THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Seymour Hersh has done another top notch reporting job in this weeks New Yorker. This time he reveals the covert operations being conducted in Iran, allegedly for intelligence, but more likely to cause a flash point for war. Oh, and guess who gave the White House the necessary support.

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. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Like most middle east policy from the Bushovik crew, it derives from a comic book outlook of what can be done coupled with a certainty that it will turn out exactly the way they anticipated, you know, just like Iraq. Nevertheless, Cheney will have his war.

The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

A curious result of these actions has been to reveal Cheney's true colors as we have allied ourselves with Sunni religious extremist Baluchis of the sort that attacked the World Trade Center. What is worse, the Iranians have publicly identified the elephant in the room from all this talk of war.

The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned that Tehran would respond to an attack against it by barraging Israel with missiles and controlling a key oil passageway in the Persian Gulf, said a newspaper report published Saturday.

The report in the conservative Jam-e-Jam newspaper comes after the disclosure of a recent Israeli military exercise over the Mediterranean Sea that was seen as sending a message to Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions.

Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari said there were strong deterrents against striking Iran, including the country’s missile power, the vulnerability of Israeli and U. S. forces in the region and the low probability of a successful attack.

This would be no deterrent to a couple of old oil men, $20 a gallon is what they live for. And their casual disregard for the military would make any and all losses acceptable.

Afterthought: Having now endured 7+ years of these shitheads in the White House, can we now call it The Shit House?