Could al Qaeda Attack Trigger War With Iran?
Analysis by Gareth Porter
06/05/07 - -- - WASHINGTON, Jun 5 (IPS) - Following revelations
of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran
responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be
portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington
might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.
Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy
Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic
Party figure on national security policy, told a private meeting
sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in
Washington May 30 that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in the
United States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran
was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the
Bush administration might accuse Iran of responsibility for such
an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.
Brzezinski suggested that new constraints were needed on
presidential war powers to reduce the risk of a war against Iran
based on such a false pretense. Such constraints, Brzezinski
said, should not prevent the president from using force in
response to an attack on the United States, but should make it
more difficult to carry out an attack without an adequate
justification.
Brzezinski's warning came a few weeks after the publication in
late April of former Central Intelligence Agency director George
Tenet's memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had told
Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting that the Bush
administration would hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda
attack on the United States that was planned from Iranian
territory.
The Bush administration has made persistent claims over the past
five years that Iran has harboured al Qaeda operatives who had
fled from Afghanistan and that they had participated in planning
terrorist actions -- claims that were not supported by
intelligence analysts.
Pentagon officials leaked information to CBS in May 2003 that
they had "evidence" that al Qaeda leaders who had found "safe
haven" in Iran had planned and directed terrorist operations in
Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Then Secretary of Defence Donald
Rumsfeld also encouraged that inference when he declared on May
29, 2003 that Iran had "permitted senior al Qaeda officials to
operate in their country."
The leak and public statement allowed the media and their
audiences to infer that the "safe haven" had been deliberately
provided by Iranian authorities.
But most U.S. intelligence analysts specialising on the Persian
Gulf believed the al Qaeda officials in Iran who were still
communicating with operatives elsewhere were in hiding rather
than under arrest. Former national intelligence officer for Near
East and South Asia Paul Pillar told IPS in an interview last
year that the "general impression" was that the al Qaeda
operatives were not in Iran with the complicity of the Iranian
authorities.
Former CIA analysts Ken Pollock, who was a Persian Gulf
specialist on the National Security Council staff in 2001, wrote
in "The Persian Puzzle", "These al Qaeda leaders apparently were
operating in eastern Iran, which is a bit like the Wild West."
He added, pointedly, "It was not as if these al-Qaeda leaders
had been under lock and key in Evin prison in Tehran and were
allowed to make phone calls to set up the attacks."
Although most elements in the Bush administration appear to
oppose military action against Iran, Vice President Dick Cheney
has reportedly advocated that course. He has also continued to
raise the issue of al Qaeda officials in Iran.
Cheney told Fox News in an interview May 14, "We are confident
that there are a number of senior al Qaeda officials in Iran,
that they've been there since the spring of 2003. About the time
that we launched operations into Iraq, the Iranians rounded up a
number of al Qaeda individuals and placed them under house
arrest."
Cheney did not say that the al Qaeda officials who were
communicating with other operatives outside Iran were under
house arrest.
As recently as last February, Bush administration officials were
preparing to accuse Tehran publicly of cooperating with and
harbouring al Qaeda suspects as part of the administration's
strategy for pushing for stronger U.N. sanctions against Iran.
The strategy of portraying Iran as having links with al Qaeda
was being pushed by an unidentified Bush adviser who had been
"instrumental in coming up with a more confrontational U.S.
approach to Iran," according a report by the Washington Post's
Dafna Linzer on Feb. 10.
As Linzer revealed, the neoconservative faction in the
administration was still pushing to link Iran with al Qaeda
despite the fact that a CIA report in early February had
reported the arrest by Iranian authorities of two more al Qaeda
operatives trying to make their way through Iran from Pakistan
to Iraq.
The danger of an al Qaeda effort to disguise an attack on the
U.S. as coming from Iran was raised in an article in Foreign
Affairs published in late April by former NSC adviser and
counterterrorism expert Bruce Reidel.
In the article, Reidel wrote that Osama bin Laden may have plans
for "triggering an all-out war between the United States and
Iran," referring to evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq now considers
Iranian influence in Iraq "an even greater problem than the U.S.
occupation".
"The biggest danger," Reidel wrote, "is that al Qaeda will
deliberately provoke a war with a 'false-flag' operation, say, a
terrorist attack carried out in a way that would make it appear
as though it were Iran's doing."
In a briefing for reporters about the article, Reidel said al
Qaeda officals have "openly talked about the advisability of
getting their two great enemies to go to war with each other",
hoping that they would "take each other out".
Reidel, now a senior fellow with the Saban Centre for Middle
East Policy at the Brookings Institution, was one of the leading
specialists on al Qaeda and terrorism, having served in the
1990s as national intelligence officer, assistant secretary of
defence and NSC specialist for Near East and South Asia up to
January 2002.
Supporting the warnings by Brzezinski and Reidel about an al
Qaeda "false flag" terrorist attack is a captured al Qaeda
document found in a hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in
2006. The document, translated and released by the Iraqi
National Security Adviser Mouwafek al-Rubaie, said "the best
solution in order to get out of this crisis is to involve the
U.S. forces in waging a war against another country or any
hostile groups".
The document, the author of which was not specified, explained,
"We mean specifically attempting to escalate tension between
America and Iran, and America and the Shiite[s] in Iraq."
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy
analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of
Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June
2005. (END/2007)
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