Iran's leaders vowed to supply a "crushing response" to those responsible for a bomb blast that killed at least 42 people including several members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard force in southeastern Iran on Sunday. The province where the attack took place, Sistan-Baluchistan, straddles the western borders of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It forms a key transport route for the international trade in narcotics from Afghanistan to Europe and the illicit transport of innumerable other products, not least violence. The attack is the deadliest the region has seen since a bomber attacked a Shi'ite mosque in Zahedan, the province's capital, in May of this year. Iranian state media was quick to announce that a Sunni muslim group called Jundullah, known by various other names including the Army of God and the Iranian People's Resistance Movement, had claimed responsibility for the deaths and it wasn't long before Iranian officials had openly accused the US, Pakistan and Britain of having a hand in the attacks. One Zionist commentator wrote in the Jerusalem Post that Iran had experienced "a taste of its own medicine".
Jundullah is a Baluchi sectarian separatist group that operates on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. The exact extent of foreign support is disputed and the US has publicly denied it has provided direct assistance to the Jundullah militants. But officials have privately been reported to have said that the relationship exists and that it is managed in a way so as 'to avoid congressional oversight'. The six Revolutionary Guard members killed included the force's second-in-command who was in Sistan-Baluchistan to meet with Sunni and Shi'ia tribal leaders to discuss mediating the tensions there.
John Leyne (pictured left), the BBC's Tehran correspondent, offered his analysis on the bombings but unfortunately he either failed to mention or was unable to include an aspect of recent Iranian history that's crucial to the factual accuracy of the story, something that was included in a piece about the Zahedan attack five months ago, but for some inexplicable reason was omitted from the BBC's coverage of Sunday's bloodletting: that the US and Pakistan have supported Jundullah since at least 2005. This, said Mr Leyne after Zahedan, was the region's 'open secret'. As the BBC reported at the time: "It is a common accusation from the Iranians...and the facts of this case may never be known. But it is an open secret that former US President George W Bush directed large amounts of money to try to destabilise Iran and there is no sign the policy is any different under President Barak Obama."
We've known for some time that the Bush Administration did funnel large amounts of cash (possibly around $400 million) covertly into the pockets of the Army of God as part of a program to destabilise the country's religious leadership. This included funding Iranian dissident groups in the region and intelligence gathering on Iran's nuclear weapons programme and all of this was exposed in detail in a piece by the always excellent Sy Hersh in 2008 in the New Yorker. Abdolhamid Rigi, brother of Jundullah leader Abdolmalek Rigi, told a room full of journalists earlier this year that Jundullah was created and supported by the United States which is also where they received their orders from. Could this be true? Rigi said: "They (US officials) told us whom to shoot and whom not to. All orders came from them. They told us that they would provide us with everything we need like money and equipment." Could this be the honest testimony of a man disillusioned with what was going on? Rigi, it must be noted, was facing the death penalty in an Iranian court when he made those remarks so there is the strong possibility that he was coerced into making the statement. But, on the other hand, it would not be so surprising if it were true, given the historical record of the US and her allies for clandestine intervention in the region stretching back over a century. Rigi also suggested that the group 'had a relationship with al-Qaeda' that ended in 2003 after a falling-out over strategy in Iran. This I will return to later.
NATO/US Special Forces' cross-border 'operations' from south-eastern Iraq have been ongoing since at least 2007, with the explicit authorisation of the President, and have included targeted killings, kidnapping and torture. The operations, conducted primarily by the NSA, DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency), the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) have probably been going on since not long after the invasion in 2003, but were significantly expanded in 2007. JSOC's secret military task force, operating inside Iran, needs absolutely no congressional oversight, unlike even CIA operations, as the Bush Administration interpreted the law in a way that classified these operations as "clandestine military activities" meaning that as the President is Commander-in-Chief he/she is in direct command of these operatives. In other words, the President has his own private death squad in Iran.
The JSOC teams were formed as a reaction to Iran's actions in Iraq but have caused tension between the US military and politicians as they have been granted total authority and that authority lies with the President's office alone, undermining the 1986 Defense Reorganisation Act, that defined the chain-of-command from the President to the various regional commanders, such as US Central Command, that oversees US military activities in the Middle East and Central Asia.The tragic irony of all this is that once more the US and its allies are using Sunni fundamentalists to commit campaigns of violence in the Muslim World, as they did with the anti-Soviet brigades during the 1980s. There is, of course, no direct evidence that the US authorised this Sunday's attack.
