Rand Paul voted for Iran sanctions?
- Thread starter AminCad
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As you've backed this up with a source, I concede; the content you've quoted is objectionable.
Again, I was operating under the premise (based on having read brief summaries of the bill as simply a statement that the US government would end financial ties with Iran's central bank) that it simply meant the government would not trade with, subsidize or otherwise interact with Iran's central bank, which would be perfectly fine, in my estimation- in fact, I would very much like it if they would never interact with any central bank anywhere. Prohibiting private businesses from interacting with Iran's central bank, however, is another matter. It isn't unconstitutional, since it does in fact, consist in regulating "commerce with foreign nations," but it is unlibertarian and beyond any role I believe government should validly take. I disagree with Rand on this issue, though I will say in his defense that he hasn't violated his oath of office.
Slutter McGee
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I love Rand for this. Play the fucking game man. This is why I gave him money. So he could make a stand when he could make a difference, either in a vote or public perception. But more so because I want him to be in a position to really truly bring about change.
You people always talk about always standing on principle. I respect that. I love Ron for doing it. But even he has played the game before. Look at ear-marks. Yes, I understand the logic of his argument, but you can't deny that bringing back funds to your district from my fucking tax money is playing the game some.
I have given up trying to change America's hearts and minds. I am all for manipulation of the political environment now to save my future. That is what Rand is doing.
Stop bitching about the second best person in Congress,
Sincerely,
Slutter McGee
You people always talk about always standing on principle. I respect that. I love Ron for doing it. But even he has played the game before. Look at ear-marks. Yes, I understand the logic of his argument, but you can't deny that bringing back funds to your district from my fucking tax money is playing the game some.
I have given up trying to change America's hearts and minds. I am all for manipulation of the political environment now to save my future. That is what Rand is doing.
Stop bitching about the second best person in Congress,
Sincerely,
Slutter McGee
Galileo Galilei
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So essentially, he's not a man of principle.
Rand cut a deal with another senator, he agreed to make a worthless vote now, in exchange for an important vote in favor of civil liberties later. Some people have principles and other people have "principles".
jtstellar
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the real principled human beings who refused to live under a tyranny are all now long dead, including their families. their genes no longer remain to make a difference. if the fight for liberty comes down to 2016 and rand manages to win and reveal himself a principled guy after all, and he merely sacrificed some short sighted grandstanding you propose here--if all that is indeed proven true, just make sure you move out of the country. we aren't doing work while getting spitted on on our back just so you can sit comfortably and enjoy the fruits of victory.So essentially, he's not a man of principle.
to others less stupid: persevere to fight another day. as long as you know his heart is in the right place and he hasn't been corrupted, it's about enduring and picking fights that make a difference. yes it takes people-read and ability to judge whether someone is corrupted. if you think rand is corrupt at his core, then we're arguing about different things altogether. the question is simply whether he should play politics, when voting no amounts to grandstanding and nothing else. the answer is absolutely yes, he should play politics. if you think none of this matters and he's really just proving he's a corrupt person, there's nothing that can be said to you. you are hopeless.
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pen_thief
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THIS ^
pen_thief
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Jeez, I might not have been around here for a long time but some of the disrespect for Ron Paul from his own supporters amazes me. Ron Paul will always be one of my heroes, whether he gets into the White House or not. I know he would not vote for something like this just as a "strategic" move. Principles still mean something to me. I guess there are few left who agree.
Note: Yes, slightly old thread. I found it after I watched a Young Turks video claiming the Senate unanimously voted for sanctions. I had to see if Rand would really vote that way, given his father's views. Disappointed.
Note: Yes, slightly old thread. I found it after I watched a Young Turks video claiming the Senate unanimously voted for sanctions. I had to see if Rand would really vote that way, given his father's views. Disappointed.
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danbeaulieu
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Yeah unless Rand reads a lot of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig Von Mises in the next 4 years... I'm not sure he'd get my vote.
Ron Paul said sanctions are an act of war. This means Rand Paul voted in favor of war with Iran basically.
I`ve seen Rand speaking about occupy movement and he sounded very much like Fox news. He`s only concern was occupiers damaging private property. That`s was what he had to say. Can`t say I like what I see in him. Seems like half neocon, half libertarian. Perhaps there`s something I`m missing, but would be nice to get some clarifications.
