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Using Constructive Engagement in the Middle East
House of Representatives - March 15, 2007

Madam Speaker, you don't negotiate with the barrel of a gun, but that seems to be the President's strategy with respect to Iran. That is why the House must legislate to ensure that the President cannot unilaterally start another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran.

Watch this floor speech [Get Windows Media Player]

The President has lost all credibility, and the world worries that another war will be waged in Iran in the name of regime change. It has been over a quarter of a century since the U.S. tried constructive engagement instead of destructive isolationism in dealing with Iran.

Foreign policy under this President has played a role in pushing Iran's leaders to the fringe. The Iranian President appears intransigent and willing to use strident rhetoric to drive a wedge between the United States and other nations. What is our response? Showdown and confrontation are the diplomatic skills of this White House, a repeat of the spin cycle to foment a march to war against Iraq. Today it is economic sanctions against Iran, but what about tomorrow?

Presidential advisers like the Vice President continue to encourage a policy of aggression. The President says one thing, but the Vice President says all options are on the table. The Secretary of State says one thing, but then we read what is going on behind the scenes from an investigative reporter, Seymour Hersch. The world is weary over the war in Iraq, and the world is worried about the President's intentions regarding Iran.

The other day the Asia Times raised these concerns in the section entitled "Dispatches From America." The Times published an article by Tom Engelhardt called "A Bombshell That Nobody Heard," and I will enter it in the Record. (article below) The article considers the troubling information revealed by Seymour Hersch, especially the disclosure of U.S. military planning for a first strike capability targeting Iran, and ready to go on one day's notice.

Despite official denials, we see and hear the Vice President chill the world by saying a military option against Iran has not been ruled out. Having seen it before in this administration, one troubling thought comes to mind: Bullets and bluster are more likely to produce bloodshed than peace.

That is why the House must exert its constitutional duty when it comes to the President's intentions with respect to Iran. We have got to chart a new course in the Middle East, and it has to be based on a commitment to stop the bloodshed, not guarantee the flow of oil. And we cannot hope to achieve peace or stability in Iraq or Iran without addressing the Palestinian-Israeli issue openly, honestly and urgently.

The issues of the Middle East are inextricably interconnected, and no one understands that better than Speaker Pelosi. At a time when the White House prefers to choose sides, our distinguished leader prefers to pursue peace in the Middle East, demanding diplomacy aimed at achieving peace through social and economic justice for all.

It is the kind of vision the whole world has passionately embraced before when the world believed the United States could stand taller than any problem and person in the region.

So one has to wonder, what were they thinking the other day when some Members of AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, rudely booed during a keynote address as the Speaker spoke very plainly on this issue. She said the Iraq war has not made America safer, has not made Israel safer, and has not made peace in the Middle East much easier to achieve.

That is the truth. What is wrong with speaking the truth? Leaders speak the truth because they have a deep and abiding faith in the strength of people everywhere to see the truth for what it is and to use it to lay a foundation to build a better world.

Today, America has a Democratic leader willing to see the world as it is, but unwilling to leave it that way. These are difficult times and we face difficult decisions just ahead. We need a strong commitment to get our soldiers out of Iraq and the strength to prevent another military misadventure in Iran.

The path to peace should be littered with pages and pages of negotiation, not booby trapped by inflammatory rhetoric and people unwilling to listen.

Madam Speaker, I include for the Record the materials referred to earlier

A bombshell that nobody heard
By Tom Engelhardt
The Asia Times March 15, 2007
(Entered into the Congressional Record by Congressman McDermott)

Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal--holding positions in the Bush administration--was convened by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others--and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw US administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras.

In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success--and would have worked far better if the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the vice president's office.

Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the British), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Dick Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money", possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the US occupation began.

Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadist groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

All of this was being done as part of a "sea change" in the Bush administration's Middle East policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shi'ite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Syrian government--and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the administration of President George W. Bush is officia1ly at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general "global war on terror"), despite its support for the largely Shi'ite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officia1s may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shi'ite rift in the region.

Imagine. All this and much more was revealed, often in remarkable detail, just over a week ago in "The redirection", a Seymour Hersh piece in The New Yorker. Other revelations included news of US military border crossings into Iran, new preparations that would allow Bush to order a massive air attack on that land with only 24 hours' notice, and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of four US aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to Bush in the Persian Gulf.

Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai story in the Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent years, from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on, he has consistently released explosive news about the plans and acts of the Bush administration.

