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BONGBLASTER'S MANIFESTO:

An attack by the United States will be considered an attack by
Israel.
An attack by Israel will be considered an attack by the United
States,
instigating full retaliatory measures by the victim, and the allies
of
the victim, and the sympathizers of the victim including sleeper
cells
in every country in the world, and every homeless and hungry Vietnam
veteran living under a bridge in the United States of America.

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US steps closer to war with Iran
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH18Ak04.html
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

The Bush administration has leaped toward war with Iran by, in
essence, declaring war with the main branch of Iran's military, the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which it plans to brand as
a terrorist organization.

A logical evolution of US President George W Bush's ill-defined,
boundless "war on terror", the White House's move is dangerous to the
core, opening the way for open confrontation with Iran. This
may begin in Iraq, where the IRGC is reportedly most active and,
ironically, where the US and Iran have their largest common
denominators.

A New York Times editorial has dismissed this move as "amateurish" and
a mere "theatric" on the part of the lame-duck president, while at the
same time admitting that it represents a concession to "conflict-
obsessed administration hawks who are lobbying for military strikes".
The political analysts who argue that the main impact of this
initiative is "political" are plain wrong. It is a giant step toward
war with Iran, irrespective of how well, or poorly, it is thought of,
particularly in terms of its immediate and long-term implications, let
alone the timing of it.

Coinciding with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's highly publicized trip
to Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, the news received front-
page coverage in the New York Times, next to a photograph of
Ahmadinejad and his Afghan host, President Hamid Karzai, as if
intended to spoil Ahmadinejad's moment by denigrating the Iranian
regime. Just two weeks ago, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
implicitly put Iran on a par with the Soviet Union by invoking
comparisons to the Cold War, and in essence compared it to al-Qaeda.

Thus if an unintended side-effect of the Cold War terminology was to
enhance Iran's global image, the "terrorist" label for the IRGC aims
to deliver a psychological blow to Iran by de-legitimizing the
country.

Also, it serves the United States' purpose at the United Nations
Security Council, where a British-prepared draft of a new round of
sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program has been floating around
for a while and will likely be acted on this autumn. The draft calls
for tightening the screws on Iran by broadening the list of
blacklisted Iranian companies and even may lead to the interdiction of
Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. This is indeed a dangerous move
that could easily trigger open confrontation.

With the window of opportunity for Bush to use the "military option"
closing because of the US presidential elections next year, the
administration's hawks - "it is now or never" - have received a huge
boost by the move to label the IRGC as terrorists. It paves the way
for potential US strikes at the IRGC's installations inside Iran,
perhaps as a prelude to broader attacks on the country's nuclear
facilities. At least that is how it is being interpreted in Iran,
whose national-security concerns have skyrocketed as a result of the
labeling.

"The US double-speak with Iran, talking security cooperation on the
one hand and on the other ratcheting up the war rhetoric, does not
make sense and gives the impression that the supporters of dialogue
have lost in Washington," a prominent Tehran University political
scientist who wished to remain anonymous told Asia Times Online.

The US has "unfettered" itself for a strike on Iran by targeting the
IRGC, and that translates into heightened security concerns. "The
United States never branded the KGB [Russian secret service] or the
Soviet army as terrorist, and that shows the limits of the Cold War
comparison," the Tehran political scientist said. His only optimism:
there are "two US governments" speaking with divergent voices, ie,
"deterrence diplomacy and preemptive action", and "that usually,
historically speaking, spells policy paralysis".

However, no one in Iran can possibly place too much faith on that kind
of optimism. Rather, the net effect of this labeling, following the
recent "shoot to kill" order of Bush with regard to Iranian operatives
in Iraq accused of aiding the anti-occupation insurgents, is to
elevate fears of a US "preemptory" strike on Iran. Particularly
concerned are many top government officials, lawmakers and present or
former civil and military functionaries who are or were at some point
affiliated with the IRGC.

