[Peace-discuss] Obama's carrot&stick kills people

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Obama, with his peace overtures, serves as the smiley-face mask for some pretty 
loathsome activities. The U.S. government claims to be fighting terrorism, yet 
is sponsoring groups that plant bombs in mosques, kidnap tourists as well as 
Iranian policemen, and fund their activities with drug-running in addition to 
covert subsidies courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. The recent suicide bombing in 
Zahedan was the work of Jundallah. These are war crimes, carried out with the 
full knowledge of the leaders of both parties in Congress, paid for by you and 
me, and conducted in our name."

	War With Iran: Has It Already Begun?
	Obama talks peace with Iran, but what's he doing under the radar?
	by Justin Raimondo, June 03, 2009

In public, when it comes to the Iranian question, President Obama is all sweet 
reason and kissy-face. His recent video message to the Iranian people was just 
what the doctor ordered. However, this public performance is severely undercut 
by an ongoing covert program aimed at regime-change in Tehran – or, at least, at 
undermining the Iranian regime to such an extent that it must respond in some way.

This covert action program, reported by Seymour Hersh last year, was started by 
the Bush administration and funded to the tune of $400 million. The U.S. is, in 
effect, conducting a secret war against Tehran, a covert campaign aimed at 
recruiting Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities – who make up the majority of 
the population in certain regions, such as in the southeast borderlands near 
Pakistan – into a movement to topple the government in Tehran, or, at least, to 
create so much instability that U.S. intervention to "keep order" in the region 
is justified. Given recent events in Iran – a suicide bombing in the southeast 
province of Sistan-Baluchistan and at least two other incidents – the effort is 
apparently ongoing.

A suicide-bomber blast, which occurred inside a mosque in the city of Zahedan, 
killed at least 30 people: a rebel Sunni group with reported links to the U.S. 
claimed responsibility. The Iranian government immediately accused the U.S. and 
Israel of being behind the attack. The violence was very shortly followed up by 
attacks on banks, water-treatment facilities, and other key installations in and 
around Zahedan, including a strike against the local campaign headquarters of 
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Add to this an attempted bombing of an 
Iranian airliner, which took off from the southwestern city of Ahvaz, and you 
have a small-scale insurgency arising on Iran’s eastern frontier.

The Iranians, confronted with peace overtures from Washington, can be blamed for 
wondering if the war against them has already begun.

A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett 
opines that President Obama’s "Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already 
failed" due to America’s covert actions in Iran. In the current debate within 
the administration over what course to take with Iran, hard-liners like Dennis 
Ross – special envoy for the region – argue that Iran’s lack of a positive 
response to Obama’s overtures are evidence the whole effort is futile, and that 
it’s time to start thinking about harsh sanctions and military action. The 
Leveretts, however, have a different take:

"But this ignores the real reason Iranian leaders have not responded to the new 
president more enthusiastically: the Obama administration has done nothing to 
cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program, begun in 
President George W. Bush’s second term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars 
to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Under these circumstances, the Iranian 
government – regardless of who wins the presidential elections on June 12 – will 
continue to suspect that American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, 
ultimately, hostile."

Last year, the same terrorist group behind the Zahedan suicide bomb blast 
kidnapped 16 Iranian policemen and videotaped their execution. The video was 
played on al-Arabiya television.

Imagine if, say, the governments of Mexico and the U.S. were engaged in talks 
aimed at improving relations between the two countries and all the while the 
former was funding and arming terrorist groups that were sowing death and 
destruction in America’s southwestern cities. Imagine if these terrorists seized 
16 American cops and, when the U.S. refused to negotiate with the 
hostage-takers, murdered them and posted the grisly proceedings on YouTube. The 
reaction would be so swift and deadly that the Mexicans wouldn’t know what hit them.

Little wonder, then, that there hasn’t been much of a response to Obama’s peace 
feelers. In this context, it’s only a matter of time before hard-liners in 
Tehran gain the upper hand and launch a provocation – aimed, perhaps, at U.S. 
forces in Iraq – that precludes any negotiating process and sets us on a course 
for war.