Imagine, in addition, that Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air, Hardball with Chris Matthews and CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually elaborated on these claims and revelations, some of which, on the face of it, seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offenses, if they do indeed reach up to the vice president or president.

Now imagine the response: front-page headlines; editorials nationwide calling for answers, congressional hearings, or even the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed-page pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking questions, demanding answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold reporters from recently freed media standing up in White House and Defense Department press briefings to demand more information on Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for hearings and investigations into why the people's representatives were left so totally out of this loop.

Uh .....

All I can say is: if any of this happened, I haven't been able to discover it. As far as I can tell, no one in the mainstream even blinked on the Iran-Contra angle or the possibility that a vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is being run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds and Saudi money, out of the US vice president's office.

You can certainly find a few pieces on, or reports about, "The redirection"--all focused only on the possible buildup to a war with Iran--and the odd wire-service mention of it; but nothing major, nothing earth-shaking or eye-popping; not, in fact, a single obvious editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no journalistic questions publicly asked of the administration; no congressional cries of horror; no calls anywhere for investigations or hearings on any of Hersh's revelations, not even an expression of fear somewhere that we might be seeing Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own moment.

This, it seems to me, adds up to a remarkable non-response to claims that, if true, should gravely concern Congress, the media and the nation.

Let's grant that Hersh's New Yorker pieces generally arrive unsourced and filled with anonymous officials ("a former senior intelligence official", "a US government consultant with close ties to Israel"). Nonetheless, Hersh has long mined his sources in the intelligence community and the military to striking effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of sourcing makes it harder for other reporters to follow up, though when it comes to such papers as the Washington Post and the New York Times, you would think that they might have Washington sources of their own to query on Hersh's claims.

And, of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed editors, congressional representatives and reporters at administration news briefings don't need to do any footwork at all to raise these subjects. (Consider, for instance, the White House press briefing last April 10, where a reporter did indeed ask a question based on an earlier Hersh New Yorker piece.) As far as I can tell, there haven't even been denunciations of Hersh's report or suggestions anywhere that it is inaccurate or off-base. Just the equivalent of a giant, collective shrug of the U.S. media's rather scrawny shoulders.

Since the response to Hersh's remarkable piece has been so tepid in places where it should count, let me take up just a few of the many issues his report raises.

"MEDDLING" IN IRAN

For at least a month, the U.S. press and television news have been full to the brim with mile-high headlines and top-of-the-news stories recounting (and, more rarely, disputing) Bush administration claims of Iranian "interference" or "meddling" in Iraq (where U.S. military spokesmen regularly refer to the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as "anti-Iraq forces").

Since Hersh published "Plan B" in The New Yorker in June 2004 in which he claimed that the Israelis were "running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria", he has been on the other side of this story.

In "The coming wars" in January 2005, he first reported that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had been "conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since" the summer of 2004. Last April in "The Iran plans", he reported that the administration was eager to put the "nuclear option" on the table in any future air assault on Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at least temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran).

He also reported that U.S. combat units were "on the ground" in Iran, marking targets for any future air attack, and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also "working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Balochis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. `The troops are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,' the consultant said. One goal is to get `eyes on the ground' ..... The broader aim, the consultant said, is to `encourage ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime."

In "The redirection", he now claims that in search of Iranian rollback and possible regime change, "American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the [Iranian] border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq."

In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added: "We have been deeply involved with Azeris and Balochis and Iranian Kurds in terror activities inside the country ..... and, of course, the Israelis have been involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan ..... Iran has been having sort of a series of back-door fights, the Iranian government, because ..... they have a significant minority population. Not everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Balochis and Kurds, you're really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country."

In addition, he reported that "a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, within 24 hours" and that its "new assignment" was to identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime-change targets, but "targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq".

Were there nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of this would still have been significant news--if we didn't happen to live on a one-way imperial planet in which Iranian "interference" in (American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret U.S. operations in, and military plans to devastate, Iran are your basic ho-hum issue.

America's mainstream news purveyors don't generally consider the issue of the United States' "interference" in Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do U.S. pundits consider it a topic worthy of speculation or consideration; nor, in a Congress where leading Democrats have regularly outflanked the Bush administration in hawkish positions on Iran, is this likely to be much of an issue.

You can read abroad about rumored U.S. operations out of Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at unsettling Iranian minorities such as the Balochs and about possible operations to create strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near the Iraqi border--the Iranians seem to blame the British, whose troops are in southern Iraq, for some of this (a charge vociferously denied by the British Embassy in Tehran)--but it's not a topic of great interest in the U.S.

