I'd Like A New Iran NIE Too, Please

By Cernig

Yes, I'd like a new NIE on Iran. No I don't mean a do-over on the recent one that said Iran doesn't have a current nuclear weapons program, the one paranoid pouter John Bolton is calling a "quasi-putsch".

No I want a new NIE to examine the military and Bush administration's allegations of Iranian involvement in Iraq. That, after all, will be what the War Party will base their next push for attacks on Iran upon. If the neocons could slant the intelligence community's findings so badly prior to now towards thinking Iran was actively seeking nukes when it wasn't, surely we need a new consensus on this issue from the whole community too.

The actual physical evidence, for instance, for saying Iran is the source for IED devices that have caused so much harm in Iraq is the assessment that they can be ascribed to Iran because of "unique markings". Question that and you will find that these markings, in total, amount to scoring patterns made by machining the IED plates that deform to become penetrators. There's no writing or stamps. These scorings, in turn, are assessed as Iranian because, we are told, Iraqis are incapable of milling plates of their own to the required tolerances. Yet a milling score pattern doesn't include a zip code. Such lids could come from anywhere within the region, including Iraq, but evidence of anything other than Iranian origin has been ignored by the military. Indeed several companies boast of importing exactly the machinery required to Iraq and the Iraqi government as late as last year was touting just how many Iraqi machining and heavy industry companies existed. Clearly the capability exists. In all their time searching, Coalition forces have not seized a single IED crossing the Iran-Iraq border, although they have found plenty inside Iraq, along with IED factories which weren't originally supposed to exist but which we are now told produce inferior copies of the Iranian real deal.

Further, even supposing a direct physical link to Iran is established, there should be a review of intelligence assessments that Iran's leadership or even it's Quods Force is involved. Private entrepreneurship in a notoriously corrupt region and through traditionally porous borders - perhaps even with the connivance of individual Iranian officials who are lining their own pockets - could just as easily explain the observed facts of Iranian weaponry in Iraq. At least, it's the explanation for U.S. pistols provided to the Iraqi security forces that turned up in PKK hands in Turkey.

Allegations of Iranian leadership knowledge and involvement in smuggling of Iranian arms into Iraq predates the arrest and subsequent confessions of a handful of alleged Iranian agents inside Iraq. Note, however, that none of the confessing agents were actually Iranian. Instead they have been from Iraq or Lebanon and came after interrogation by Iraqi military personnel or members of the MeK terror group acting as U.S. "interpreters". These interrogations were conducted beyond U.S, military oversight purely so that the military could continue to assert that it doesn't torture. It should come as no surprise that these detainees confessed and bolstered that prior account. As we now know from recent revelations about destroyed CIA tapes, such confessions are always liable to give the torturers the answers they seek, whether the answers are true or not. Iranians arrested have, after many allegations have been made, released and turned over to Iran as diplomats. Draw your own conclusions.

There are many reasons why it seems likely that, just as was done with the 2005 NIE that said Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program, political pressure to find what was wanted to advance the narrative for war with Iran filtered and coloured intelligence which has backed allegations of Iranian meddling in Iraq. If so, the supposed drop in recent Iran-backed attacks would be no more than a relabelling of the recent drop in non-Iran backed attacks by Shiite militias who we used to be told were proxies for Iran but we are now told are not. Only a minority of radicals in these groups are Iranian proxies, the official story now runs.

Yes indeed, let's have a new NIE on Iran. After all, neocon fixing of the intelligence around the policy got the U.S. into a war with Iraq and almost succeeded in using false claims about a non-existent nuclear weapons program to get us into a war with the Iranians too. Let's not wait until after the shooting starts over Iran's supposedly killing U.S. troops in Iraq to discover that the same fixing went on there too.

Nuke Watchdog Head Slams Anti-Iran Rhetoric

By Cernig

The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, has again slammed anti-Iran rhetoric from the Bush administration and repeated that the Agency has no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster.

"We have information that there has been maybe some studies about possible weaponization," said Mohamed ElBaradei, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency. "That's why we have said that we cannot give Iran a pass right now, because there is still a lot of question marks."

"But have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weaponization program? No." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran this month of "lying" about the aim of its nuclear program. She said there is no doubt Tehran wants the capability to produce nuclear weapons and has deceived the IAEA about its intentions.

Vice President Dick Cheney has raised the prospect of "serious consequences" if Iran were found to be working toward developing a nuclear weapon. Last week, the Bush administration announced harsh penalties against the Iranian military and state-owned banking systems in hopes of raising pressure on the world financial system to cut ties with Tehran.

ElBaradei said he was worried about the growing rhetoric from the U.S., which he noted focused on Iran's alleged intentions to build a nuclear weapon rather than evidence the country was actively doing so. If there is actual evidence, ElBaradei said he would welcome seeing it.

"I'm very much concerned about confrontation, building confrontation, because that would lead absolutely to a disaster. I see no military solution. The only durable solution is through negotiation and inspection," he said.

I fully expect the extreme right to attack el-Baradei again for what they will call "meddling" in diplomacy instead of just quietly doing inspections. But surely, if his Agency's inspections and his experts are saying something at such variance with the bush administration line, he has a duty to speak up. Especially when, as never gets reported in the US media, the US has passed the IAEA dozens of leads about the alleged iranian nuclear weapons program and on every single occasion US intelligence assessments and suspicions have proven to be based on false claims by regime-change outfits like the MeK and Ken Timmerman's group.

Of course, backing both the US and Iran into belligerent corners is seen by the Fourth Branch and it's wormtongues as a feature, not a bug.

The same is true of the evolving story of EFP penetrators, supposedly supplied by Iran to Shiite militias in Iraq. This narrative has been aggressively pushed despite many gaping holes in the official line. Veteran journalist Gareth Porter has done an excellent job of following the evolving hype and his latest article sets out the contrary evidence neatly. Iraqi machine shops have been producing their own EFPs for years and the Iraqis almost certainly managed to get the know-how from Hezboullah - the world experts on EFP's - without any involvement from Iran being needed.

El Baradei is the man appointed by the international community to head up the agency responsible for inspections and investigations of alleged illegal nuclear programs. He has done an excellent job - and was correct about Iraq's suppoed program the last time the Bush administration's warmongers tried to pressure him out of his job for speaking up about their fixing the facts around the policy. When he is criticized now, the world should understand that attacks on him and his agency are aimed at silencing a contrary voice against the narrative and do not stem from real concerns about his interfering with the diplomatic process.

SAS In Iran - Or Not?

By Cernig

There's a Sunday Times article today which is causing some cherry-picked interpretation over on rightwing blogs. Michael Smith, the man who broke the Downing Street memos and was roundly lambasted by the Right as never trustable with a story again, is suddenly a reliable cite as long as they're careful what they trust.

For instance, McQ at Q&O blog believes the Sunday Times' lede:

BRITISH special forces have crossed into Iran several times in recent months as part of a secret border war against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Quds special forces, defence sources have disclosed

but ignores the contrary view a few paragraphs down:

Last week, Bob Ainsworth, the armed forces minister, said the Ministry of Defence was unable to say whether British troops had killed or captured any Iranians in Iraq. The ministry declined to comment, but privately officials insisted British troops never carry out hot pursuit across the border.

Hmmm...seems like a bit of a contradiction there. Which is strange, because the whole article and headline relies on this point.

Read the article yourself - what I get from it, and I may well be guilty of cherrypicking to my own agenda too, is that UK forces in Iraq are concerned with very real smugglers but that officials in London are the ones jumping to perhaps unwarranted conclusions about Iranian leadership direction of all those smuggling outfits.

Certianly, Smith is as honest a reporter as you could hope to find working at a Murdoch newspaper. Unlike say, Sarah Baxter, editors can't rely on the journalist to put their approved spin in for them and may have to add it after a report is submitted. Murdoch's UK outlets are - to fit Conservative Party policy - anti Iraq occupation but pro attacking Iran.