The Machiavelian road is a slippery slope and once you embark on it there`s not telling what you gonna end up doing and where you gonna end up.
I`ve seen Rand speaking about occupy movement and he sounded very much like Fox news. He`s only concern was occupiers damaging private property. That`s was what he had to say. Can`t say I like what I see in him. Seems like half neocon, half libertarian. Perhaps there`s something I`m missing, but would be nice to get some clarifications.
The Machiavelian road is a slippery slope and once you embark on it there`s not telling what you gonna end up doing and where you gonna end up.
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GeorgiaAvenger
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Ron can't have it both ways. Sanctions can't be both 1-an act of war and 2-something that leads up to wars. War is war.
But if they are an act of war, would Ron take action if Iran enacted a sanction by blocking the strait of hormuz?
For the most part, occupy was filthy and I would never support it.
Justinfrom1776
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You don't make the connection that something that always leads up to war is in fact an act of war? I do.
GeorgiaAvenger
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Better yet, how do they expect people to vote for Ron Paul.
John F Kennedy III
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Rand Paul for President 2016!
The US-Iran economic war
By Pepe Escobar
NEW YORK - Here's a crash course on how to further wreck the global economy.
A key amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act signed by United States President Barack Obama on the last day of 2011 - when no one was paying attention - imposes sanctions on any countries or companies that buy Iranian oil and pay for it through Iran's central bank. Starting this summer, anybody who does it is prevented from doing business with the US.
This amendment - for all practical purposes a declaration of economic war - was brought to you by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), on direct orders of the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.
Torrents of spin have tried to rationalize it as the Obama administration's plan B as opposed to letting the Israeli dogs of war conduct an unilateral attack on Iran over its supposed nuclear weapons program.
Yet the original Israeli strategy was in fact even more hysterical - as in effectively preventing any country or company from paying for imported Iranian oil, with the possible exceptions of China and India. On top of it, American Israel-firsters were trying to convince anyone this would not result in relentless oil price hikes.
Once again displaying a matchless capacity to shoot themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet, governments in the European Union (EU) are debating whether or not to buy oil from Iran anymore. The existential doubt is should we start now or wait for a few months. Inevitably, like death and taxes, the result has been - what else - oil prices soaring. Brent crude is now hovering around $114, and the only way is up.
Get me to the crude on time
Iran is the second-largest Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) producer, exporting up to 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Around 450,000 of these barrels go to the European Union - the second-largest market for Iran after China.
The requisite faceless bureaucrat, EU Energy Commissioner Gunther Ottinger, has been spinning that the EU can count on Saudi Arabia to make up the shortfall from Iran.
Any self-respecting oil analyst knows Saudi Arabia does not have all the necessary extra spare capacity. Moreover, and crucially, Saudi Arabia needs to make a lot of money out of expensive oil. After all, the counter-revolutionary House of Saud badly needs these funds to bribe its subjects into dismissing any possibility of an indigenous Arab Spring.
Add to it Tehran's threat to block the Strait of Hormuz, thus preventing one-sixth of the world's oil and 70% of OPEC's exports from reaching the market; no wonder oil traders are falling over themselves to lock up as much crude as they can.
Forget about oil at an accessible $50 or even $75 a barrel. The price of oil may be destined to soon reach $120 a barrel and even $150 a barrel by summer, just as in crisis-hit 2008. OPEC, by the way, is pumping more oil than at any time since late 2008.
So what started as an Israeli-concocted roadside improvised explosive device has now developed into a multiple economic suicide bombing targeting whole sections of the global economy.
No wonder the chairman of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, Ala'eddin Broujerdi, has warned that the West may be committing a "strategic blunder" with these oil sanctions.
Translation: as it goes, the name of the game for 2012 is deep global recession.
Obama rolls the dice
First Washington leaked that sanctions on Iran's central bank were "not on the table". After all, the Obama administration itself knew this would translate into an oil price hike and a certified one-way ticket for more global recession. The Iranian regime, on top of it, would be making more money out if its oil exports.
Still, the Bibi-AIPAC combo had no trouble forcing the amendment through those Israel-firster Meccas, the US Senate and Congress - even with US Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner expressly against it.
