Untitled Document
Gore Vidal is certainly correct—the United States of America is more rightly
deemed the United States of Amnesia. Our political memory lasts about thirty minutes,
or until the next television programming slot. Some of us, however, are elephants
when it comes to political memory. Otherwise ephemeral events stick in our craw
and emerge later to make sense.
For instance, Richard Perle.
Most Americans have no idea who Richard Perle is, even though he “served”
as the chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to
2004, that is until he was booted from that Strausscon-infested committee for
shady business dealings at the expense of the American people. Although Perle
kept a more or less low profile after his sacking, he wandered into the media
spotlight briefly last year when he spoke on behalf of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK)
at the Washington Convention Center. MEK is an anti-Iranian mullah “opposition
group” listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization. “MEK
may have an interest in this event or may attempt to use the event to raise
funds,” the Treasury Department told the Washington Post. Perle claimed
innocence, although the keynote speaker at the event was MEK leader Maryam Rajavi,
who addressed the audience via videophone from Paris. A few of us paying attention
at the time—for this was truly a two minute news item—saw smoke
and fire: in essence, Perle was bestowing Strausscon laurels on the terrorist
MEK.
As Laura Rozen wrote last December, MEK serves “the political agenda
of the Bush administration… it's no wonder that hawks in the Bush administration
are lobbying for the MEK as a means to promote their goal of regime change.
Some Iran watchers say that a mutual working relationship between Washington
and [MEK] has already been agreed to, one which includes the U.S. debriefing
of MEK members at Camp Ashraf in Iraq for Iran intelligence information.”
Dan Byman, a former Middle East analyst at the CIA now affiliated with the Brookings
Institution, told Rozen the Bushites “will use them, but not de-list them
[as terrorists]… We have control of MEK facilities in Iraq… and
we are taking advantage of it, and not shutting them down.”
In then, earlier today, bombs mysteriously explode in Ahvaz, Iran, near the
Iraqi border, and Tehran, killing nine people a few days ahead of the Iranian
elections. “The Ahvaz bombs appeared to be placed outside official buildings
or the homes of senior officials, while the Tehran blast was near a public square,”
reports CBC News. “There is no explanation for the attacks, but an Iranian
official suggested the bombs were linked to the presidential elections set for
Friday.”
“The terrorists of Ahvaz infiltrated Iran from the region of Basra (in
southern Iraq),” Ali Agha Mohammadi, a top national security official,
told AFP. “These terrorists have been trained under the umbrella of the
Americans in Iraq.”
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The
Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going
to have the Iranian campaign,” a former high-level intelligence official
told Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker earlier this year. Hersh reported that
Bush has already “signed a series of top-secret findings and executive
orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to
conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as
10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”
“No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, the deadliest
in the Islamic Republic in more than a decade and a rarity since the Iran-Iraq
war ended in 1988,” notes Knight Ridder. “But Iranian television,
which is controlled by Iran's conservative powerbrokers, accused the bombers
of trying to disrupt this coming Friday's presidential elections.”
Is it possible the MEK—with a track record for violence against not only
Iranians but Americans as well—is responsible for the deadly attacks inside
Iran? Nobody knows for sure but with the Strausscon's well-advertised desire
to foment chaos and bring down the mullahocracy, it should not be overlooked.
It should also not be overlooked that Scott Ritter and others have predicted
something would happen in Iran this month. Ritter, appearing at the Capitol
Theater in Olympia, Washington, in February “held up the specter of a
day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded
an even greater conflagration.”
Is it possible the opening salvos of that conflagration were fired this weekend?