The first part of the UK Murdoch Line is certainly something Smith is OK with. Evidence this blog post from 15th September:

the SAS have been stretched to the limit by their operations in Iraq. We have only a very few special forces. By the very nature of the work they do, we can’t keep them safe, but we do need to husband our resources. We need them out of Iraq and bolstering the forces protecting us from the terrorists both at home and in Afghanistan – where the SBS are currently leading the fight to try to ensure that we get one of Bush's ill-judged wars right!

Still, the most interesting part of the Sunday Times' article for me was a bit McQ failed to mention at all:

Seven American U2 spy planes have passed through RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire this year on their way to Akrotiri in Cyprus or Al-Dhafra in Abu Dhabi, the bases for flights over Iran.

Such flights would be a violation of Iranian airspace and themselves an intense provocation for war. I suspect U-2 spy planes aren't all that good for spotting transient stuff like smugglers - but great for targeting fixed targets for airstrikes.

With Cheney picking up the rhetorical baton from Bush and Mullen today, threatening Iran with "serious consequences" for pursuing nuclear knowledge and saying "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon", attacks are looking more and more likely - especially now that Bush has made clear that the knowledge to make a nuke, not making a nuke itself, is his administration's red line.

Col. Boylan On EFP's

By Cernig

Yesterday, we posted an email interview with Colonel Steven Boylan, press spokesman for General Petraeus, who gave his personal take on some non-softball questions regarding the U.S. presence in Iraq. One of the matters he addressed was alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq, specifically the origins of EFP devices, the improvised bombs which are so effective against even the heaviest armor. Col. Boylan wrote:

The EFPs come from Iran. We interdicted shipments of them from Iran, we have records that have been captured in targeted raids that inform us that they are from Iran, and we have taped interviews from those that have been captured as well. They have said that they could not do what they are doing without the help and assistance from Iran. We have physical evidence that we have shown over and over again to the media in Baghdad on how we know these weapons come from Iran. Now, Iran has pledged to the Iraqi government to stop the flow of arms into Iraq. We hope that they honor that pledge and we are looking for that to happen so now we have to wait to see if in fact that will happen.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Col. Boylan's personal view matches exactly with the official line. Yet there are several points contained in that official line which are simply not supported by the facts.

"We interdicted shipments of them from Iran." That, as far as I'm aware, is simply untrue. I keep a pretty close eye on the news where EFP's and Iran are concerned and the closest that can be said in truth is that U.S. forces have seized EFP shipments which were assessed as coming from Iran - there has never, ever, been a case of an EFP shipment (or indeed any other weapons shipment) being seized at the border. The assessment (intel-speak for 'guess') that these seized EFP's came from Iran is premised entirely on...the assessment that all EFP's come from Iran. There are lots of good reasons to suspect that premise isn't true - mainly the finding of manufactories for EFP's inside Iraq by U.S. forces. If the U.S. military were saying that elements in Iran facillitated Iraqi groups getting the know-how to make EFP's, via Hezboullah, they would probably be right. But they insist on a stronger narrative for which their actual presented evidence is far too weak.

"We have records that have been captured in targeted raids that inform us that they are from Iran." These raids were, according to reports, targeted on the say-so of informants from the MeK terror group and found computer laptops holding the kind of information only a moron would put on a laptop if they were indeed genuine. Unfortunately, in the past the MeK has been suspected of perpetrating forgeries of anti-Iranian evidence on laptops in other matters, notably Iran's nuclear program. Col. Boylan writes elsewhere in his interview responses that he is unaware of and therefore "would not be able to comment" on those reports of MeK involvement in U.S. intelligence gathering efforts in Iraq.

"We have taped interviews from those that have been captured as well. They have said that they could not do what they are doing without the help and assistance from Iran." Yeah, I haven't seen those tapes and I suspect the Colonel hasn't either. I've been meaning to post about these captured EFP smugglers. Again, there are credible reports that the MeK has been providing interpreters/interrogators for U.S. forces in such cases and that other interrogations have been conducted by Iraqi Army personnel - in all cases with a "hands off" posture from the U.S. military - entirely so that "robust" interrogation techniques forbidden by the military justice code can be used.

Then there's the detainees themselves. The most prominent of them are the alleged heads of a Mahdi Army splinter group who, when captured, confessed exactly as described by Col. Boylan. But they'd already confessed - twice - to the Associated Press after seeking out AP to tell their story. For supposedly super-secret proxy agents of Iran's machinations, they're truly terrible secret keepers. Their account to the AP got some really unusual confirmation - it was backed as truthful (from a transatlantic distance) by the US spokesman for the anti-Iranian MeK terror group, FOXNews contributor Alireza Jafarzadeh.

Finally - Col Boyland writes that "Iran has pledged to the Iraqi government to stop the flow of arms into Iraq." We've only the Iraqi government's word for that - Iran has never made a formal statement. And there have been reasons aplenty to think that the Maliki government will say whatever it feels it needs to if it means keeping the U.S. happy while at the same time still keeping close ties with Iran.

On this one, Colonel Boylan's opinion is unconvincing to me.

Mistrusting The Narrative

By Cernig

There goes General Petraeus again, pushing the narrative ahead.

General David Petraeus, speaking at a U.S. military base about 30 km (20 miles) from the Iranian border on Saturday, said Iran was giving advanced weaponry to militias in Iraq.

"They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers," Petraeus told a small group of reporters when asked if the Iranian government was responsible for killing U.S. troops.

"There is no question about the connection between Iran and these components, (the) attacks that have killed our soldiers."

Petraeus did not say how he knew Iran's ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, was a member of the Qods force.

"The ambassador is a Qods force member," said Petraeus, before appearing to suggest that Kazemi-Qomi was not under the U.S. military spotlight because he was a diplomat.

"Now he has diplomatic immunity and therefore he is obviously not subject (to scrutiny). He is acting as a diplomat."

...Petraeus said he had no doubts about the Qods force.

"There should be no question about the malign, lethal involvement and activities of the Qods force in this country," he said.

Petraeus listed the type of weapons he said Iran was supplying to militias in Iraq.

He said this comprised advanced rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-fired "Stinger-like" air defense missiles and 240mm rockets. This was in addition to components used to make explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), a particularly deadly roadside bomb that has killed hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Petraeus also suggested there was an Iranian link in the assassination of two provincial governors in southern Iraq in August. Both were killed by roadside bombs.

"They are implicated in the assassination of some governors in the southern provinces," said Petraeus.

Asked to be more specific, he said one case "was clearly an explosively formed projectile."

"They only come from Iran and they are only used by militias so it's a sort of a signature trademark of militia extremists. The other case the suspicion is the same, we just don't have the same quality of forensics."

Asked if there was intelligence directly linking Iran to the two bomb attacks, he said: "I would not comment on this."

There's a few links made here possibly fall into the category of 'seeing what you want to see in the ink-blot'.

Firstly - Qods. In nine months of trying, the US has singularly failed to arrest a single probable member of Qods anywhere in Iraq. What is presented as proof of their involvement is, looked at with a sceptical eye, rather sparse - Iraqis alleged to be agents of Qods based on computer evidence seized after tip-offs by the MeK terror group, or who have confessed after "interrogation' by MeK interpreters working for the U.S. military. Alleging that a merchant, or an ambassador, is a member of Qods without actual, presentable, proof is akin to the kind of tit-for-tat accusations made during the Soviet/West Cold War and shouldn't be seen as anything more than that. No-one ever really expected the accusations to be proven true or false, but they were still just as useful for propaganda purposes.

I admit freely that elements of Qods may well be involved in Iraqi weapons smuggling - for a profit. The Qods is notoriously corrupt and interested in itself first and foremost. There has been exactly zero evidence presented to show that any Qods involvement in Iraq is anything more than freelancing to line individuals' pockets at the expense of their own state's arsenal. That may not be convincing on an emotional level to many, but it's simply facts and logic.

Which brings us to those "advanced rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-fired "Stinger-like" air defense missiles and 240mm rockets". All of these items have been found in Iraq, undeniably with Iranian markings. But all of those weapons are also widely exported to other nations by iran, many of whom have their share and more of corrupt individuals who will happily re-export such items on the black market to their own enrichment. Such re-direction has already been seen several times in respect of American weaponry exported to Saudi Arabia and Iraq, among others, which have then turned up in terrorist hands in Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran. On at least a couple of occasions U.S. military officers have been involved in these black market trades. Without proof other than the simple seizure of such weapons, there is no reason to suspect anything more in Iran's case than in America's that would stand up in a court of law.

