Those little bits about Hizbollah's planning for the capture of Israeli soldiers that I mentioned the other day are looking more noteworthy all the time. Jim Lobe reports on "a broad consensus among the U.S. political elite" that Iran is behind all the troubles to which Israel is responding in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon: Mideast Conflict Boosts Chances of Iran-US Showdown Inter Press Service 07/19/06.
Lobe writes of this depressing development:
And its repeated rejection of U.S. demands that it respond to the pending proposal for a deal on its nuclear programme adds to the thesis that Iran is engaged in its own form of asymmetric warfare against Washington. Indeed, it has become accepted wisdom here that Iran encouraged Hezbollah's Jul. 12 raid as a way to divert attention from growing international concern over its nuclear programme.
"There has been a lot of connecting of the dots back to Iran," according to ret. Col. August Richard Norton, who teaches international relations at Boston University. "This goes well beyond the (neo-conservative) 'Weekly Standard' crowd; we've seen the major newspapers all accept the premise that what happened Jul. 12 was engineered in some way by Iran as a way of undermining efforts to impede its nuclear programme."
"(There has been a) build-up of domestic forces that now see Iran as inexorably at the centre of the entire regional spiderweb," noted Graham Fuller, a former top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and RAND Corporation Middle East expert. "The mainstream is unfortunately grasping for coherent explanations, (and) the neo-con/hard right offers a fairly simple, self-serving vision on the cause of the problems, and their solution."
In much the same way that Saddam Hussein was depicted, particularly by neo-conservatives, as the strategic domino whose fall would unleash a process of democratisation, de-radicalisation, moderation, and modernisation throughout the Middle East, so now Iran is portrayed as the "Gordian Knot" whose cutting would not only redress many of Washington's recent setbacks, but also renew prospects for regional "transformation" in the way that it was originally intended. (my emphasis)
The idea that Hizbollah's July 12 raid was a carefully planned diversion coordinated precisely with Iran's nuclear diplomacy doesn't sound quite so convincing if they were already trying to do this months ago. See the Nicolas Blanford article I quoted in the earlier post.
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