The amendment just passed may not represent the "crippling sanctions" vociferously demanded by the Israeli government. Tehran will feel the squeeze - but not to an intolerable level. Yet only those irresponsible people at the US Congress - despised by the overwhelming majority of Americans, according to any number of polls - could possibly believe they can take Iran's 2.5 million barrels of oil a day in exports off the global market with no drastic consequences for the global economy.
Asia increasingly will need more oil - and will continue to buy oil from Iran. And oil prices will keep flirting with the stratosphere.
So why did Obama sign it? For the Obama administration, everything now is about electoral calculus. Those terminal wackos in the Republican presidential circus - with the honorable exception of Ron Paul - are peddling war on Iran the moment they're elected, and substantial swathes of the American electorate are clueless enough to buy it.
No one, though, is doing some basic math to conclude the American and European economies certainly don't need oil flirting with the $120 level if some minimal recovery is in the cards.
Show me your balls
Apart from that self-defeating, terminally in crisis euro/North Atlantic Treaty Organization bunch, everyone and his neighbor will be bypassing this Israeli-American declaration of economic war:
- Russia already said it will circumvent it.
- India is already paying for Iranian oil via Halkbank in Turkey.
- Iran is actively negotiating to sell more oil to China. Iran is China's second-largest supplier, only behind Saudi Arabia. China pays in euros, and soon may be paying in yuan. By March they both will have sealed an agreement about new pricing.
- Venezuela controls a bi-national bank with Iran since 2009; that's how Iran gets paid for business in Latin America.
- Even traditional US allies want out. Turkey - which imports around 30% of its oil from Iran.
- Will seek a waiver exempting Turkish oil importer Tupras from US sanctions.
- And South Korea will also seek a waiver, to buy around 200,000 barrels a day - 10% of its oil - from Iran in 2012.
China, India, South Korea, they all have complex two-way trade ties with Iran (China-Iran trade, for instance, is $30 billion a year, and growing). None of this will be extinguished because the Washington/Tel Aviv axis says so. So one should expect a rash of new private banks set up all across the developing world for the purpose of buying Iranian oil.
Washington wouldn't have the balls to try to impose sanctions on Chinese banks because they will be dealing with Iran.
On the other hand, one's got to praise Tehran's balls. After a relentless campaign of covert assassinations; abductions of Iranian scientists; cross-border attacks in Sistan-Balochistan province; Israeli sabotage of its infrastructure, with viruses and otherwise; invasion of territory via US spy drones; non-stop Israeli and Republican threats of an imminent "shock and awe"; and the US sale of $60 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia, still Tehran won't balk.
Tehran has just tested - successfully - its own cruise missiles, and in the Strait of Hormuz of all places. Then when Tehran reacts to the non-stop Western aggressive barrage, it is blamed with "acts of provocation".
Last Friday, the New York Times editorial board was totally in love with the Pentagon's threats against Iran, as well as calling for "maximum economic pressure".
The bottom line is that average Iranians will suffer - as average, crisis-hit, indebted Europeans will also suffer. The US economy will suffer. And whenever it feels the West is getting way too hysterical, Tehran will keep reserving the right to send oil prices skyrocketing.
The regime in Tehran will keep selling oil, will keep enriching uranium and, most of all, won't fall. Like a Hellfire missile hitting a Pashtun wedding party, these Western sanctions will miserably fail. But not without collecting a lot of collateral damage - in the West itself.
By Pepe Escobar
NEW YORK - Here's a crash course on how to further wreck the global economy.
A key amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act signed by United States President Barack Obama on the last day of 2011 - when no one was paying attention - imposes sanctions on any countries or companies that buy Iranian oil and pay for it through Iran's central bank. Starting this summer, anybody who does it is prevented from doing business with the US.
This amendment - for all practical purposes a declaration of economic war - was brought to you by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), on direct orders of the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.
Torrents of spin have tried to rationalize it as the Obama administration's plan B as opposed to letting the Israeli dogs of war conduct an unilateral attack on Iran over its supposed nuclear weapons program.
Yet the original Israeli strategy was in fact even more hysterical - as in effectively preventing any country or company from paying for imported Iranian oil, with the possible exceptions of China and India. On top of it, American Israel-firsters were trying to convince anyone this would not result in relentless oil price hikes.
Once again displaying a matchless capacity to shoot themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet, governments in the European Union (EU) are debating whether or not to buy oil from Iran anymore. The existential doubt is should we start now or wait for a few months. Inevitably, like death and taxes, the result has been - what else - oil prices soaring. Brent crude is now hovering around $114, and the only way is up.