Ramzi Yousef, convicted over the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM; pictured above-left at Guantanamo Bay), alleged to be the 'mastermind' behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, are Sunni extremists. KSM, as it happens, is thought to be a former leader of Jundullah. There have also been reports that the 'real' KSM was killed in 2002 in a shootout in Karachi and the prisoner in Cuba is a patsy.
As well as Jundullah, the US has covertly supported the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or M.E.K., and the Kurdish Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAC), despite the MEK having been on the State Department's list of terrorist organisations since the 1990s. Both groups, operating from bases inside northern and central Iraq, have been accused of committing political killings by the Iranians. It is another fateful twist of history that the US supports PJAC, who regularly commit atrocities in Turkey as well, when during the 1990s the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations regularly looked the other way when the Turkish Air Force used US F-4 fighters and Cobra helicopters to bomb Kurds in northern Iraq.
The practice is also employed against the 'Pakistani Taliban' in Waziristan, and so the US is also directly involved in this 'secret war' through its repeated use of unmanned Predator drones (pictured left), controlled like a computer game from military bases in the US, to shoot missiles at Pushtun farmers there. The use of these drones requires people on the ground within a few hundred metres to give the precise location and so requires a network of spies and informants who then often bare the brunt of any retaliation.
In the defence-intelligence jargon these agents and groups such as Jundullah, MEK and PJAC, are referred to as "surrogates" as they are employed, some knowingly and others not so, to protect US strategic interests. The potential for "false-flag" operations to trigger an all-out war on Iran will persist, and, though the appetite for bloody foreign adventures has waned in the West because of Iraq and Afghanistan this could change quickly, as was evidenced in January 2008 when Iranian patrol boats surrounded a US vessel near the Straights of Hormuz. The key soundbite produced for CNN et al. in this particular episode was a video made by the US DoD where an Iranian voice is heard saying "You will explode". However it subsequently emerged that the voice probably came from somewhere else entirely. Could this have been a deliberate attempt to trigger a war by the US? Or, as press reports later suggested, a "prankster"? Again, this sort of behavior would be nothing new.
With coverage of Iran in the media focussing on 'the nuclear issue' one must ask if the intelligence agencies have a hand in it, as they did in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when British spy agencies were revealed to have planted stories in the British press to aclimatise the public into accepting the already foregone conclusion: that we were going to bomb the ancient cities of Iraq into the ground.
You may be forgiven for thinking the same is now happening with regards a war on Iran. On Friday 23 October the American Enterprise Institute (that bastion of right-wing propaganda) will host John 'too right-wing for the Bush administration' Bolton, 'torture lawyer' John Yoo, and Michael Rubin, at a panel discussion titled "Should we attack Iran" where, among other things, they will discuss whether an unprovoked Israeli attack on Iran 'would break international law or be legitimate self-defence'. Any guesses as to what their conclusions will be? Bolton has already revealed his position on the issue, in the well-versed Orwellian manner he has nurtured over the years, and seemingly without a hint of irony, he was quoted as calling for a nuclear first-strike by Israel on Iran, at an event called "Ensuring Peace".
At another AEI event earlier this month called "Next steps on Iran" and co-hosted by the Brookings Institution, Zionist Senator Joe Leiberman said: "The secret construction of this facility, whose size, configuration, and location are inconsistant with a peaceful energy program, fits into a pattern of deception and concealment by the Iranians about their nuclear activities that stretches back over twenty years." Replace the word "Iranians" with "Israelis" and he would be referring to the Dimona reactor that Israel hid from the world for decades, and was only revealed by courageous activist Mordechai Vanunu who now faces a life of persecution by the state.
There are various motives behind the escalation of aggression towards Iran in recent years, most recently the country's decision to switch from dollars to mostly Euros in its oil dealings. This will provoke outrage on Wall Street as it did when Saddam Hussein did it in 2000. Could this be the casus belli the war profiteers have been looking for?
A few important things to take note of: There remains no evidence that Iran is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon; Balochistan has massive reserves of oil, minerals, and is a key strategic point in the region between Pakistan/Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf; the "secret nuclear facility" in Iran does not breach international law, in fact, Iran complied with IAEA rules a full year ahead of schedule according to the NPT.
* An edited version of this post appeared on www.londonprogressivejournal.com on 23/10/2009
