Short Stories, Long Odds

The indefatiguable Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon are running secret recon missions in Iran.

Let me give you a bit of perspective, in case you thought the escalation in Iraq was as bad as it can get:

• Iraq, while home to plenty of Islamic extremists, had a mostly demoralized military and no weapons of mass destruction.
• The government of Iraq, despite Hussein’s overtures to the rest of the Arab world concerning his piety, was largely secular.
• The government in Iraq also had some dealings with terrorist organizations, but most of the real Islamist-extremist powerhouse terror groups looked down on Hussein because of his habit of only giving lip service to his religion.
• Also, the Iraqi Army, which was mostly compliant upon promises from the US of roles and continued employment in a post-Saddam Iraq, were all fired, and summarily had their pensions cut. These pensions were later partially re-instated in some cases, and a small portion of those soldiers actually did get jobs. I’m telling you this because you can bet that if we invade another country, the Army is going to be a lot less cooperative, to say the least.

Iran, on the other hand:

• is a government almost entirely comprised of Islamic extremists.
• Ever since the overthrow of the US-installed Shah in 1979, Iran has been an ideological pit of vipers from the state-funded terrorist groups all the way up to the top levels of government.
• Legislation is passed with cries of “death to America” as regularly as the members of our Senate miss votes.
• I don’t know much about their military manpower or tactical capabilities, but I do know that they’ve got a weapons stockpile that, had it been found in Iraq, would have gone a long way towards meeting the justification we were given by the Pentagon and the administration. Problem is, its in Iran.

This problem deserves further examination of what military operations against another sovereign Arab country would mean to our continuing foreign relations disaster, but it would almost certainly mean another exponential increase in recruits for Islamic Extremist terror groups. This stuff is like material for terrorist stroke books.

If you read the story, tell me if you crack up at the line about how clandestine special forces ops are strengthening the diplomatic process. More on this later.