Get me to the crude on time
Iran is the second-largest Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) producer, exporting up to 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Around 450,000 of these barrels go to the European Union - the second-largest market for Iran after China.
The requisite faceless bureaucrat, EU Energy Commissioner Gunther Ottinger, has been spinning that the EU can count on Saudi Arabia to make up the shortfall from Iran.
Any self-respecting oil analyst knows Saudi Arabia does not have all the necessary extra spare capacity. Moreover, and crucially, Saudi Arabia needs to make a lot of money out of expensive oil. After all, the counter-revolutionary House of Saud badly needs these funds to bribe its subjects into dismissing any possibility of an indigenous Arab Spring.
Add to it Tehran's threat to block the Strait of Hormuz, thus preventing one-sixth of the world's oil and 70% of OPEC's exports from reaching the market; no wonder oil traders are falling over themselves to lock up as much crude as they can.
Forget about oil at an accessible $50 or even $75 a barrel. The price of oil may be destined to soon reach $120 a barrel and even $150 a barrel by summer, just as in crisis-hit 2008. OPEC, by the way, is pumping more oil than at any time since late 2008.
So what started as an Israeli-concocted roadside improvised explosive device has now developed into a multiple economic suicide bombing targeting whole sections of the global economy.
No wonder the chairman of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, Ala'eddin Broujerdi, has warned that the West may be committing a "strategic blunder" with these oil sanctions.
Translation: as it goes, the name of the game for 2012 is deep global recession.
Obama rolls the dice
First Washington leaked that sanctions on Iran's central bank were "not on the table". After all, the Obama administration itself knew this would translate into an oil price hike and a certified one-way ticket for more global recession. The Iranian regime, on top of it, would be making more money out if its oil exports.
Still, the Bibi-AIPAC combo had no trouble forcing the amendment through those Israel-firster Meccas, the US Senate and Congress - even with US Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner expressly against it.
The amendment just passed may not represent the "crippling sanctions" vociferously demanded by the Israeli government. Tehran will feel the squeeze - but not to an intolerable level. Yet only those irresponsible people at the US Congress - despised by the overwhelming majority of Americans, according to any number of polls - could possibly believe they can take Iran's 2.5 million barrels of oil a day in exports off the global market with no drastic consequences for the global economy.
Asia increasingly will need more oil - and will continue to buy oil from Iran. And oil prices will keep flirting with the stratosphere.
So why did Obama sign it? For the Obama administration, everything now is about electoral calculus. Those terminal wackos in the Republican presidential circus - with the honorable exception of Ron Paul - are peddling war on Iran the moment they're elected, and substantial swathes of the American electorate are clueless enough to buy it.
No one, though, is doing some basic math to conclude the American and European economies certainly don't need oil flirting with the $120 level if some minimal recovery is in the cards.
Show me your balls
Apart from that self-defeating, terminally in crisis euro/North Atlantic Treaty Organization bunch, everyone and his neighbor will be bypassing this Israeli-American declaration of economic war:
- Russia already said it will circumvent it.
- India is already paying for Iranian oil via Halkbank in Turkey.
- Iran is actively negotiating to sell more oil to China. Iran is China's second-largest supplier, only behind Saudi Arabia. China pays in euros, and soon may be paying in yuan. By March they both will have sealed an agreement about new pricing.
- Venezuela controls a bi-national bank with Iran since 2009; that's how Iran gets paid for business in Latin America.
- Even traditional US allies want out. Turkey - which imports around 30% of its oil from Iran.
- Will seek a waiver exempting Turkish oil importer Tupras from US sanctions.
- And South Korea will also seek a waiver, to buy around 200,000 barrels a day - 10% of its oil - from Iran in 2012.
China, India, South Korea, they all have complex two-way trade ties with Iran (China-Iran trade, for instance, is $30 billion a year, and growing). None of this will be extinguished because the Washington/Tel Aviv axis says so. So one should expect a rash of new private banks set up all across the developing world for the purpose of buying Iranian oil.
Washington wouldn't have the balls to try to impose sanctions on Chinese banks because they will be dealing with Iran.