In recent months, in fact, several bombs have gone off in minority regions of Iran. These explosions have been reported in the U.S., but you would be hard-pressed to find out what the Iranians had to say about them, and the possibility that any of these might prove part of a U.S. (or Anglo-American) covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian fundamentalist regime basically doesn't concern the news mind, even though history says it should.

After all, many of the United States' present Middle Eastern problems can be indirectly traced back to the successful CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry) and install young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in power as shah.

After all, in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA (with the eager connivance of the Pakistanis and the Saudis) helped organize, arm and fund the Islamic extremists who would some day turn on the U.S. for terror campaigns on a major scale.

As Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost Wars, for instance, "Under ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence] direction, the mujahideen received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. [CIA director William] Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."

Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Iraq National Accord, an organization run by the CIA's Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad Allawi, evidently planted, under the agency's direction, car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime. The New York Times reported this on its front page in June 2004 (to no effect whatsoever), when Allawi was the prime minister of U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Who knows where the funding, training and equipment for the bombings in Iran are coming from--but, at a moment when charges that the Iranians are sending into Iraq advanced improvised explosive devices, or the means to produce them, are the rage, it seems a germane subject.

In the U.S., it's a no-brainer that the Iranians have no right whatsoever to put their people, overtly or covertly, into neighboring Iraq, a country that, back in the 1980s, invaded Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it, resulting in perhaps a million casualties; but it's just normal behavior for the Pentagon to have traveled halfway across the planet to dominate the Iraqi military, garrison Iraq with a string of vast permanent bases, build the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and send special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA teams as well) across the Iranian border, or to insert them in Iran to do "reconnaissance" or even to foment unrest among its minorities. This is the definition of an imperial world view.

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

Let's leave Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other matters highlighted in "The redirection" that certainly should have raised the odd red flag and pushed the odd alarm button in the U.S. far more than his Iranian news (which did at least get some attention).

Iran-Contra redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that, under the leadership of Elliott Abrams (who in the Iran-Contra period pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress and was later pardoned), such a meeting was held? Does no one want to confirm that this happened? Does no one want to know who attended?

Iran-Contra alumni in the Bush administration at one time or another included the late president Ronald Reagan's national security adviser John Poindexter, Otto Reich, John Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his post as director of national intelligence to avoid the 21st-century version of Iran-Contra--"No way. I'm not going down that road again, with the NSC [National Security Council] running operations off the books, with no [presidential] finding"), Roger Noriega, and Robert Gates.

Did the vice president or president sit in? Was either of them informed about the "lessons drawn"? Were the vice president's right-hand men, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and/or David Addington, in any way involved? Who knows?

In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration drew together the seediest collection of freelance arms dealers, intelligence agents, allies and--in the case of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iranian regime-- sworn enemies in what can only be called "amateur hour" at the White House. Now, it looks as if the Bush administration is heading down a similar path and, given its previous "amateur hour" reputation in foreign policy, imagine what this is likely to mean.

Jihadis as proxies: Using jihadis as U.S. proxies in a struggle to roll back Iran--with the help of the Saudis--should have rung a few bells somewhere in U.S. memory as another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s--on the theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend--the fundamentalist Catholic CIA director William Casey came to believe that Islamic fundamentalists could prove tight and trustworthy allies in rolling back the Soviet Union.

In Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the Saudi royals, who themselves represented an extremist form of Sunni Islam, regularly favored and funded the most extreme of the mujahideen ready to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the results? Today, according to Hersh, the Saudis are reassuring key figures in the Bush administration that this time they have the jihadis to whom funds are flowing under control. No problem. If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Congress in the dark: Hersh claims that, with the help of Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan (buddy to the Bushes and Cheney's close comrade-in-arms), the people running the black-ops programs out of Cheney's office have managed to run circles around any possibility of congressional oversight, leaving the institution completely "in the dark", which is undoubtedly exactly where Congress wanted to be for the past six years. Is this still true? The non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly encouraging.

To summarize, if Hersh is to be believed--and as a major journalistic figure for the past near-40 years he certainly deserves to be taken seriously--the Bush administration seems to be repeating the worst mistakes of the Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in U.S. history.

Given what we already know about the Bush administration, Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this means now as well as down the line. For Congress, the media and Americans in general, this report should have been not just a wake-up call, but a shout for an allnighter with NoDoz.

In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a perilous situation--say, clinging to the ledge of a tall building--would be screaming for help, while passers-by were so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the opposite situation: a journalist in essence writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently cares--not yet, anyway--to pay the slightest attention.

It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn.