Is UK-Iran incident part of larger war provocation plan?

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Cytat:

Larry Chin
Online Journal
Friday, March 30, 2007

The Bush administration and its allies (notably the UK and Israel governments) have been planning to attack Iran as early as spring 2007. It is not surprising that yet another fabricated pretext is being used to set it up.

Were the 15 British sailors who were captured and detained by Iran involved in a criminal espionage operation, in Iranian waters, in the process of setting up a Gulf of Tonkin-style pretext for war? Or were they captured by Iranian forces in Iraqi waters (as claimed by London), as a defensive political maneuver, in response to American and British covert provocations that have been ongoing for months, and continuing to escalate?

While Western media coverage has done little beyond echo and embellish Tony Blair’s immediate shrieking and bellicose assertions (“there was no justification whatsoever . . . completely unacceptable, wrong and illegal”), and the predictable Bush administration support for Blair (the White House “fully backs Tony Blair and our allies in Britain”), and the impending political onslaught against Tehran, little if any analysis has been devoted to the context of what has led up to this incident.

In 2003, Tehran sent a sweeping proposal to the Bush administration (via the Swiss Embassy) for dialogue and regional cooperation. White House officials confirm that this memo was widely circulated and discussed -- and rejected (top Bush administration officials profess a convenient “memory lapse”).

The American and British military-intelligence buildup towards a spring 2007 attack is a known fact. Wall Street is anticipating war. The Iran-Iraq region has been brimming with increasing Western intelligence agency activity for well over a year. George W. Bush personally ordered provocative covert operations several months ago, aimed specifically at baiting Iran into a war and a nuclear confrontation. The illegal raid of the Iranian liason office in Irbil, Iraq, has been used as part of a larger case of cooked and false intelligence against Tehran. A number of Iranians, including high-ranking Iran Revolutionary Guard officials, have been captured by Western forces. A top Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated by the Mossad. Bush also gave a “shoot to kill” order to hunt down and kill Iranians in Iraq. Iran’s intelligence minister, Gholam Hossein Ejeli, claims that Iran has uncovered a network of 100 CIA and Mossad agents.

A multinational consensus has already been built in support of an attack on Iran, which is now militarily and politically encircled (a full-scale US-British military buildup is underway). In a March 28 interview on Air America Radio, Senator Carl Levin echoed the simple-minded Bush-Blair propaganda that Iran alone is provoking a confrontation with the West, alone guilty of “brinksmanship” and “nuclear ambitions.” Levin repeated the popular assertion that President Ahmadinejad is insane, and that the US Congress is “uniformly” behind stopping Iran, which is “pressuring the West” (no mention of the overwhelming pressure against Iran, by the West). Levin’s dim-witted and dangerous views are shared by Democrats and Republicans alike.

In a letter mailed to the Associated Press by the Iranian embassy in London, British sailor Faye Turney apologized for trespassing into Iranian waters. Western officials have quickly responded by claiming (without proof) that Turney’s admission was coerced, and blasting a tape of the captured sailors (showing that they are being well treated) as “unacceptable.” Meanwhile, London is rushing to provide proof that the boat crews were seized inside Iraqi waters.

It is unlikely that evidence provided by either side, or even a diplomatic exchange or settlement, will defuse the larger confrontation already underway. The incident, and the resulting political tensions, are clearly part of a larger international agenda, similar to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that set up the Vietnam War that the US government was hell-bent to start.

If an overt act of war against Iran occurs around the marine incident, is it conceivable that London will lead the charge and be joined immediately by the Bush administration and Israel.
The Blair government (MI-6, MI-5, etc.) has been among the most overt “war on terrorism” aggressors in recent years. For example, on September 19, 2005, six British armored vehicles smashed into an Iraqi jail in Basra to free two undercover SAS elite special forces commandos who were engaged in a bungled espionage operation (see the BBC report). Indeed, there are reports that a rescue operation against Iran is being contemplated.

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Cytat:

15 Britons In a Sea Of Intrigue

By David Ignatius
Friday, March 30, 2007; Page A17

BERLIN -- We are in a season of skulduggery in the Middle East, with a strange series of events that all involve the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The murky saga is a reminder that the real power in Iran may lie with this secretive organization, which spawned Iran's firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Revolutionary Guard orchestrated the seizure of 15 British sailors and marines last week near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. The British say they have technical data to prove that their people were outside Iran's territorial waters when they were captured, and they have protested vigorously to Iranian diplomats. But the Iranian Foreign Ministry doesn't seem to know anything about the case. Indeed, it may have been one of the indirect targets.

The Revolutionary Guard seized the hostages, if that's the right word, at a time when it is under intense and growing pressure. U.S. troops captured five of its intelligence operatives in January in the Iraqi city of Irbil. Perhaps the Guard's commanders wanted some bargaining chips to get their people back.

There are larger forces at play, too. The Revolutionary Guard was targeted in the U.N. sanctions enacted last weekend against Iran's nuclear program -- which, as it happens, is run by the Revolutionary Guard. The elite military group may have wanted to retaliate by imposing its own brute sanctions against Britain, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council.

European officials note that the provocative move comes as speculation grows about new discussions between the United States and Iran -- a dialogue the Revolutionary Guard may oppose. Representatives of the two nations met in Baghdad this month as part of a regional conference on Iraqi security, and it was expected that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would meet her Iranian counterpart at a follow-up meeting in Istanbul in April. That meeting may be in jeopardy if the British sailors and marines aren't returned soon.

The Revolutionary Guard may also have hoped to sabotage diplomatic negotiations over the nuclear issue. U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said several weeks ago that the United States was getting "pinged all over the world" by Iranian intermediaries who wanted a resumption of talks. Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, hinted at such a message in his recent contacts with the European Union's top diplomat, Javier Solana. But the prospect of nuclear talks may have been blown out of the water, as it were, until the British issue is resolved.

Maybe that was the goal of seizing the sailors and marines. The Revolutionary Guard, after all, can't be happy about curbing the nuclear program that would allow it to project power even more aggressively.

But what's making the Revolutionary Guard so jittery? Why is it behaving as if someone had made off with its family jewels? Maybe that's where the last of the mysterious events comes in.

On Feb. 7, a top Revolutionary Guard officer named Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari vanished in Istanbul. This is no small fish. He is a former deputy defense minister who, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, had been Iran's key operative in Lebanon, helping organize its proxy army, Hezbollah. According to Bob Baer, who was a CIA case officer in Beirut at that time, Asgari was the primary contact for Hezbollah's leader, Hasan Nasrallah, and its most feared terrorist operative, Imad Mughniyah. "Asgari was in the IRGC's chain of command when it was kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon in the '80s," Baer wrote in Time.

So what happened to Asgari, a man who knows some of the Revolutionary Guard's most precious secrets? Officials in Washington, Paris and Berlin shrug and say, sorry, they just can't be helpful on this one. But a leading Israeli daily, Yedioth Aharonoth, reported soon after Asgari's disappearance that Mossad had organized his defection. An Israeli defense source was quoted in the Sunday Times of London on March 11 as saying that Asgari "probably was working for Mossad but believed he was working for a European intelligence agency."

The betting among spy buffs is that Asgari was recruited in what's known as a "false flag" operation. His handlers may be Israelis posing as officers of another intelligence service, perhaps even during the debriefing. Such speculation was piqued two weeks ago when the German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, was asked during a visit to Turkey whether Asgari was in Germany. "I cannot say anything on this issue," he replied.

In the perverse spy story that is the Middle East, we have started a strange new chapter. This one has killers and kidnappers galore, and a plot to die for.

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