Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran
responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as
planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi
warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb
Iran.
Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977
through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national security
policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the
Republic in Washington May 30 that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in the United
States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran was a possibility that
must be taken seriously, and that the Bush administration might accuse Iran of
responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack
on Iran.
Brzezinski suggested that new constraints were needed on presidential war powers
to reduce the risk of a war against Iran based on such a false pretense. Such
constraints, Brzezinski said, should not prevent the president from using force
in response to an attack on the United States, but should make it more difficult
to carry out an attack without an adequate justification.
Brzezinski's warning came after Fox News' chief Washington correspondent Jim
Angle reported on "Special Report with Brit Hume" May 14 that, according to
unnamed U.S. official sources, U.S. officials had urged Iran in two face to face
meetings to deport the terrorists to their countries of origin, told them about
al Qaeda efforts to get a nuclear device, and "warned that if any terrorist
attack against Americans were to come from Iranian territory, it would be held
responsible."
Angle quoted a former official as saying that Iran "understood how bad it would
be...if there were another terrorist attack and it was learned it had been
planned in Iran."
Former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet wrote in his
recently-published memoirs that U.S. intelligence had learned by early 2003 that
a senior al Qaeda operative who had been detained in Iran was in charge of the
organisation's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. Tenet said that information
was passed on to Iranian officials "in the hope that they would recognise our
common interest in preventing any attack against U.S. interests."
The Bush administration has made persistent claims over the past five years that
Iran has harboured al Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that
they had participated in planning terrorist actions -- claims that were not
supported by intelligence analysts.
Pentagon officials leaked information to CBS in May 2003 that they had
"evidence" that al Qaeda leaders who had found "safe haven" in Iran had planned
and directed terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Then Secretary
of Defence Donald Rumsfeld also encouraged that inference when he declared on
May 29, 2003 that Iran had "permitted senior al Qaeda officials to operate in
their country."
The leak and public statement allowed the media and their audiences to infer
that the "safe haven" had been deliberately provided by Iranian authorities.
But most U.S. intelligence analysts specialising on the Persian Gulf believed
the al Qaeda officials in Iran who were still communicating with operatives
elsewhere were in hiding rather than under arrest. Former national intelligence
officer for Near East and South Asia Paul Pillar told IPS in an interview last
year that the "general impression" was that the al Qaeda operatives were not in
Iran with the complicity of the Iranian authorities.
Former CIA analysts Ken Pollock, who was a Persian Gulf specialist on the
National Security Council staff in 2001, wrote in "The Persian Puzzle", "These
al Qaeda leaders apparently were operating in eastern Iran, which is a bit like
the Wild West." He added, pointedly, "It was not as if these al-Qaeda leaders
had been under lock and key in Evin prison in Tehran and were allowed to make
phone calls to set up the attacks."
Although most elements in the Bush administration appear to oppose military
action against Iran, Vice President Dick Cheney has reportedly advocated that
course. He has also continued to raise the issue of al Qaeda officials in Iran.
Cheney told Fox News in an interview May 14, "We are confident that there are a
number of senior al Qaeda officials in Iran, that they've been there since the
spring of 2003. About the time that we launched operations into Iraq, the
Iranians rounded up a number of al Qaeda individuals and placed them under house
arrest."
Cheney did not say that the al Qaeda officials who were communicating with other
operatives outside Iran were under house arrest.
As recently as last February, Bush administration officials were preparing to
accuse Tehran publicly of cooperating with and harbouring al Qaeda suspects as
part of the administration's strategy for pushing for stronger U.N. sanctions
against Iran. The strategy of portraying Iran as having links with al Qaeda was
being pushed by an unidentified Bush adviser who had been "instrumental in
coming up with a more confrontational U.S. approach to Iran," according a report
by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer on Feb. 10.
As Linzer revealed, the neoconservative faction in the administration was still
pushing to link Iran with al Qaeda despite the fact that a CIA report in early
February had reported the arrest by Iranian authorities of two more al Qaeda
operatives trying to make their way through Iran from Pakistan to Iraq.
The danger of an al Qaeda effort to disguise an attack on the U.S. as coming
from Iran was raised in an article in Foreign Affairs published in late April by
former NSC adviser and counterterrorism expert Bruce Reidel.
In the article, Reidel wrote that Osama bin Laden may have plans for "triggering
an all-out war between the United States and Iran," referring to evidence that
al Qaeda in Iraq now considers Iranian influence in Iraq "an even greater
problem than the U.S. occupation".
"The biggest danger," Reidel wrote, "is that al Qaeda will deliberately provoke
a war with a 'false-flag' operation, say, a terrorist attack carried out in a
way that would make it appear as though it were Iran's doing."
In a briefing for reporters about the article, Reidel said al Qaeda officals
have "openly talked about the advisability of getting their two great enemies to
go to war with each other", hoping that they would "take each other out".
Reidel, now a senior fellow with the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the
Brookings Institution, was one of the leading specialists on al Qaeda and
terrorism, having served in the 1990s as national intelligence officer,
assistant secretary of defence and NSC specialist for Near East and South Asia
up to January 2002.
Supporting the warnings by Brzezinski and Reidel about an al Qaeda "false flag"
terrorist attack is a captured al Qaeda document found in a hideout of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006. The document, translated and released by the Iraqi
National Security Adviser Mouwafek al-Rubaie, said "the best solution in order
to get out of this crisis is to involve the U.S. forces in waging a war against
another country or any hostile groups".
The document, the author of which was not specified, explained, "We mean
specifically attempting to escalate tension between America and Iran, and
America and the Shiite[s] in Iraq."
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest
book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam",
was published in June 2005.
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