Lastly, Petraeus' assertion that EFP's found in Iraq must be Iranian because only Iran makes EFP's is an outright falsehood, contradicted by seizures of EFP's and of manufactories for EFP's inside Iraq as well as by the existence of non-Iranian made EFP's elsewhere in the world. Here we have a perfect case of fitting the facts around the policy. Particularly since both governors Petraeus referred to were members of SCIRI - the Shiite political party with the strongest ties of all to Iran. If the General is to believed, Iran is complicit in killing its own strongest allies for no reason that he bothers to forward.

It's little wonder that others, even staunch allies, aren't convinced. The British certainly aren't.

Diplomatic relations between Britain and the United States over Iran are under increasing strain after Gordon Brown's special security adviser warned that American claims about Tehran's military capability should be taken 'with a pinch of salt'.
As a new conservative campaign group with links to the White House prepares to make the case that Iran is a direct threat to the US, Patrick Mercer urged scepticism towards any US justification for strikes against the country.

Mercer, the former shadow homeland security spokesman, who visIted the Iranian capital recently, said: 'There is increasing concern about the apparent evidence that America is preparing about Iranian military involvement.'
Mercer, who last month accepted a post as an adviser to the Brown government, said: 'All that I heard when I was in Iran was British authorities saying "be careful about what you hear from America". I'm not saying for one moment that it is necessarily wrong, but it's got to be taken with a pinch of salt. Is it American rhetoric, propaganda or fact?'

However he conceded that British military commanders had discussed the issue of Iran with their US counterparts, although there had been no offer of support for a US-led air strike against the country. 'Iran is a problem, there's no doubt about it. Whatever is going to occur vis à vis Iran is going to include at the very least British diplomatic effort.'

Meanwhile, a well-funded new conservative campaign group with links to the White House is making the case that Iran is a threat to the US and Israel and should be 'stopped'. Freedom's Watch was founded in March by a dozen billionaire and multimillionaire benefactors. Critics say the organisation is a neo-conservative 'slush fund' and front for White House policy, in particular the views of Vice President Dick Cheney.

I know it upsets some who are more enamoured of their own beliefs than in a realistic appraisal of the facts, but "taking it all with a pinch of salt" is all I've ever asked be done. Unfortunately, in the absence of actual evidence and in the presence of an emotional, illogical narrative that has replaced critical thought for many here in the U.S., by pushing for that measure of salt I've found myself as a reluctant apologist for an odious regime in Teheran. I'm not at all comfortable with that position, but I cannot in conscience abandon it while the prevalent narrative is for blame and demonization on the basis of that narrative alone.

One Way Or Another (We're Gonna Getcha)

By Cernig
Updated below

Seymour Hersh has a "must read" today in the New Yorker entitled "Shifting Targets - the Administration's plan for Iran". Hersh writes:

This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

I have to say that I disagree with Hersh a little - I don't think the White House are really shifting targets at all, it's always been a case of "one way or another". They know, still, that any "surgical" strikes will provoke a response that in turn will provide the cause for the wider campaign they've had in mind all along. The only shift is from all-out to gradual.

However, Hersh is correct that the Bush administration have run into resistance to their plan to blame their attack on Iran's nuclear program. The rest of the international community have caught a serious whiff of warmongering bulls**t in the White House's stance of criticizing the IAEA and its director for doing what the UNSC said they should - clear up outstanding questions regarding Iran's nuclear activities - and pre-emptively trying to push for more sanctions before the experts have presented their findings. Compare that push with the White House's rhetoric of "give the experts time" over Petreaus' "surge", as other nations have, and the hypocrisy in service to a pre-fixed agenda is obvious. The Bush administration aren't at all interested in solving the Iranian nuclear problem - they're interested in a war and will have it by any means.

If the IAEA were showing signs of what the White House wants found - any evidence whatsoever of an Iranian nuclear weapons program - they wouldn't be so frantic to seal the deal before the experts finish their work. But they aren't. At every step, intelligence provided by the U.S. to the IAEA (often based on the say-so of the MeK terror group and it's political front or the paranoid wing of Israeli intelligence) has proven false. At this point, they only people giving any credence to continued shock-horror anonymous leaks and revelations are the extreme Right's pundit corps and those in Israel and America who "hate all Iranians" in any case.

Thus, the new-found impetus to charges that Iran is meddling with deadly intent in Iraqi affairs. We've seen it before. Back at the beginning of the year, the White House felt such provided their best causus belli and all the talk was of EFP's and Iranian agents. Then came the infamous Baghdad Briefing - a PR flop so disastrous and so obviously motivated by a desire to find an excuse for war that even Secdef Gates and General Pace publicly disavowed the claim that Iran's leadership were provably behind the meddling. Frantic scrabbling to restore message discipline ensued at the White House, and an anonymous Baghdad Briefer was thrown under an anonymous bus when anonymous administration sources told the media he had overstepped his authority.

Since then, the White House and their tame officers in Iraq (both the chief military spokesmen at MNF-I were dispatched there direct from the White House's military press office) have been careful to stick to leaks from "official sources who remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information" and pronouncements of "assessments" from the Green Zone where "we assess" is a handy euphemism for "we guess". No more big dog-and-pony shows where the paucity of the evidence against Iran as a nation-state can be addressed as a whole body and at one time.

There are good reasons why the White House doesn't want to subject its "evidence" to scrutiny, as Hersh knows full well.

Questions remain, however, about the provenance of weapons in Iraq, especially given the rampant black market in arms. David Kay, a former C.I.A. adviser and the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations, told me that his inspection team was astonished, in the aftermath of both Iraq wars, by “the huge amounts of arms” it found circulating among civilians and military personnel throughout the country. He recalled seeing stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges that had been recovered from unexploded American cluster bombs. Arms had also been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their Shiite allies in southern Iraq who had been persecuted by the Baath Party...“I thought Petraeus went way beyond what Iran is doing inside Iraq today,” Kay said.

...In interviews with current and former officials, there were repeated complaints about the paucity of reliable information. A former high-level C.I.A. official said that the intelligence about who is doing what inside Iran “is so thin that nobody even wants his name on it. This is the problem.”

The difficulty of determining who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq can be seen in Basra, in the Shiite south, where British forces had earlier presided over a relatively secure area. Over the course of this year, however, the region became increasingly ungovernable, and by fall the British had retreated to fixed bases. A European official who has access to current intelligence told me that “there is a firm belief inside the American and U.K. intelligence community that Iran is supporting many of the groups in southern Iraq that are responsible for the deaths of British and American soldiers. Weapons and money are getting in from Iran. They have been able to penetrate many groups”—primarily the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias.

A June, 2007, report by the International Crisis Group found, however, that Basra’s renewed instability was mainly the result of “the systematic abuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias.” The report added that leading Iraqi politicians and officials “routinely invoke the threat of outside interference”—from bordering Iran—“to justify their behavior or evade responsibility for their failures.”

Not just Iraqi politicians. In all of this, there has never been a serious attempt by either the US military, the Bush administration or the mainstream media to address the biggest drawback to all of the Iran-pounding - all the evidence can be explained sufficiently well by referring to private, black-market, entrepreneurs. Some, perhaps more than just a few, of those private-enterprise actors may well be in Iranian military uniforms - just as some have been Iraqis, Kuwaitis or in U.S. military uniforms. Like Basra, the simple truth is more likely venal self-interest on the part of a variety of groups, in an area where border control is historically a farce, than some grand Iranian conspiracy.

It seems certain to me that both these parallel attempts to justify an attack on Iran will continue, with one being given precedence over the other depending on current circumstances until the Cheneyite faction gets its wish. The attack will be motivated primarily by animosity to Iran for insults in the past rather than current events or broad-brush tarring of an entire religion which will then be firmly affixed to Iran as the scapegoat for xenophobia. It will be given a gloss of seeming reason which still, at base, stems from a sociopathic claim that Iran must be guilty because "it's what we neocons would do if we were Iran."

