Sen. Joe Lieberman says the United States should be prepared to take "aggressive military action" against Iran in response to its purported killings of U.S. troops inside Iraq.
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," the Connecticut independent said during an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation." "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."
Do I have to go over this again?
UPDATE: L,G &M takes a stab at this from a different angle:
What's missing here is any causal logic. Unless Senator Lieberman thinks that attacks against Iran will destroy the industrial capacity to supply or the infrastructure to transfer weapons to Iraq (extremely unlikely since EFPs can be manufactured in any warehouse and transported by any truck), a successful campaign would require coercion, convincing the Iranian leadership to change its attitude on Iraq. The administration itself, however, refuses to assert that the Iranian leadership is behind the supply of any weapons to Iraqi insurgents. Even if the Iranian leadership is shipping weapons to insurgents, the success of an air campaign would depend on doing enough damage to Iran to convince the leadership to give up such behavior. Such would require the leadership to be far more reasonable and far more sensitive to costs than SENATOR LIEBERMAN HIMSELF has asserted that they are.
In other words, Joltin' Joe is calling for attacks in a situation and in a manner in which force has almost no chance of working. And this is what passes for "serious". The man is genuinely disturbed.
If you're looking for proof to my arguments on Iran, look no further than the man I've been quoting all day. Juan Cole wrote of the lack of evidence or actual sense of claiming Iran was helping the Sunni insurgencies back in Feb., but there's also a good bit in an article from March this year written by a reader of Cole's.
Your reference to the Drew Brown McClatchy wire service report carried by the Mercury News about possible Sunni involvement in the IEDs and EFPs that have allegedly killed upwards of 170 Americans could be the tendrils of the new "Yellowcake" scandal of the Administration's ramp up to attacking Iran.There's a lot more here. But I think the point of all of this is that some serial numbers on some particles from an explosive doesn't really constitute as proof of anything. Also, given the constant strife in the entire region of dissimilar attitudes towards differing tribes, it's possible that Iranian weapons wound up in Iraq through no fault of Iran whatsoever.
As we all know, several weeks ago, a military intelligence briefing occurred in Iraq where several officials, including Brigadier General Caldwell, the mouthpiece for the American Occupation Forces, and several intelligence analysts, claimed that not only was Iran responsible for the use and manufacture of EFPs, which they said had killed upwards of 170 Americans -- but that the orders for their use, manufacture, and supply to "insurgents" came from "the highest levels of the Iranian Government." The Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, quickly said that while there were aspects to the briefing he agreed with, he could not state, unequivocally, that the orders for the use and manufacture of these EFPs had come down from on high. This was when the American people, indeed, the people of the world, were told that the nefarious "Quds Brigade" were the operatives who had carried out these tasks for high Iranian officials.
Checking through various books I've read about the Shia, I learned that the Quds Brigade, besides being a counter intelligence and intelligence unit for the Supreme Leader, ali Khamenai, has considerable expertise and probably HAD supplied training to insurgents in Iraq on how to build these massive and powerful weapons. Once I saw some of the photos of Abrams M1 tanks completely destroyed, or flipped, it became clear that yes, the insurgents had a new, more powerful weapon.
Several things hadn't jelled with me, though, about this briefing. First, no one ever, even to this day, said that the briefing was blessed by General Odierno, General Petraeus's second in command. Nor have they ever indicated whether Petraeus had blessed the briefing. Having worked for the U.S. Air Force for 20 years, I would say that that constitutes poor reporting. To NOT have been given the blessing to conduct the briefing, by one or both of those officers, would constitute such gross negligence, that they ought to be recalled immediately. The civilian intelligence analyst who speculated that the highest type officials of the Iranian government had blessed the use of these devices probably is shoveling poop in Alaska now, if he even has a job. But General Caldwell, you can believe, reports to Odinero or Petraeus. If either of them had signed off on the briefing, then why no action for them? The charges, after all, led to a serious reversal by even the White House.
The Mercury News article goes over the details in a way that more media reporters should have taken. They sorted out how many EFPs and IED attacks have occurred in 2005 and 2006. There isn't much difference ... about 40 killed from the former year to the latter. But the EFPs have clearly become an almost certain death sentence for our troops. But the details bear out what I thought from having read the casualty reports that come out daily from Globalsecurity.org. The greatest % of fatalities connected with those devices is in Sunni or Mixed areas.
So, nix the so called solid intelligence the Administration has once again claimed to warrant severe scrutiny of the Iranians and Iranian leadership. Essentially, they can't prove it, or, if they can, they're not going to compromise their intelligence sources (most likely signals intelligence of some kind derived from NSA monitoring). Additionally, what about the eight choppers shot down or brought down due to the use of SA-7s, 14s, and 17s? All Soviet weapons. And, again, according to Globalsecurity.org's glossary of weapons information, at least two Sunni dominated nations -- Egypt and Pakistan -- had all of these weapons, plus the heavy machine guns that have also been used in downing these 8 choppers. Is it possible that rouge intelligence or military agents from those two nations, among other Sunni nations which might have some reason to see the Americans humiliated, have migrated to Iraq? And taught insurgents -- Sunni insurgents -- how to use those weapons in coordination with RPGs, heavy automatic weapons fire, as well as other diversions, to cause chopper problems for the Americans?
...
Could it be that the rampant Bushista rant against Iran is the new "yellowcake" incident of this potential war? Because why in the world would the Americans NOT cite ANY Sunni nations as transferring not only IED and EFP technology and training to Sunni insurgents, but also, why would they not even mention the implications of Sunni experts from some Sunni nation, assisting insurgents in shooting down choppers? And possibly, the chlorine gas IEDs, as well. For there being 170 Americans killed and nearly 700 wounded by EFPs, it's remarkable that nothing's been said to Sunni nations when it is Sunni insurgents doing the killing. Rather, without naming Sunnis as the killers using these devices, the Bush Administration makes it appear that the deaths are caused by IRANIAN weapons and trainers.
This is not to say that Iran is our best friend, but they could be. It's not to say that Iran is not at fault for many many things, but what I think we're trying to achieve involves Iran in big ways. So either we diplomatically make it easy for Iran to work with us until major conflict operations are over and more specific issues with Iran can be dealt with, or we continue making baseless accusations that really hold no water and use them to threaten a country that has already shown it doesn't really care about our criticism.
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