There is also a legal implication. Under international law, the United
States' move could be challenged as illegal, and untenable, by
isolating a branch of the Iranian government for selective targeting.
This is contrary to the 1981 Algiers Accord's pledge of non-
interference in Iran's internal affairs by the US government. [1]

Should the terror label on the IRGC be in place soon, US customs and
homeland-security officials could, theoretically, arrest members of
Ahmadinejad's delegation due to travel to the UN headquarters in New
York next month because of suspected ties to the IRGC. Even
Ahmadinejad, with his past as a commander of the Basij Corps, a
paramilitary arm of the IRGC, risks arrest.

The US has opened a Pandora's box with a hasty decision that may have
unintended consequences far beyond its planned coercive diplomacy
toward Iran. The first casualty could be the US-Iran dialogue on
Iraq's security, although this would simultaneously appease Israeli
hawks who dread dialogue and any hints of Cold War-style detente
between Tehran and Washington.

It would also become more difficult for Syria to collaborate with Iran
with respect to Lebanon's Hezbollah, who owe much to the

IRGC since their inception in the early 1980s. The consensus in Iran
is that chaos in Iraq is in Israel's interests, but not that of the
US, and that the United States' Middle East policy is being held
hostage by pro-Israel lobbyists who have painted an enemy image of the
dreaded IRGC that is neither accurate nor in tune with the history of
US-IRGC interaction.

The US and the IRGC
The current noise masks a hidden history of cooperation between the US
military and the IRGC - in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan and, more
and more likely, Iraq.

In Bosnia, the US military and intelligence interacted with the IRGC,
which had trained Bosnian Muslims, and fought alongside it against
their Serbian enemies. They also funneled arms to the IRGC, mainly
through Croatia, with the tacit consent of the US government.

In Afghanistan, US military commanders have had similar interaction
with commanders of the IRGC, including the elite Quds division of the
IRGC, which supported anti-Taliban forces and helped those forces take
over Kabul in 2001 with relative ease.

In Iraq, the IRGC has supported various Shi'ite militias as well as
the Iraqi military and intelligence and, unofficially, it can credit
for the relative stability of the eight Shi'ite provinces, including
those in the south. The new US diplomatic engagement of Iran over Iraq
is having direct and immediate effects on Iran's behavior inside Iraq,
promising further results by the joint expert committees set up as a
result of the latest round in the dialogue.

Yet true to the United States' traditional Janus-faced approach toward
Iran, just as Iranian and US military and intelligence officials are
about to embark on systematic discussions over Iraq and regional
security, they will in effect be prevented from doing so by the
labeling of the IRGC as terrorist.

Coming 'war of attrition'?
The idea of an all-out military confrontation between the US and Iran,
triggered by a US attack on the IRGC, has its watered-down version in
a "war of attrition" whereby instead of inter-state warfare, we would
witness medium-to-low-intensity clashes.

The question, then, is whether or not the US superpower, addicted to
its military doctrine of "superior and overwhelming response", will
tolerate occasional bruises at the hands of the Iranians. The answer
is highly unlikely given the myriad prestige issues involved and, in
turn, this raises the advisability of the labeling initiative with
such huge implications nested in it.

No matter, the stage is now set for direct physical clashes between
Iran and the US, which has blamed the death of hundreds of its
soldiers on Iranian-made roadside bombs. One plausible scenario is the
United States' "hot pursuit" of the IRGC inside Iranian territory,
initially through "hit and run" commando operations, soliciting an
Iranian response, direct or indirect, potentially spiraling out of
control.

The hallucination of a protracted "small warfare with Iran" that would
somehow insulate both sides from an unwanted big "clash of titans" is
just that, a fantasy born and bred in the minds of war-obsessed hawks
in Washington and Israel.

Note
1. The Algiers Accords of January 19, 1981, were brokered by the
Algerian government between the US and Iran to resolve the situation
that arose from the capture of American citizens in the US Embassy in
Tehran in 1979. Through this accord the US citizens were set free.
Among its provisions it was stated that the US would not intervene in
Iranian internal affairs. - Wikipedia

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also
wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus
Fiction.

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