In mounting a campaign to destabilize Iran, the U.S. is allying itself with some 
pretty loathsome elements. Jundallah, for example, is a Sunni militant 
organization, created to establish a Baluchi Islamic state in southeastern Iran 
and parts of Pakistan. One of the founding members of Jundallah was allegedly 
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational commander of 9/11 attacks, who 
was arrested in 2003 in Pakistan and is now in U.S. custody.

The current leader of Jundallah, Abdolmalek Rigi, is a bloodthirsty maniac even 
by the standards of the region. In an interview with Dan Rather, Rigi showed a 
video in which he personally beheaded his own brother-in-law, al-Qaeda-style.

Rigi denies having a separatist agenda and claims he wants to establish a 
"United States of Iran," presumably with more autonomy for Iranian Baluchistan. 
He also denies links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and he characterizes Jundallah 
– which has since changed its name to the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement – 
as an Islamic "awakening" movement.

This "awakening" parlance should be all too familiar to Middle East observers: 
it is the same sort of "awakening" that energized the U.S. military "surge" in 
Iraq, made possible by an American alliance with Sunni tribes who claimed to 
have been awakened to the danger posed by al-Qaeda. Substitute Iran for 
al-Qaeda, and you have the echoes of the Sunni-card strategy being played by the 
U.S. and Israel throughout the region. Support for Jundallah fits in nicely with 
the effort to forge an anti-Iranian united front, bringing together the U.S. and 
its Sunni allies in the region, with the Israelis providing backup and (largely 
covert) support.

Obama, with his peace overtures, serves as the smiley-face mask for some pretty 
loathsome activities. The U.S. government claims to be fighting terrorism, yet 
is sponsoring groups that plant bombs in mosques, kidnap tourists as well as 
Iranian policemen, and fund their activities with drug-running in addition to 
covert subsidies courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. The recent suicide bombing in 
Zahedan was the work of Jundallah. These are war crimes, carried out with the 
full knowledge of the leaders of both parties in Congress, paid for by you and 
me, and conducted in our name.

What’s even more outrageous is that the Obama administration, far from decrying 
or even trying to distance itself from such activities, is endorsing and 
expanding this style of warfare by appointing Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to 
head up U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. McChrystal was formerly 
commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a secret army of 
special-ops commandos who murdered, tortured, and kidnapped suspected terrorists 
throughout the world.

McChrystal’s appointment is part of the "new thinking" in the Pentagon that goes 
under the general rubric of COIN [.pdf], which emphasizes the political 
alongside the military as an essential element of successful counterinsurgency 
operations. The Jundallah operation reeks of this new counterinsurgency doctrine 
– championed by Democratic think-tanks and Iraq commander David Petraeus – 
that’s all the rage in the Obama administration. I’m thinking, in particular, of 
Jundallah’s recent name-change: I wonder what Pentagon contractor came up with 
"Iranian People’s Resistance Movement."

What’s going on in Iran today – a sustained campaign of terrorism directed 
against civilians and government installations alike – is proof positive that 
nothing has really changed much in Washington, as far as U.S. policy toward Iran 
is concerned. We are on a collision course with Tehran, and both sides know it. 
Obama’s public "reaching out" to the Iranians is a fraud of epic proportions. 
While it’s true that our covert terrorist attacks on Iran were initiated under 
the Bush regime, under Obama we’re seeing no letup in these sorts of incidents; 
if anything, they’ve increased in frequency and severity.

Of course, we hear nothing about this from the U.S. media, Seymour Hersh 
excepted. All we get from them, and from the "progressive" community, for that 
matter, is cheerleading for the administration. Every time he betrays them, the 
limousine liberals and their media amen corner blame it on bad advisers, the 
Republicans, or the iron necessity of "moderating" his liberal politics in the 
name of "pragmatism." Yet in a situation such as this, when the first shots of a 
war against Iran are being fired, one has to ask: doesn’t the president know 
about this – and, if so, does he approve?

Well, of course he knows, you dummy – it wouldn’t be happening if he didn’t give 
the green light, now would it?

Those who dread the prospect of war with Iran and hope to avoid it are a bit 
tardy in their concerns. I have news for these people: we’re already at war with 
Iran, and have been for quite a while. It’s only a matter of time, and 
circumstance, before it becomes official.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/06/02/war-with-iran-has-it-already-begun/