On the other hand, one's got to praise Tehran's balls. After a relentless campaign of covert assassinations; abductions of Iranian scientists; cross-border attacks in Sistan-Balochistan province; Israeli sabotage of its infrastructure, with viruses and otherwise; invasion of territory via US spy drones; non-stop Israeli and Republican threats of an imminent "shock and awe"; and the US sale of $60 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia, still Tehran won't balk.
Tehran has just tested - successfully - its own cruise missiles, and in the Strait of Hormuz of all places. Then when Tehran reacts to the non-stop Western aggressive barrage, it is blamed with "acts of provocation".
Last Friday, the New York Times editorial board was totally in love with the Pentagon's threats against Iran, as well as calling for "maximum economic pressure".
The bottom line is that average Iranians will suffer - as average, crisis-hit, indebted Europeans will also suffer. The US economy will suffer. And whenever it feels the West is getting way too hysterical, Tehran will keep reserving the right to send oil prices skyrocketing.
The regime in Tehran will keep selling oil, will keep enriching uranium and, most of all, won't fall. Like a Hellfire missile hitting a Pashtun wedding party, these Western sanctions will miserably fail. But not without collecting a lot of collateral damage - in the West itself.
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AuH20
Account Restricted. Admin to review account standing
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- Feb 20, 2009
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- 28,739
Ron crumbled on the AUMF Afghanistan vote thanks to internal pressure within his staff, which I don't necessarily have a problem with since he wasn't the deciding vote. The same can be said for Rand in this instance. We have dead and legless GIs, thanks to IEDs being created in Iran and the last thing I want to see is Rand Paul being thrown into that future type of maelstrom which is ruled by emotion as opposed to logic.
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Despite Charges, No Evidence Iran Sending IEDs to Iraq
by Gareth Porter
For 18 months now, the George W. Bush administration has periodically raised the charge that Iran is supplying anti-coalition forces in Iraq with arms.
But in the past, high administration officials have always admitted that they have no real evidence to support it. Now, they are going further. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters on her current Middle Eastern trip, "I think there is plenty of evidence that there is Iranian involvement with these networks that are making high-explosive IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and that are endangering our troops, and that's going to be dealt with."
However, Rice failed to provide any evidence of official Iranian involvement.
The previous pattern had been that U.S. and British officials suggest that Iranian government involvement in the use by Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias of "shaped charges" that can penetrate U.S. armored vehicles is the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the facts. But when asked point blank, they admit that they have no evidence to support it.
That charge serves not just one administration objective but two: it provides an additional justification for aggressive rhetoric and pressures against Tehran and also suggests that Iran bears much of the blame for the sectarian violence in Baghdad and high levels of U.S. casualties from IEDs.
The origins of the theme of Iranian complicity strongly suggest that it was a propaganda line aimed at reducing the Bush administration's acute embarrassment at its inability to stop the growing death toll of U.S. troops from shaped charges fired at armored vehicles by Sunni insurgents.
The U.S. command admitted at first that the Sunnis were making the shaped charges themselves. On Jun. 21, 2005, Gen. John R. Vines, then the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters that the insurgents had probably drawn on bomb-making expertise from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's army.
A Pentagon official involved in combating the new IEDs also told the New York Times that the first such bombs examined by the U.S. military had required considerable expertise, and that well-trained former government specialists were probably involved in making them. The use of infrared detonators was regarded as a tribute to the insurgents' "resourcefulness," according to the Pentagon source.
But sometime in the next six weeks, the Bush administration made a decision to start blaming its new problem in Iraq on Tehran. On Aug. 4, 2005, Pentagon and intelligence officials leaked the story to NBC and CBS that U.S. troops had "intercepted" dozens of shaped charges said to have been "smuggled into northeastern Iraq only last week."
The NBC story quoted intelligence officials as saying they believed the IEDs were shipped into Iraq by Iranian Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah, but were "convinced it could not have happened without the full consent of the Iranian government."
These stories were leaked to coincide with public accusations by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad that Iran was meddling in Iraqi affairs. A few days after the stories appeared, Rumsfeld declared that these shaped charges were "clearly, unambiguously from Iran" and blamed Tehran for allowing the cross-border traffic.
But the administration had a major credibility problem with that story. It could not explain why Iran would want to assist the enemies of the militant Shi'ite parties in Iraq that were aligned with Iran.
