Today's Absurdity 12/27/2006

In a New York Times story headlined "U.S. Says Captured Iranians Can Be Linked to Attacks" we find the following quote

"American officials have long said that the Iranian government interferes in Iraq, but the arrests, in the compound of one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite political leaders, were the first since the American invasion in which officials were offering evidence of the link.

The raids threaten to upset the delicate balance of the three-way relationship among the United States, Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi government has made extensive efforts to engage Iran in security matters in recent months, and the arrests of the Iranians could scuttle those efforts.

Some Iraqis questioned the timing of the arrests, suggesting that the Bush administration had political motives. The arrests were made just days before the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment."

This is fine example of the tortured logic of misapplied Cold War realism at it's worst:
The raids upset the delicate balance, not the presence in Iranian military officers in Baghdad).

There is a balance, a delicate one at that to upset... yes the Iraqis and Iranians are meeting, but I doesn't look like we're engaging in much dialogue... and again - why is it that our response to agression gets categorized as destabilizing? That would be as absurd as blaming the Israelis for violating a cease fire when they attack groups who've just launched rockets... No one would consider that, right?

The arrests scuttle efforts to engage in security matters. Technically, this is correct. The Iranians are already pretty "engaged"in internal Iraqi security matters, what with providing material and technical support for strikes against civilians and coalition forces and all. Therefore, their arrests would tend to lessen their engagement.

Absurd.

Equally worthy of discussion in the same report is the US language "the chief spokesman for the American command, said the military, in the raid, had “gathered specific intelligence from highly credible sources that linked individuals and locations with criminal activities against Iraqi civilians, security forces and coalition force personnel.”

I thought our policy in the war on terror was to consider terrorist as enemy combatants, not criminals. Is there some nuance here that we should explore further?


If course... you know all this Iranian stuff is just a neo-con conspiracy. ;)