congressional dems are a sort of inbred ‘don’t rock the boat’ crowd who got used to minority status and have made fundraising inroads int their own mainstream republocratic ‘the business of government is pork’ business communities in their districts.
I wish Obama would set a more aggressive tone on a couple of key points (like no wider war, and FISA accountability). The party needs some galvanizing. (That’s a sort o pun … galvanizing involves aligning the orientations of atoms in a metal.)
Dan // June 30, 2008 at 12:47 pm |
You know what I really hate? When a lot of other people start saying things that sound like, “The revolution is over. The billionaires won. The Republocrats are in control.”
It leads me to suspect that maybe I’m not a paranoid wackjob after all…that maybe I’m actually right.
So KNOCK IT OFF.
P. Cross // June 30, 2008 at 1:26 pm |
Do you really think that whats going on overseas is the real problem, like it or not the founding fathers knew that foreign policy couldn’t be run by committee thats why i’st the responsibility of the Pres. alone.
The congress has always had the power of the purse and still dose. If they truly believe, they can go on the record.
Thats the rub isn’t it once they commit they have to live with the consequences. Bush has to, Cheney has to and The next President will have to.
This will all land in his lap and when he gazes up the hill he won’t see any friends.
STS // June 30, 2008 at 4:03 pm |
Dan:
Sorry to reinforce your paranoid tendencies with my own. I for one don’t think the billionaires “have won” — though they clearly are “winning”. The battle hasn’t really been joined because the billionaire-controlled media do stuff likethis to keep our ADHD levels high enough to prevent organized opposition to pork-ocracy.
Personally, I don’t particularly dislike billionaires or what they do most of the day. It’s not money that’s the root of all evil it’s the love of money that’s bad news. What I hate about “the billionaires” is the way our mass culture promotes mindless worship of the ground they walk on. That’s quite sufficient to keep us divided and irresolute.
Jon Taplin // June 30, 2008 at 5:23 pm |
Dan- I don’t think things are half as bad as you imagine. This will be a reform election and although the new President will have a lot of problems to solve, I think this country is totally capable of reforming itself.
Morgan Warstler // June 30, 2008 at 6:04 pm |
“Last month, the Center for a New American Security, which has become something like Obama’s foreign-policy think tank, released a report that argued against a timetable for withdrawal, regardless of the state of the war, and in favor of “conditional engagement,” declaring, “Under this strategy, the United States would not withdraw its forces based on a firm unilateral schedule. Rather, the time horizon for redeployment would be negotiated with the Iraqi government and nested within a more assertive approach to regional diplomacy. The United States would make it clear that Iraq and America share a common interest in achieving sustainable stability in Iraq, and that the United States is willing to help support the Iraqi government and build its security and governance capacity over the long term, but only so long as Iraqis continue to make meaningful political progress.” It’s impossible to know if this persuasive document mirrors Obama’s current thinking, but here’s a clue: it was co-written by one of his Iraq advisers, Colin Kahl.”
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/07/07/080707taco_talk_packer
Ken Ballweg // June 30, 2008 at 6:58 pm |
In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” Junot Díaz uses a wonderful term for the form of government under Trujillo: Kleptocracy.
So descriptive of this administration.
Lewis // July 1, 2008 at 4:55 am |
Jon,
I wrote the linked post while taking your seminar. As we wrote in the class blog, this is not surprising; frankly, this fixation on Iran ignores the far larger, utter, abject failure of both Democrats and Republicans to get the CIA working after 60 years.
Have you read Tim Weiner’s LEGACY OF ASHES? I enjoy your blog, but certain issues require essay form and this is certainly one of them.
We can simply say, well, let’s engage in public diplomacy, etc.
But I do agree with you that there should be a national debate in Congress about Iran. Of course, I think it’s naive to think this will happen.
You seem to have an addiction to blogging now, which can distort the actual difficulty of engaging the public. “It’s time for Congress to make a decision whether we are going to war with Iran.”
Please. Not when the Olympics are on and gas is so high. Why stress when it’ll look like some cool anime/machima fighting we can all blog about.
Bush and Cheney want another war « Liberal Eye // July 2, 2008 at 8:38 am |
[...] For some time now there has been a rising tide of ‘chatter’ from segments of the US media that Bush and Cheney are planning another war. Incredibly, it seems that they are even funding Al Qaeda –linked groups to achieve this as Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh outlines in the New Yorker magazine. (Hat Tip: Jon Taplin) [...]