British troops in Shi'ite southern Iraq, where the shaped charges were apparently used by Shi'ite militias, had an equally embarrassing problem with the IEDs penetrating their armored vehicles. An unnamed senior British official in London told BCC on Oct. 5, 2005, that the shaped charges that had killed British troops in southern Iraq had come from Hezbollah in Lebanon via Iran.
The following day, British Prime Minister Tony Blair took the occasion of a joint press conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to declare that the circumstances surrounding the bombs that killed British soldiers "lead us either to Iranian elements or to Hezbollah." But Blair conceded that he had no evidence of such a link.
Privately British officials said that the only basis for their suspicions was that the technology was similar in design to the shaped charges used by Hezbollah in its war to drive Israel out of southern Lebanon in the 1980s.
Anthony Cordesman, a highly respected military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, explained why the story line blaming Iran for the IED problem in Iraq didn't hold water. "A lot of this is just technology that is leaked into an informal network," he told Associated Press. "What works in one country gets known elsewhere."
The Blair government soon dropped that propaganda line. The Independent reported Jan. 5, 2006, that government officials acknowledged privately that there was no "reliable intelligence" connecting the Iranian government to the more powerful IEDs in the south.
However, the U.S. administration continued to push that accusation, and Bush himself raised the theme for the first time at a press conference Mar. 13, 2006. "Some of the most powerful IEDs we're seeing in Iraq today," he said, "came from Iran."
Bush quoted the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, as testifying, "Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to building improvised explosive devices."
No reporter has followed up on what Negroponte meant by providing the "capability" to build such devices or why the militias would need to go outside Iraq to find that know-how.
The day after Bush's press conference, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted at a Pentagon news conference that he had no evidence of the Iranian government sending any military equipment or personnel into Iraq. Rumsfeld, appearing with Pace, said, "All you know is that you find equipment in a country that came from the neighboring country."
Last November, as the release of the Iraq Study Group report approached, administration officials again planted the story of intercepted Iranian-made weapons and munitions it had leaked in mid-2005. ABC News reported Nov. 30 that a "senior defense official" had told them of "smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand new weapons fresh from Iranian factories."
The new twist in the story was that the weapons allegedly had manufacturing dates in 2006. The story continued, "This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market."
The assumption underlying the anti-Iran defense department spin that a private market for weapons or, more likely, components, could not move them from Iran across the porous border to Iraq in a few months is far-fetched.
At about the same time Bush apparently gave orders that the U.S. military should seize any Iranians in the country in an effort to get some kind of evidence to use in support of its propaganda theme. The first such operation came in central Baghdad just before Christmas, and a second raid against Iranian diplomats in Irbil was carried out to coincide with the president's speech last Wednesday.
These raids, presented to the public as part of a campaign against targets supposedly identified through good intelligence, were clearly aimed at trying to substantiate an anti-Iran line for which the administration has no credible evidence. Those raids now create a requirement to produce something new to justify them.
by Gareth Porter
For 18 months now, the George W. Bush administration has periodically raised the charge that Iran is supplying anti-coalition forces in Iraq with arms.
But in the past, high administration officials have always admitted that they have no real evidence to support it. Now, they are going further. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters on her current Middle Eastern trip, "I think there is plenty of evidence that there is Iranian involvement with these networks that are making high-explosive IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and that are endangering our troops, and that's going to be dealt with."
However, Rice failed to provide any evidence of official Iranian involvement.
The previous pattern had been that U.S. and British officials suggest that Iranian government involvement in the use by Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias of "shaped charges" that can penetrate U.S. armored vehicles is the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the facts. But when asked point blank, they admit that they have no evidence to support it.
That charge serves not just one administration objective but two: it provides an additional justification for aggressive rhetoric and pressures against Tehran and also suggests that Iran bears much of the blame for the sectarian violence in Baghdad and high levels of U.S. casualties from IEDs.
The origins of the theme of Iranian complicity strongly suggest that it was a propaganda line aimed at reducing the Bush administration's acute embarrassment at its inability to stop the growing death toll of U.S. troops from shaped charges fired at armored vehicles by Sunni insurgents.
The U.S. command admitted at first that the Sunnis were making the shaped charges themselves. On Jun. 21, 2005, Gen. John R. Vines, then the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters that the insurgents had probably drawn on bomb-making expertise from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's army.
A Pentagon official involved in combating the new IEDs also told the New York Times that the first such bombs examined by the U.S. military had required considerable expertise, and that well-trained former government specialists were probably involved in making them. The use of infrared detonators was regarded as a tribute to the insurgents' "resourcefulness," according to the Pentagon source.
But sometime in the next six weeks, the Bush administration made a decision to start blaming its new problem in Iraq on Tehran. On Aug. 4, 2005, Pentagon and intelligence officials leaked the story to NBC and CBS that U.S. troops had "intercepted" dozens of shaped charges said to have been "smuggled into northeastern Iraq only last week."
The NBC story quoted intelligence officials as saying they believed the IEDs were shipped into Iraq by Iranian Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah, but were "convinced it could not have happened without the full consent of the Iranian government."
These stories were leaked to coincide with public accusations by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad that Iran was meddling in Iraqi affairs. A few days after the stories appeared, Rumsfeld declared that these shaped charges were "clearly, unambiguously from Iran" and blamed Tehran for allowing the cross-border traffic.
But the administration had a major credibility problem with that story. It could not explain why Iran would want to assist the enemies of the militant Shi'ite parties in Iraq that were aligned with Iran.
British troops in Shi'ite southern Iraq, where the shaped charges were apparently used by Shi'ite militias, had an equally embarrassing problem with the IEDs penetrating their armored vehicles. An unnamed senior British official in London told BCC on Oct. 5, 2005, that the shaped charges that had killed British troops in southern Iraq had come from Hezbollah in Lebanon via Iran.
The following day, British Prime Minister Tony Blair took the occasion of a joint press conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to declare that the circumstances surrounding the bombs that killed British soldiers "lead us either to Iranian elements or to Hezbollah." But Blair conceded that he had no evidence of such a link.
Privately British officials said that the only basis for their suspicions was that the technology was similar in design to the shaped charges used by Hezbollah in its war to drive Israel out of southern Lebanon in the 1980s.
Anthony Cordesman, a highly respected military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, explained why the story line blaming Iran for the IED problem in Iraq didn't hold water. "A lot of this is just technology that is leaked into an informal network," he told Associated Press. "What works in one country gets known elsewhere."
The Blair government soon dropped that propaganda line. The Independent reported Jan. 5, 2006, that government officials acknowledged privately that there was no "reliable intelligence" connecting the Iranian government to the more powerful IEDs in the south.
However, the U.S. administration continued to push that accusation, and Bush himself raised the theme for the first time at a press conference Mar. 13, 2006. "Some of the most powerful IEDs we're seeing in Iraq today," he said, "came from Iran."
Bush quoted the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, as testifying, "Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to building improvised explosive devices."
No reporter has followed up on what Negroponte meant by providing the "capability" to build such devices or why the militias would need to go outside Iraq to find that know-how.
The day after Bush's press conference, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted at a Pentagon news conference that he had no evidence of the Iranian government sending any military equipment or personnel into Iraq. Rumsfeld, appearing with Pace, said, "All you know is that you find equipment in a country that came from the neighboring country."
Last November, as the release of the Iraq Study Group report approached, administration officials again planted the story of intercepted Iranian-made weapons and munitions it had leaked in mid-2005. ABC News reported Nov. 30 that a "senior defense official" had told them of "smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand new weapons fresh from Iranian factories."
The new twist in the story was that the weapons allegedly had manufacturing dates in 2006. The story continued, "This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market."
The assumption underlying the anti-Iran defense department spin that a private market for weapons or, more likely, components, could not move them from Iran across the porous border to Iraq in a few months is far-fetched.
At about the same time Bush apparently gave orders that the U.S. military should seize any Iranians in the country in an effort to get some kind of evidence to use in support of its propaganda theme. The first such operation came in central Baghdad just before Christmas, and a second raid against Iranian diplomats in Irbil was carried out to coincide with the president's speech last Wednesday.
These raids, presented to the public as part of a campaign against targets supposedly identified through good intelligence, were clearly aimed at trying to substantiate an anti-Iran line for which the administration has no credible evidence. Those raids now create a requirement to produce something new to justify them.
AuH20
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Note the date of the article I posted below. 2011. Regardless, Rand Paul is not going to win a national conversation on proving that the Iranians are not involved in the creation of IEDs:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politic...ranian-smuggling-network-linked-to-iraq-ieds/
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