Has the War with Iran Already Begun?

The evidence of an extensive Western covert program against Tehran, and Iranian retaliation, is now too obvious to ignore

By Michael Hirsh

Updated: December 4, 2011 | 5:18 p.m.
December 4, 2011 | 2:19 p.m.

UPI/Maryam Rahmanian - Iranian soldiers march during the annual military parade on September 22, 2011 in front of the mausoleum of the Iran's late leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran,Iran. The parade marks the beginning of the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq.

Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.

Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.

“It’s safe to say the Israelis are very active,” the official said, adding about U.S. efforts: “Everything that [GOP presidential candidate] Mitt Romney said we should be doing—tough sanctions, covert action and pressuring the international community -- are all of the things we are actually doing.” Though the activities are classified, a senior Obama administration official also would not deny that such a program was under way. He indicated that the U.S. was not involved in every action, referring to recent alleged explosions at Isfahan and elsewhere. But, he added: “I wouldn’t assume that everything we do is coordinated."

Former undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who oversaw America’s Iran engagement during the Bush administration, asked Sunday about reports that the U.S. program began under George W. Bush, said he could not comment on intelligence matters.

In September, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, accused Great Britain, Israel and the U.S. of conducting attacks on him and other Iranian scientists."Six years ago the intelligence service of the UK began collecting information and data regarding my past, my family, the number of children," Abbasi-Davani told a news conference at the annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Abbasi-Davani, who was said to have been wounded in 2010 car bomb explosion, said the attacks were carried out by Israel with the "support of the intelligence services of the United States and England."

Last week, Iranian protesters stormed the British embassy in Tehran. Dominick Chilcott, Britain's ambassador to Iran, later said the attack occurred "with the acquiescence and the support of the state." Then, on Sunday, Bahrain's interior ministry announced that an explosion occurred inside a minibus parked near the British Embassy. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries.

U.S. officials alleged in October that agents acting for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which has increasingly exerted control over the Tehran regime, were involved in a plot to kill that Saudi ambassador to Washington in a restaurant. Iran denied the allegations. Then, on Sunday, in what have been another escalation, Iran’s news agency reported that Iranian armed forces shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that illegally crossed the country's eastern border.

Responding to the Iranian report, NATO command in Afghanistan released a terse statement Sunday: "The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a US unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status."

The White House declined to comment but officials did not seem unduly alarmed, suggesting that the drone's capture would not provide Iran with significant information about U.S. surveillance technology and techniques.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council in Washington, said the tit-for-tat incidents “add up to a very worrisome picture,” in part because “the Iranians are absorbing all of these assassinations without seeing the pace of their nuclear program slow down to the extent it would be acceptable to the West.” But if Iranian retaliations grow serious enough, he said, they could provide “the pretext for a much larger war” in which the Israelis, and possibly the Americans, launch a full attack on Iran.

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Germany, says the intensity of the covert war indicates that this is where the U.S. and Israel are putting their energy for now. “If the U.S. or Israel were determined to take Iran’s nuclear installations out they wouldn’t be wasting time pinpointing individual scientists like this,” he says. Still, he points out, that Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor was also preceded by assassination attempts on Iraqi scientists.

By accident or not, it’s entirely possible the covert war could escalate into a real one, experts say. “I am less enthusiastic about how effective all this going to be than some people in the administration,” says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear investigator at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Bunn says he has occasionally discussed the program with the Obama administration officials, and “some have broadly suggested they think this is major element of slowing down Iranian progress.”

He’s not so sure. “Take Stuxnet. It’s possible that a thousand centrifuges went down” because of sabotage by the mystery computer virus _ a super sophisticated program said to have caused substantial parts of Iran's uranium enrichment program to self-destruct several years ago. “But Iran has a thousand more than they would require to enrich to highly enriched uranium” needed for a bomb. Bunn also notes that Iran is increasingly keeping its key scientists such as Mohsen Fakrizadeh, said to be the “Oppenheimer” of the Iranian program, hidden away from sight and burying its facilities deeper underground.

Beyond that, says Hibbs, “Some of the concern in the expert community is that in going this route we’re unleashing forces we cannot control.”

Source:  The National Journal

(RELATED: Reports—Unmanned U.S. Aircraft Shot Down in Iran)

Obama to Iran: Let Them Eat Ice Cream

On Iran, President Obama is worse than Hamlet. He's Colin Powell, waiting to see who wins before picking a side.

Last week, massive protests roiled Iran in response to an apparently fraudulent presidential election, in which nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner within two hours of the polls closing. (ACORN must be involved.)

