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What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: C... everybody's sittin' round, watching television What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: C... i see you crawling in your garden, subhuman, subhuman no mercy, no exceptions i brush my teeth until they break, until i start b... I hope the Russians love their children too What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: C... What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: CLXI What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: CLX Friday, January 26, 2007
Don't gimme no lies and keep your hands to yourself:
Eli Lake has a story I wish appeared under my byline, about how the intelligence community, though divided, assesses Iran's penetration of the Iraqi Shiites as thorough and near-complete. How deep? To give just one example, in 2004, for the low-low price of $140,000 up front, Iran recruited 70,000 conscripts for one Shiite militia alone. (Badr? Probably.) According to a paper written by a Fort Leavenworth-based Army Reserve sergeant, all of the Shiite and Kurdish allies America relies on in Iraq are also Iranian allies. Indeed, Iran started reaching out to Shiite proxies like SCIRI as early as November 2001 to prepare for what Teheran accurately forecast as an inevitable U.S. invasion. Unlike us, Iran had a Phase IV in place for what came next.
In short, a reasonable conclusion is that Iran views Iraq much like Pakistan viewed Afghanistan in the 1990s: as an opportunity for strategic depth -- that is, an area of comfort on its border, allowing it to focus on larger threats. The parallel isn't exact, of course, because the larger threat that Iran is facing is from the United States, and it exists primarily in Iraq. Dafna Linzer has more today on Bush's order to attack Iranian assets inside Iraq, as it's not just Task Force 16. In a statement proving irony is truly for suckers, CIA Director Michael Hayden observed "Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism." In order to combat that, the Bush administration is planning "aggressive moves" to disrupt Iranian actions throughout the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine. So let's review administration strategy here. In Iraq, the plan is to escalate the war in order to buy time for Iraqi politics... which is thoroughly dominated, according to U.S. intelligence, by Iran. The best case scenario for us in Iraq is handing Iraq to Iran even more than we already have. At the same time, U.S. military and intelligence assets will go around the country seeking to kill Iranian Revolutionary Guard Forces. (Pop quiz: how many soldiers or intelligence operatives do we have in Iraq who can tell the difference between Arabic and Farsi if they heard it?) Also, we plan to take unspecified "aggressive moves" to roll back Iranian influence around Iran, and, for good measure, confront Iran over its nuclear program on the world stage. And apparently, we think Iran will do nothing, roll over, and decide that conducting foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism has all been folly, according to Linzer: Senior administration officials said the policy is based on the theory that Tehran will back down from its nuclear ambitions if the United States hits it hard in Iraq and elsewhere, creating a sense of vulnerability among Iranian leaders. --Spencer Ackerman
I must protest, the original lyrics don't mention lies. It's "Don't hand me no lines, and keep your hands to yourself". |
