Get Smart

By Cernig

David Ignatius writing at the Washington Post yesterday confirmed Sy Hersh's revelations about US covert action inside Iran, but characterised those covert efforts as being piecemeal and directionless - the kind of "Get Smart" comedy-of--errors operations we should have expected from the cakewalk crowd.

In the new cold war between America and Iran, the United States appears to be running some limited covert operations across the Iranian border. But according to knowledgeable sources, this effort shares the defect of broader U.S. policy toward Iran -- it is tentative and ill-coordinated, and it undermines diplomacy without bringing serious pressure on the regime.

"Tell us what's your policy with Iran," says one Arab official familiar with the covert program. "Are you going to talk to them or go to war with them?" This official describes U.S. operations this way: "There are attempts to cause mischief inside Iran and go after the Quds Force. Some things are being done, but not with the seriousness that's needed."

Argues a former intelligence official, "It's a PowerPoint covert-action program. It looks aggressive, but it's not a tied-together, long-term strategy that would make Iran change its policy."

...The danger of these cross-border activities was explained to me by one intelligence source. He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

The U.S. program appears to focus on political action and the collection of intelligence rather than on lethal operations. Lethal action inside Iran may be conducted independently by some groups. There are reports, for example, that Kurdish guerrillas have retaliated for Iranian shelling of Kurdistan.

Those Kurdish guerillas - the PJAK - have in the past claimed that the US military was supporting them with money and intelligence help, although since Turkey became more aggressive in pursuing the PKK and PJAK that aid seems to have halted. So it might be more accurate to say that their actions are conduscted independently now.

Ignatius goes on to contrast this "Power-Point" progam with Iran's covert efforts against the US and against Israel, which seem to him to be far better thought out and directed. Outperforming the administration that "oversaw" the CPA, moved covert assets in Afghanistan to their war-of-choice in Iraq and now wants to believe that entirely subjective  and belated "satisfactory progress" towards Iraqi reconcilliation benchmarks by Iran's closest allies (Maliki and the ISCI) is actually the same as attaining those benchmarks wouldn't be difficult. Where other governments play international chess the Bush administration plays tiddliewinks.

But it seems to me that the available evidence, rather than the hype, points towards Iranian actions which are just as bemuddled by differences between internal government factions on what to do and how to do it, as well as being confused by private entrepreneurship in black markets (some, no doubt, by Iranian officers and officials lining their own pockets on company time) which are being erroneously ascribed to concerted Iranian action. We should be careful of the kind of groupthink that resulted in the Iraq WMD Hunt, where a wish to fix the facts around the policy at high levels leads to a presumption of diabolical intent and evil-genius mastery of subterfuge at lower ones which then underlies all intelligence assessments and ends up hyping the threat outrageously. That way lies another debacle like Iraq.

Which is why I'm so happy to see General Mullen push back against the "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" crowd. He may believe the hyped Iranian threat, but he is far more level-headed in his own clear assessment of the US military's ability to both prosecute an attack and then deal with the aftermath.

At a US defence department news conference, Adm Mullen refused to say what Israeli leaders told him during meetings last week about any plan to strike Iran.

But he warned that opening up a third front, after Iraq and Afghanistan, would be "extremely stressful, very challenging, with consequences that would be difficult to predict".

Asked if he was concerned Israel would strike before the end of the year, he said: "This is a very unstable part of the world and I don't need it to be more unstable."

The admiral said that if a conflict began, he believed Iran would have the capability to disrupt ship traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a waterway near the Gulf, but he would not say if the US Navy was stepping up its patrols in the region.

He said: "I believe [Iran is] still on a path to get nuclear weapons and I think that's something that needs to be deterred."

He added: "My position with regard to the Iranian regime hasn't changed. They remain a destabilising factor in the region.

"But I'm convinced that the solution still lies in using other elements of national power to change Iranian behaviour, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure."

He called for dialogue between the US and Tehran.

His bosses, though, don't seem to want to listen. They and their fellow-travellers are already following up news that Iran might well be ready for a "freeze on freeze" deal with rhetoric suggesting that Iran blinked in the face of hightened threats of an attack. In actuality, however, some experts indicate that the opposite is true - "in anticipation (or with advance information) of a greater Iranian willingness to demonstrate flexibility on the enrichment freeze, the threats were escalated in order to allow the claim that chest-thumping was working." More hapless "Get Smart" style game-playing instead of just getting smart.