The war with Iran will go ahead purely because "its what we neocons would do if we were in charge" - and they are. As Hersh notes, the world is not unaware of this dynamic.

Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come from Iran—especially since SA-7s are available through black-market arms dealers.

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.”

Update Be sure to read The Washington Post's primer on the IED problem in Iraq. The first part is out today. I want to draw your attention to a key point that is far too often overlooked by those who want to blame every EFP detonation on Iran.

U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate Appropriations Committee shortly after taking over U.S. Central Command in July 2003. "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control. We don't."

...More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

There were literally hundreds of thousands of Saddam-era soldiers made jobless after the invasion, and many joined the insurgency. Many were doubtless already knowledgeable about EFP's as well as IED's, and if they weren't then Shiite contacts with Hezboullah (originally facillitated by Iran in Saddam's time) were doubtless sufficient to import the knowledge. Iraq has plenty of machine shops, plenty of raw materials and plenty of knowledgeable bomb-makers. The idea that EFP's that work properly are assessed as coming from Iran purely because they work properly whereas homegrown Iraqi EFP's are substandard and cooked up on household stoves is counter-intuitive in the extreme.

Update 2 Fresh of the presses comes this story from Arutz Sheva: "Bolton, Podhoretz Say: Bomb Iranian Nukes."

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Conservative Party delegates in Britain Sunday that efforts by the UN to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country. Influential conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz told a British paper that he has advised President George W. Bush to do just that.

Bolton also said the UN's involvement with Iran was "fundamentally irrelevant". Podhoretz said he told Bush: "You have the awesome responsibility to prevent another holocaust. You’re the only one with the guts to do it." Still crazies after all these years.

That Porous Iraq/Iran Border

By Cernig

Buried inside an AP report today on very belated attempts by the U.S. to patrol the Iran/Iraq border (why did it take so long, given all those allegations?) is a remarkable admission.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia sent 2,000 troops to help last month, but they haven't yet left a major base in the area. Mueller and his troops are also getting a late start, basically trying to secure the thinly patrolled border from scratch after it was largely ignored during more than four years of war.

The area has attracted new U.S. attention as the military steps up allegations that Tehran is aiding Shiite extremists who have killed hundreds of American troops with powerful bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, believed to be brought in from Iran. Tensions between the two countries also have been rising over Iran's nuclear program and the recent detentions of each others' citizens.

Mueller, 48, from Yorktown, Va., is the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's border transition team at the heart of an intensified U.S. push to stop the smuggling. The strategy is similar to American efforts elsewhere in Iraq - build up the infrastructure and train the Iraqi forces to take over eventually.

The 900-mile border between the two countries, however, is laced with ancient smuggling routes and tribes who spent decades bringing in weapons to fight Saddam Hussein's regime and are now believed to be making their living from Shiite militias. The problem is particularly stark along the 90-mile section in predominantly Shiite Wasit province, southeast of Baghdad.

Mueller acknowledges the virtual impossibility of securing such a border but says the U.S. forces can at least disrupt the flow of weapons into the capital.

Please try to remember this the next time some Bush official or rightwing hack says the Iranian leadership must know about weaponry smuggled into Iraq from Iran and that the Iranian leadership must be fully complicit in any smuggling going on.

If the Best Military In The World (tm) can't secure the Iran/Iraq border against smugglers, what chance do the Iranians have? The entire region is a maze of smuggling trails and the arms smuggling market is one of the biggest growth areas in the Middle East as a whole. As I keep saying, criminal private entrepreneurs explain all cases of Iranian weaponry found in Iraq to date and absent some hard and verifiable evidence otherwise there is no causus belli against Iran as a nation.

Iran And The EFP Causus Belli

By Cernig

Echoing a pessimistic certainty by progressive bloggers that the Bush administration intends to mount an attack on Iran before the end of their term, Council on Foreign Relations expert and past advocate of "preventative force", Barnett Rubin, wrote on Wednesday that the administration are waiting until after labor Day to make their big push for war, on the basis that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran. This anecdote is also inconclusive, but it is consistent with the depth of planning that went into the reconstruction effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hesitated before posting this. I don't want to spread alarmist rumors. I don't want to lessen the pressure on the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran. But there are too many signs of another irresponsible military adventure from the Cheney-Bush administration for me just to dismiss these reports. I am putting them into the public sphere in the hope of helping to mobilize opposition to a policy that would further doom the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and burden our country and the people of the Middle East with yet another unstoppable fountain of bloodshed.

No wonder the Bush administration are full of ill-concealed gloom at yesterday's report from the IAEA, who have put to rest some of the major talking-points the neocons were using to ratchet up war rhetoric over Iran's nuclear energy program and look set to answer other long-standing questions too. Not that any of this will stop the bush administration ignoring facts in their reach for war.

As of today, there's no uncertainty about Iran's plutonium experiments - they were peaceful - says the IAEA. The Iranian facilities which had been questioned have been inspected and are also peaceful in intent. Likewise, Iran is operating its less-than-expected number of enrichment centrifuges at about 10% efficiency, hardly a sign of an urgent rush to bomb-making. Soon, Iran will give the IAEA detailled answers on the provenance and accuracy of laptop plans for something supposedly called the "Green Salt Project" - a laptop provided by the MeK anti-Iranian terror group. It will also respond on documents showing plans for forming hemispherical uranium for bombs sent to Iran by the Pakistani Khan network - plans Iran maintains it didn't ask for and has never made use of. The murk around Iran's nuclear program is getting clearer and as it clears the Bush administration's narrative - complete with 2002-style "mushroom cloud" rhetoric - of a nuclear threat gets flimsier.

And so it seems likely that the push for war will center around alleged meddling in Iran, especially the supposed provision of troop-killing EFP bombs. Cheney has already said this alone amounts to a causus belli. Yet the evidence and arguments for knowing Iranian leadership involvement in Iraqi EFP attacks is also flimsy at best. I've been following this thread of warhype from very early on and venture to claim I've researched the matter as thoroughly as any non-expert pundit can. Certainly as well or better than any who aren't immediately inclined to believe everything the neocon noise machine tells them.

Let's review the narrative, and some of the contrary evidence that the warmongers won't be talking about. Much of it has been given sparse attention by the media, yet intelligence analysts are undoubtably aware of it.

Despite repeated claims by neoconservative pundits and Bush administration officials that Iran is arming the Taliban in Afghanistan with EFP bombs, neither the US Army's own bomb expert in theatre, NATO allies nor the commanding US general agree with that assessment.

As former CIA field officer Robert Baer points out, co-operation between Iraqi fighters and Hezboullah has an 18 year history and any assessment of Iranian involvement in the transmission of EFP technology from Hezboullah to the Iraqi insurgency is reaching further than the evidence provides for.

Hezboullah got EFP technology - including the use of infra-red triggers - from the Irish Republican Army in the early 1990's. The IRA had also traded the same technology to various other terrorist groups including Columbia's FARC and Spain's ETA. Iraqis fighting for Hezboullah and then returning to their homeland took their gained knowledge of EFP manufacture with them. Claims that only Iran knows how to make EFP's are ludicrous.

The narrative on who makes EFP's has been subject to change since just the beginning of the year. At every stage the administration has been forced to change its story only after independent experts debunked the existing version or emerging evidence has made nonsense of their version. They have moved from "only Iran makes EFP's" to "Iran makes them and they are assembled in Iraq" to "Iraqis make their own but the ones made in Iran work better". Yet in top-level pronouncements, the evolving narrative is glossed over as "Iran provides EFPs".

Even the current narrative that "Iraqis make their own but Iran provides better ones" ignores the laws of physics and denigrates the capabilities of Iraqis in order to further the anti-Iran story.

Both General Pace and Defense Secretary Gates have been at pains to point out that their is no established link between EFP's in Iraq and the Iranian leadership. Their refusal to toe the party line caused one poor anonymous Baghdad Briefer to be tossed under the bus by Cheney's faction for "exceeding his authority".

Much of the evidence for supposed Iranian meddling in Iraq has been provided by the notorious MeK terror group, a favorite of the neocons in the Bush administration which is nonetheless facing court cases in Iraq for involvement in Saddam-era atrocities. On repeated instances, their "intelligence" has been found to be false on this and matters related to the Iranian nuclear program.

No-one has yet found a single EFP crossing the Iranian border into Iraq and British officers who have spent months looking say there's nothing to find. The most British officials will concede, even off the record, is that a single splinter group may be receiving EFP's from Iran manufactories but that these are probably made by rogue black-marketeers cashing in on the chaos in Iraq.

Neocon shills continue to cite other stories about Iranian involvement in Iraq - often promulgated by the neocon noise machine's connections with foreign news media - such as the false tale of Austrian sniper rifles, which have since been denied by the US military or were obviously spurious to begin with.

Allegations (without produced evidence) that the Iranian Quods Force are supplying Iraqi groups with $3 million a month in aid seem sensational until one realizes that such amounts are chump change in comparison to amounts the US spends - for instance $75 million on the Anbar Salvation Council which apparently only funded their leader's bank robberies and con games. They are of a piece with in-credible attempts to bring the other neocon boogeyman, China, into the narrative.

To date, the only positive evidence for Iranian involvement in and leadership of EFP attacks in Iraq are: confessions delivered by MeK and Iraqi Army interrogators under conditions of extreme duress; explosives that the US military says it knows are Iranian because they're in fake US wrappers and scoring marks on EFP discs caused by the manufacture process which the US military says must be Iranian because they say the Iraqis can't machine discs on their own (despite there being plenty of machine shops in Iraq and the formulas used being widely spread by the IRA in the 90's); other weapons that the US military knows are Iranian because they have serial numbers on (and they never think that maybe that means rogue elements redirecting arms exports, since the Iranian government are clever enough at black ops to take the serial numbers off). That's it.

Yet, despite the narrative's utter denial of common sense and the rules of evidence, this will be enough for the Cheneyites to drum up a war with Iran. Democratic leaders, as they have already, will go along with the surge to Tehran.

Army Expert Contradicts White House EFP Narrative

By Cernig

You may recall that the White House's various mouthpieces have linked EFP's found in Afghanistan with meddling by the Iranian leadership, just as they have in Iraq. Not so fast, says the US Army's own resident bomb expert.

Five EFPs, which can penetrate armed vehicles and have caused numerous civilian and military casualties in Iraq, were found in Afghanistan this year, Col. Tom Kelly, deputy chief of ISAF [the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force - C] counter-bombs operations, told a press conference.

The first EFP exploded south of the Afghan capital Kabul in January, but caused no casualties, Kelly said, adding the other four were captured either in the western Herat province bordering Iran or in Kabul before they went off.

This is the first time that EFPs were found in Afghanistan. This new trend has caused lots of attention and concerns among international troops deployed here, as Iraq-style bombs would greatly strengthen militants and terrorists here if transferred into Afghanistan.

However, Kelly said "We don't see Afghanistan and Iraq are associated on the improvised explosive devices (IEDs). We think Afghanistan and IEDs seen in Afghanistan really have their own unique signature."

...Kelly said "Some EFP components may be made in Iran, but it doesn't necessarily mean the Iranian government is behind it," as some explosive materials maybe are trafficked into Afghanistan by "criminal elements."

Ascribing EFP manufacture to "criminal elements" is in perfect accord with the opinions of NATO allies in the region, the senior US General in Afghanistan and the opinions of independent experts.

Yet the White house are insisting on creating an "assessed" tie between Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to say Iran is meddling in both US-led occupations. The evidence doesn't fit the bill for those claims in Afghanistan, but it's enough out of the publics' eye that officers there can get away with saying so. The evidence in Iraq fits a "criminal elements" explanation better than it does the "Quods Force/Iranian leadership" narrative too, but the message on Iraqi EFP's is so politicized and under such a tight leash after the last time Pace and Gates wandered off the preferred White House line that there's no chance of any military officer saying so out loud. And the mainstream media continue to facillitate the deception by not asking questions hard enough.

(H/T David Hambling at Danger Room, an expert who all along has asked the right questions.)

Taking It For Granted At The NYT

By Cernig

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has a piece today which is more critical of his colleagues, reporter Michael Gordon and executive editor Bill Keller, than he was the last time he was called to spin Gordon's blatant hackery in writing about alleged Iranian EFPs in Iraq. But not by much.

there are special lengths that The Times — or any other news organization — must go to when dealing with an issue so protracted, so complicated, and so politicized. It must take pains when reporting today’s events to add yesterday’s perspective. It must attribute information exhaustively to keep sources’ credibility and motives in view. And it must be willing to revisit old ground when new developments change the context.

The recent article demonstrates some of the pitfalls. I think it had avoidable problems that helped lead to the eruption of criticism, a view vehemently disputed by Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, and Michael Gordon, who wrote the piece.

Readers said that, at a time of growing tensions between the United States and Iran, the article failed to offer persuasive evidence that Iran was the source of the bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, E.F.P.’s, which can go through the armor of Humvees.

In fact, strong evidence was provided in a 2,600-word article by Gordon and Scott Shane, published March 27, and Gordon said, “I do sort of assume that readers will have some familiarity with the body of our coverage over the past few months.” I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption, and I believe The Times could have found a way to remind skeptics of the essentials in the March article without repeating it in its entirety.

The article cited is a Times Select one, but rightwing blogger Tigerhawk helpfully and approvingly cites the "evidence" part for us.

American intelligence analysts say the first detonation of an E.F.P. in Iraq may have come in August 2003. But their view that Iran was playing a role in the attacks emerged slowly. American officials said their assessment of Iranian involvement was based on a cumulative picture that included forensic examination of exploded and captured devices, and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iraq and devices used in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.

''There was no eureka moment,'' said one senior American official, who like several others would discuss intelligence and administration decision-making only on condition of anonymity.

The entire E.F.P. assembly seen repeatedly in Iraq, including the radio link used to activate it and the infrared sensor used to fire it, had been found only one other place in the world, American officials say: Lebanon, since 1998, where it is believed to have been supplied by Iran to Hezbollah.

According to one military expert, some of the radio transmitters used to activate some of the E.F.P.'s in Iraq operate on the same frequency and use the same codes as devices used against Israeli forces in Lebanon.

More evidence came from the interception of trucks in Iraq, within a few miles of the Iranian border, carrying copper discs machined to the precise curvature required to form the penetrating projectile. Wrappers for C4 explosive, among other items, were traceable to Iran, officials say.

An important part of the American claim comes from intelligence, including interrogation of captured militia members, about Shiite militants who use E.F.P.'s and maintain close ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah.

The militant groups led by Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani have operated one of the most important E.F.P. networks. According to American intelligence reports, his network has been receiving E.F.P. components and training from the Quds Force, and elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard, and Hezbollah operatives in Iran. He is on the Iraqi most-wanted list and the Iraqi criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest in 2005.

Ahmad Abu Sajad al-Gharawi, a former Mahdi Army commander, has been active in Maysan Province. American intelligence officials say his group was probably linked to the attack on British forces that was cited in the American diplomatic protest. He is also on the Iraqi government's most-wanted list, and an Iraqi warrant has been issued for his arrest.

In September 2005, British forces arrested Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, the leader of a splinter group of the Mahdi Army that carried out E.F.P. attacks against British forces in southern Iraq. American intelligence concluded that his fighters might have received training and E.F.P. components from Hezbollah.

Mr. Fartusi lived in Lebanon for several years, and a photograph of him with Hezbollah members was discovered when British forces searched his home. In the view of American officials that may be circumstantial evidence of an Iranian connection, because American intelligence experts say Hezbollah generally conducts operations in Iraq with the consent of Iran.

Last week, American-led forces captured Qais Khazali and Laith Khazali, two Shiite militants who were linked to the kidnapping and killing of five American soldiers in Karbala in January, the United States military said. American officials say they have also trafficked in E.F.P.'s.

I wouldn't characterize that evidence as "strong" unless you are set on deliberately ommitting the counter-evidence of sceptics from the equation - something Michael Gordon obviously wants to do.

There's no mention of the fact that infra-red and radio triggered EFPs have been used in Northern ireland long before the current conflict or that there are reports that the design for EFPs used in Iraq was first seen in Ireland and spread globally by the IRA in trade for weapons and other bomb-making techniques.

No mention that Hezboullah was active in Iraq long before the US-led invasion and it hardly needs an Iranian element to explain their presence.

No mention of reports that detainee interrogations which have produced confessions concerning Irainain involvement have involved the notorious MeK terror group as "translators" or have involved Iraqi interrogators working without US supervision, all amid accusations of torture.

No mention of the evolving tale of "Iranian EFP's" - from "only Iran makes them" to "Iran makes the components" to "Iran makes them better but Iraqis make them too" - as independent experts question each successive version of the "assessments" made by the US military. Indeed, even the latest itteration of the narrative has some serious scientific, technical and logical flaws. Among those are the C-4 explosives mentioned above - which the US military says it knows are Iranian because they're in fake US wrappers - and the supposedly exacting standards of Iranian copper discs, which can be made in any machine shop once the dimensions are known while at the same time the tale of Iraqis making inferior moulded discs doesn't pass basic scientific muster.

No mention of the possibility that less dramatic explanations than an iranian leadership conspiracy are entirely sufficient to explain the evidence. As I wrote when the latest Gordon stenography appeared:

The main thrust of criticism of the narrative is that it violates both logic and good intelligence analysis policy - informal sharing of regional expertise coupled with porous borders, the burgeoning black-market arms trade in the region and widespread corruption in regional militaries are sufficient on their own to explain the current evidence without inventing a high-level Iranian conspiracy.

Gordon is undoubtably aware of all this - he's had plenty of time to play catch-up - but he obviously doesn't care. So he continues to pop out these hacktacular reports, in full knowledge that he has left behind any journalistic integrity.

Now Hoyt, while seemingly giving Gordon a rapped knuckle, is also glossing over the depth of scepticism about the US narrative (both it's evidence and the conclusions drawn from that evidence) by citing Gordon's last article as being a fair representation of that scepticism.

Another Hacktacular EFP Story

By Cernig

Have I mentioned that Michael Gordon of the NY Times really, really annoys me? Every time the US military wants to catapult some anti-Iran propoganda about how Iran-provided EFP bombs are killing US troops, they turn to Gordon. And every time they do, he dutifully does another fine job of stenography.

Today, he has another one, which turns, as Sean-Paul rightly points out, on some legerdemain of statistics. Sunni attacks in Baghdad are down and Shiite militia attacks are up basically because they think the US is turning away from supporting the Shiites to supporting Sunni groups instead. Nature abhors a vacuum. But since EFP penetrators are a favored weapon of Shiite groups, and the US says all EFP's are the fault of Iran - that makes Iran the biggest enemy. So the obvious (?) conclusion is that Iran is surging to disrupt the surge - and that's what Gordon dutifully writes.

But the bit that's got me really pissed is the throw-away nature of the obligatory "sceptical" paragraph the editors made him insert after the row last time he picked up his Rita Skeeter quill.

American intelligence says that its report of Iranian involvement is based on a technical analysis of exploded and captured devices, interrogations of Shiite militants, the interdiction of trucks near Iran’s border with Iraq and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iran and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.

Some critics of Bush administration policy, saying there is no proof that the top echelons of Iran’s government are involved, accuse the White House of exaggerating the role of Iran and Syria to divert attention from its own mistakes.

Michael Gordon isn't a stupid person - he knows that this entirely misrepresents the strength of US "evidence" against Iran and the thrust of criticism of the Bush administration's narrative.

The evidence is very weak, with every single element being challenged - from EFP manufacture techniques and locations, to confessions obtained under aggressive interrogation by Iraqi Army or MeK questioners, to Hizbullah's being involved in Iraq even before the invasion. The main thrust of criticism of the narrative is that it violates both logic and good intelligence analysis policy - informal sharing of regional expertise coupled with porous borders, the burgeoning black-market arms trade in the region and widespread corruption in regional militaries are sufficient on their own to explain the current evidence without inventing a high-level Iranian conspiracy.

Gordon is undoubtably aware of all this - he's had plenty of time to play catch-up - but he obviously doesn't care. So he continues to pop out these hacktacular reports, in full knowledge that he has left behind any journalistic integrity.

NATO Undermines US Claim On Iran Weapons

By Cernig

U.S. officers working under the NATO command in Afghanistan have said that deadly EFP explosive devices have been found in Afghanistan, but that there is no evidence that the Iranian leadership is involved, contradicting recent claims by Bush administration officials.

Thomas Kelly, a US colonel under NATO command, said forces had found several of the so-called "explosively-formed projectiles" that were more sophisticated than the crudely-made bombs usually used by Afghan insurgents.

But the senior spokeswoman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), US Lieutenant Colonel Claudia Foss, stressed that the alliance had no evidence that the Iranian government was involved in the supply.

Kelly said four of the devices, which are also being used by Iraqi insurgents and Lebanon's Hezbollah, were found in Herat near the Iranian border and in Kabul, where a fifth device had harmlessly exploded early this year.

The colonel told a Kabul media briefing that the bombs were "something called explosively-formed projectiles (EFPs)... They're designed to penetrate armoured vehicles.

"These are very sophisticated IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and they're really not manufactured in any other places other than, our knowledge is, Iran," he said, adding that the explosives were factory-made.

Taliban insurgents commonly attack US-led, NATO and Afghan targets with roadside bombs and other explosives made from old ammunition such as mortars and rockets left over from the war-torn country's decades of conflicts.

"The insurgents may have access to this device but may not yet know how to use them or know if they're effective or not," Kelly said.

Foss, however, told the same briefing that ISAF's commander had previously said "that we have no evidence of any formal supply of weapons from Iran."

"For decades this country has been under attack and we find weapons all the time but, as far as any formal supply, there's been no evidence."

Notice first of all that their information that these EFP's are only manufactured in Iran is an older version of the U.S. military and Bush administration narrative about EFP's in Iraq. In Iraq, however, they've now admitted that Iraqis can make EFP's in very basic manufacturies but claim that Iraqi-made ones aren't as dangerous as Iranian ones (although how they tell them apart is also problemmatic).

While todays statement contradicts Bush officials like Gates and Burns, but agrees with the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, who told reporters last month that he had no hard evidence that Iran's government had a policy of shipping arms to the Taliban as well as with independent experts who say these arms shipments are part of normal black-market entrepreneurship in a region with plentiful small arms bazaars and historically porous borders.

The biggest problem I have with the Bush administration's tale of EFP's from Iran is that the tale keeps changing every time it is challenged by outside experts. Here, for instance, the Afghan tale is an older version of the tale being told in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Occam's Razor version - that Iran didn't invent these things, that the techniques for making them have been spread far and wide through terror groups as different as Columbia's FARC, Spain's ETA and the UK's IRA as well as a whole slew of Islamic terror outfits, that they can be made easily and effectively with a minumim amount of manufacturing base, that dispersal of the knowledge needed is sufficient to explain their occurence without claiming origin from any one nation - continues to fit all the available evidence, unaltered.

I cynic would say the Bush administration are trying to set the stage to blame their favorite scapegoat - Iran - for their failure to keep their eye on the Afghani ball. A British bi-partisan government report says today that Afghanistan is in danger of failing as the taliban gain in strength again.

GIGO on the US OODA

Earlier this week I passed along the Washington Post reporting that the US military is claiming to have captured or killed 20,000 insurgent fighters and leaders since January of this year. I find this an incredible fact if all other elite consensus opinions are assumed to be true as to the size of the insurgency. If 20,000 insurgents were captured or killed, that is a significant fraction of the consensus size of the insurgencies and militias in Iraq. It is a fraction sufficient in all other historical examples, to force a step down in overall complexity and scale of non-Iraqi government armed forces operations. We have not seen that; instead the trend has been towards more attacks, more complex attacks, and more strategically focused attacks.


I have always been skeptical of the official numbers because those numbers make no sense given historical experience and motivations for fighting. Additionally, they also assume near infallibility in the US ability to correctly categorize individuals from supporter, to neutral, to inactively sympathetic for the insurgents, mildly supportive of some faction of the insurgency, active supporter of some armed non-governmental faction, to active shooter/IED emplacer.

Andrew Sullivan brings in an estimate as to how large of a salt shaker is needed to hold the proper skepticism:

Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson estimates that the US administration has arrested between 30,000 and 50,000 suspects during the past year. Eighty-five percent of them were innocent, according to Wilkerson. "We really have created a mess here. A terrible mess," Wilkerson says. "This has been incredibly damaging."

Counterinsurgency,if there is a no-actively seeking genocide constraint is a battle of intelligence, information and effective OODA loops. Our OODA loops suck if there is an 85% false positive rate on initial captures and detentions. The metric of processing individuals is what is being measured as a sign of success, so it will be emphasized despite illustrating further downstream that the US intelligence system is not working effectively in either cultivating informers, using their information, or verifying their information against other sources to make sure that we are not being sucked into a business feud. This failure of the US OODA loop due to GIGO exposes our soldiers to more risks as they are embarking on raids that have no effective value, create further distrust between the Iraqi population and US forces, devalues the intelligence value of the cadre of useful and accurate informers as their claims probably have a discount value due to the overall veracity of intelligence, and finally creates more insurgents from the released individuals.

Almost grasping 4th GW

David Ignatius wrote a painful column today as he is reaching for an idea of asymmetrical power and capability and barely scrapes his fingernails against it before he pulls back.

What's striking is that most of them were killed by roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

The United States is losing the war in Iraq because it cannot combat these makeshift weapons. An army with unimaginable firepower is being driven out by guerrillas armed with a crude arsenal of explosives and blasting caps, triggered by cellphones and garage-door openers.

This is Gulliver's torment, circa 2007. We have thrown our money and technology at the problem, with limited effect

No, it is losing this war as there is no clear strategic objective, minimally clear operational objectives and the illusion of tactical success and kill rates are used to substitute for the blind strategic and operational perspectives. We are also losing this war because the insurgencies are operating on a faster OODA and innovation loops.

Low-tech seems to trump high-tech. The military is operating nearly 5,000 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 150 in 2004. The latest model, dubbed "Fido," has a digital nose that can sniff explosives. Yet the bombs are so cheap and easy to make, and the robot sniffers are so expensive and finicky to operate, that the cost-benefit ratio seems to work in favor of the insurgents.

Up to this point, he has the central concept of the different scales of innovation loops and the velocity of change. And then he fails miserably and resorts to a combination of technofilia and centralized decision making.

Someday, perhaps, the Pentagon will track and target bombers by identifying biological tags -- smells or DNA traces that are unique signatures. Someday, we will be able to examine the microbes on an insurgent's skin or in his gut to find out if he was trained in Iran or the Bekaa Valley or Afghanistan.

As borders become less and less effective at keeping people, ideas, and the gray and black market economies of the world contained, what good will this do us if our responses will be the same relatively ponderous responses and not an attack against critical nodes and bottlenecks in the networks? Indiscriminate force is not an option in a counter-insurgency war if a strategic constraint is no intentional genocide. Restraint is one of the core attributes any counter-insurgent force must possess in abundance so the following solution to the IED problem has been discarded:

There are technologies that would allow us to detonate every roadside bomb in Iraq by heating the wires in the detonators to the point that they triggered an explosion. But these systems could severely harm civilians nearby, so we're not using them, either. "In our system, we often are not given credit for the fact that we are very concerned about collateral damage," Meigs said.

Such a system would cause massive collateral damage, reinforce the narrative that the United States does not care about Iraqi casualties, thus reinforcing the insurgency, and leading to an innovation that got around the metal wire bottleneck. The only solution that Mr. Ignatius proposes is a complete abandonment of operational and strategic thinking in favor of more tactical excellence:

The simple, low-tech answer to the IED threat is to reduce the number of targets -- by getting our troops off the streets during vulnerable daylight hours, to the extent possible. It's an interesting fact that very few IED attacks have been suffered by our elite Special Forces units, which attack al-Qaeda cells and Shiite death squads mostly at night, with devastating force. They blow in from nowhere and are gone minutes later, before the enemy can start shooting. That's the kind of asymmetry that evens the balance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under this plan, the insurgencies would own the day, and most nights as the IED threat will have established significant credible attrition to channel US forces to predictable hours and routes, thereby reducing US option space while increasing insurgent option space. During the day, the complete lack of US forces able or willing to patrol means that any insurgent counterintelligence network will be easily able to roll up any pro-US networks embedded in the population and either kill them or flip them to feed disinformation into the US OODA loop.

Brilliant!!!!

More EFP Nonsense

By Cernig

It isn't too long ago that the New York Times was making protestations of scepticism (albeit faint) regarding US claims of Iranian complicity in EFP attacks in Iraq. It would seem that the Washington Post has no such standards, as today they printed a bit of blatant stenography with absolutely no attempt to fact-check or set the story in a context of changing claims.

In the WaPo's article, we are told that:

Attacks in Iraq involving lethal weapons that U.S. officials say are made in Iran hit a record high last month, despite efforts to crack down on networks supplying the armor-piercing weapons known as explosively formed projectiles, according to a senior U.S. commander.

At no point does the article, by staff writer Ann Scott Tyson, suggest the obvious conclusion - that either said crackdown is failing or it is aimed in entirely the wrong direction, at Iran instead of indigenous Iraqi efforts.

It continues:

The U.S. military in recent weeks captured the Iraqi leader of a network that brings the projectiles into Iraq from Iran, as well as other members of extremist cells provided with funding, training and munitions by the al-Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, said at a news conference in Washington last week.

Also seized were computer documents and records detailing attacks against U.S. forces, presumably kept to justify financing by the Quds Force, Petraeus said.

While the captured head of the weapons cell "certainly reports to the very top," Petraeus added, there was nothing that would "absolutely indicate" knowledge or involvement by Iran's leaders.

Followed by the obligatory "fair and balanced" single sentence noting that Iran denies all involvement in EFP manufacture or smuggling.

Lets re-phrase that paragraph above, shall we? The US military captured some people who, after aggresive interrogation (i.e. torture) confessed what their interogators wanted them to. In an entirely seperate raid, acting on information provided by a terrorist goup, the MeK, computer records were seized which recorded attacks on US forces. Purely on the say-so of the MeK, the US military decided these records were to provide justification for finace by the Quds Force. But no-one is asking how the MeK knew those records would be there, or why anyone would be so stupid as to keep such records for such a covert operation, or even connecting the dots between this and previous MeK-provided computer evidence that turned out to be utterly made up.

Then, there's this:

Iraqi fighters have been making their own versions of the weapons, but so far none has been effective against U.S. forces, Odierno said. The Iraqi-made projectiles, using brass and copper melted on stoves, have failed to fully penetrate U.S. armor and are more likely to be used against Iraqi forces, whose vehicles often have thinner armored protection than U.S. vehicles, U.S. military officials said.

"We have not seen a homemade one yet that's executed properly," Odierno said, adding that such weapons are not a major concern "as of yet."

First, the WaPo's stenographer could have noted that this statement is yet another step in the evolution of the US military's narrative on EFP's from Iran - and that at every stage the narrative only changes because independent experts point out how wrong the narrative is. Since January, we've moved from "only Iran can make these weapons" to "only Iran can make these weapons properly". Yet every independent expert says that Iraqis have plenty of experience and equipment to make their own - and all the EFP's so far seized have been inside Iraq already, including in Iraqi manufacturies, not coming across the border.

Yet the only criterion for deciding whether an EFP is Iranian or Iraqi-made applied by the US military is itself subjective - a biased guess. If it would work well, it is Iranian - if not, it's Iraqi. There's no proof for this, they just decide that's the way it is. The latest version of the spin, that Iraqis cannot mill EFP discs correctly and must instead rely on poured discs is just plain insulting of people's intelligence. Iraqis have a long history of oil exploration, and EFP's have a long history of being used to open the sides of wells to allow the oil to flow more freely. The milling, once you understand the principles and equations, can be done by any precision engineering shop, of which Iraq has plenty.