Obama responded by boldly declaring that the difference between the loon Ahmadinejad and his reformist challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, "may not be as great as advertised."

Maybe the thousands of dissenters risking their lives protesting on the streets of Tehran are doing so because they liked Mousavi's answer to the "boxers or briefs" question better than Ahmadinejad's.

Then, in a manly rebuke to the cheating mullahs, Obama said: "You've seen in Iran some initial reaction from the supreme leader" -- peace be upon him -- "that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Did FDR give speeches referring to Adolf Hilter as "Herr Fuhrer"? What's with Obama?
Even the French condemned the Iranian government's "brutal" reaction to the protesters -- and the French have tanks with one speed in forward and five speeds in reverse.

You might be a scaredy-cat if ... the president of France is talking tougher than you are.

More than a week ago, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The ruling power claims to have won the elections ... if that were true, we must ask why they find it necessary to imprison their opponents and repress them with such violence."

But liberals rushed to assure us that Obama's weak-kneed response to the Iranian uprising and the consequent brutal crackdown was a brilliant foreign policy move. (They also proclaimed his admission that he still smokes "lion-hearted" and "statesmanlike.")

As our own Supreme Leader B. Hussein Obama (peace be upon him) explained, "It's not productive given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling."
You see, if the president of the United States condemned election fraud in Iran, much less put in a kind word for the presidential candidate who is not crazy, it would somehow crush the spirit of the protesters when they discovered, to their horror, that the Great Satan was on their side. (It also wouldn't do much for Al Franken in Minnesota.)

Liberals hate America, so they assume everyone else does, too.
So when a beautiful Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, was shot dead in the streets of Iran during a protest on Saturday and a video of her death ricocheted around the World Wide Web, Obama valiantly responded by ... going out for an ice cream cone. (Masterful!)

Commenting on a woman's cold-blooded murder in the streets of Tehran, like the murder of babies, is evidently above Obama's "pay grade."

If it were true that a U.S. president should stay neutral between freedom-loving Iranian students and their oppressors, then why is Obama speaking in support of the protesters now? Are liberals no longer worried about the parade of horribles they claimed would ensue if the U.S. president condemned the mullahs?

Obama's tough talk this week proves that his gentle words last week about Ahmadinejad and Iran's "supreme leader" (peace be upon him) constituted, at best, spinelessness and, at worst, an endorsement of the fraud.

Moreover, if the better part of valor is for America to stand neutral between freedom and Islamic oppression, why are liberals trying to credit Obama's ridiculous Cairo speech for emboldening the Iranian protesters?

The only reason that bald contradiction doesn't smack you in the face is that it is utterly preposterous that Obama's Cairo speech accomplished anything -- anything worthwhile, that is. Not even the people who say that believe it.

The only reaction to Obama's Cairo speech in the Middle East is that the mullahs probably sighed in relief upon discovering that the U.S. president is a coward and an imbecile.

Two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was exulting over the "free and fair" national election in Lebanon, in which the voters threw out Hezbollah and voted in the "U.S.-supported coalition." (Apparently support from America is not deemed the vote-killer in Lebanon that it allegedly is in Iran.)

To justify his Times-expensed airfare to Beirut, Friedman added some local color, noting that "more than one Lebanese whispered to me: Without George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 ... this free election would not have happened."
That's what Lebanese voters said.

But Friedman also placed a phone call to a guy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- which he didn't have to go to Lebanon for -- to get a quote supporting the ludicrous proposition that Obama's Cairo speech was responsible for the favorable election results in Lebanon.

"And then here came this man (Obama)," Mr. Carnegie Fund said, "who came to them with respect, speaking these deep values about their identity and dignity and economic progress and education, and this person indicated that this little prison that people are living in here was not the whole world. That change was possible."

I think the fact that their Muslim brethren are now living in freedom in a democratic Iraq might have made the point that "change was possible" and "this little prison" is "not the whole world" somewhat more forcefully than a speech apologizing for Westerners who dislike the hijab.

Obama -- and America -- are still living off President Bush's successes in the war on terrorism. For the country's sake, may those successes outlast Obama's attempt to dismantle them.

By Ann Coulter - Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and Author including: High Crimes and Misdemeanors

The situation in Iran will turn out to be a major opportunity missed by President Obama. One of the most important missed facts of this revolutionary movement by the president and his administration is the fact that it is a women’s revolt, which from any standpoint makes it a civil liberties issue. --Ask Marion

Posted: Knowledge Creates Power