Oh...and stoves don't get hot enough to melt copper or brass without modification. A standard propane stove heats to around 900 degrees farenheit. Copper melts at 1981 degrees and brass is right on the borderline at 940 degrees. Melting and casting such materials needs, at least, a requires a high-temperature firebrick foundry, a big propane torch and a graphite crucible.

In other words, just more EFP nonsense.

Update Over at The Agonist, "jdbmo" notes that I misread the melting point of brass. It's 940 kelvin or 1724 farenheit. That's even more ridiculous.

Meanwhile, at Wired's Danger Room, David Hambling is as usual doing great work with a compilation of all his links detailling the debunking of the current EFP narrative. His commenters are also, as ever, well-informed and healthily sceptical.

Reviewing Brave New War

I pre-ordered John Robb's book, Brave New War last January as a late Christmas present to myself, and when it arrived ten days ago, I devoured the entire book in two short sittings. I had been determined to write a review on this excellent compilation of one of the more interesting national security thinkers' work, but I have been stuck in how to formulate my response until I read how ZenPundit started his response.

is a book that was really written for two audiences.

The first is the relatively small number of specialists in military affairs, serious students of geopolitics and bloggers who are already avid readers of Robb’s Global Guerillas site. For them, Brave New War is a systematic and footnoted exposition of the theories of conflict and “dangerous ideas” that Robb discusses daily on his blog. They will be entertained and challenged by the same analysis that makes them return again and again to Global Guerillas to debate John Robb and one another.

The second audience is composed of everyone else. Brave New War is simply going to blow them away.

I am a part of the first audience as I wandered into Global Guerrillas during the late spring of 2004 as I did some deep link exploring off of the Whiskey Bar blogroll and lucked into an amazing site. The book reads like his blog, in-depth critical analysis that is unconventional in its focus on the rapid democratization of destruction and the fragility of most capital intensive systems to deliberate sabotage and damage. A few new examples were brought out, and the analysis was in greater depth, but as I was reading through the book, I was remembering the posts where I first started to see the development of an Iraqi marketplace for IEDs, or the creation of a shadow OPEC that can control the swing production of oil.

However I am not the typical reader whose first systemic exposure to the idea that the crashing of communication and coordination costs combined with the massive availability of destructive technology that can be leveraged by small groups against the complex networks that are not inherently or deeply resilient upon which modern societies rely upon to function as a modern society is the book. At this point the book becomes a critical read for anyone interested in national security, and system security even if you disagree with some of the conclusions.

The chapter on the parallels between the current Iraqi insurgencies and the Desert Storm theory of air power brings the cost of targeted violence into stark relief. The operational plan of Desert Storm was to use targeted air-power of a superpower to bring the Iraqi state into partial system failure. The communication and transportation networks from Baghdad to the south were destroyed in order to ruin Hussein's OODA loop. To accomplish this targets were selected for disruption and not complete destruction. Entire roads were not mined and power plants were not completely destroyed; instead bridges were knocked out and distribution stations were bombed. This plan was successful as it utilized a superpower's air force to achieve the systems disruption that previously would have required Rommelian armored thrusts.

Twelve years later the planned insurgency in Iraq started on the same mission of disrupting the ability of the Iraqi government to function as a modern government. And they have been successful in restricting export revenue, controlling electricity and destroying the interconnectivity that is a prerequisite of a modern nation state. The goal and the target sets utilized by the insurgencies are very similiar to the Desert Storm theory of airpower but the means are significantly different. Instead of utilizing thousands of combat sorties a day dropping hundreds of tons of bombs, the insurgencies utilize infantry weapons and truck portable munitions to cause a partial failure of the Iraqi society.

The cost of violence and organizing violence has decreased massively so capabilities that were once the preserve of powerful nation states is now in the hands of groups that can not fill the auditorium of a high school musical. And these trends are not limited to a specific case of Iraq. Instead John Robb persuasively argues that the low cost of networked violence is a global phenomena with demonstrated success in Nigeria's oil producing Delta region and an adaptive insurgency in the Caucuses that has the potential of taking down a significant portion of the Russian state.

This book is a scary book, and it is a pessimistic book but it is a critical read for its insight and its offer of a solution that deeper resiliency and modified local area self-sufficiency combined with dense interconnectedness is a viable path forward. I highly recommend reading and re-reading this work.

Linear Narrative And Muddled Reality

By Cernig

The linear narrative insisted upon by the Bush administration when it talks about Iranian involvement in Iraq and the the actual muddled reality are two entirely different beasts. Former CIA field officer Robert Baer does such a good job of explaining the differences between the two in an article for Time today that I'm going to quote it all. Any bold emphasis is mine.

Administration claims that Iran has been supplying arms to Iraq's Sunni insurgency have never made any sense. Coming soon after Washington initially accused Tehran of arming Shi'ite militias, they have seemed like a weak attempt to remake its case tying the country to attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq — the vast majority of which are carried out by Sunni, not Shi'a, forces.

One of the unshakable foundations of Iranian foreign policy is support for Iraq's Shi'a, who now more than ever are bloody foes of the country's Sunni minority. And if for some unfathomable reason Iran were arming the Sunni insurgency, would it leave behind evidence to implicate itself?

In April 1983 an Iranian surrogate group blew up the American embassy in Beirut. Forensic investigators sifting through the rubble determined with a fair amount of certainty that the bomb maker had inserted explosives inside the firing chain, ensuring a "signature" was not left to tie the attack to Iran. Iran never claimed the attack, the suicide bomber was never named, and if it weren't for a still classified lucky break, we would have had no evidence the Iranians were behind it. It is unlikely in the intervening years Iran lost its touch. It certainly isn1t clumsy enough to leave serial numbers or factory markings on weapons going to the Sunni insurgency.

An intel official recently assigned to Baghdad told me he too thought the Administration's claims are ridiculous. Iraq is too chaotic and the insurgency too fragmented — both the Sunni and Shi'a — to determine the origin of arms. The Iranians certainly are arming Shi'a militias, but what happens to the arms once they get to Iraq are anyone's guess. Among other things, Sunni insurgent groups regularly raid Shi'a caches.

And like everything else in Iraq, it turns out to be more complicated. Even before Saddam fell, Hizballah and other Lebanese militias opened up shop in Iraq. (A large part of Hizballah's leadership has strong historical ties to Iraq, including Hizballah secretary general Hasan Nasrallah, who studied in Najaf.) Iraqis — both Shi'a and Sunni — fought with Hizballah in southern Lebanon in its 18-year war against Israel, picking up battlefield experience we're now seeing in Iraq, including knowledge of explosive-formed projectiles, EFP's.

Compounding the problem, I am told by someone close to Hizballah, is that Syria does not have complete control over Iranian arms stores it holds for Hizballah. Some arms and explosives are finding their way to the Sunni insurgency, possibly with the complicity of individual Syrian intelligence officers or the Syrian regime.

In other words, even if Iranian-built EFPs are finding their way into the hands of the Sunnis, we don't really know who the culprit is.

Bringing in Iran to help try and stem the violence in Iraq is a step in the right direction. But Iran has nowhere near the levels of control over and responsibility for the chaos and carnage that Washington is ascribing to it, and we can't count on it being the silver bullet. The unfortunate truth is Iraq is awash in weapons and only a unified, independent, popularly backed Iraqi government can change that.

So far, the only evidence that Iran is in fact deliberately passing EFP's to Iraqis is "detainee evidence" tortured out of prisoners by interrogators who are asking leading questions based entirely on the say-so of the utterly-nutterly MeK. A far more likely scenario is that Hizboullah - who got the technology from the Irish Republican Army rather than Iran - have been passing on their knowledge and helping Iraqis make their own EFP's without any kind of incitement from the Iranian leadership. US military leaders know this, but they are yet again nodding in time to the administration's war beat.

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