28 March 2007
Pawns
It is Spring now, and time of an exhilarating game of global chess. The Senate sent a message to the President yesterday, setting a deadline for the removal of forces from the Gulf and attaching it to the supplemental funding bill to continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is an interesting bit of theater in a most troubling drama. President Bush says he will veto the bill, which will send it back to the House, where Ms Pelosi will be faced with a conundrum: either she supports the troops, or cuts the funding. The deadline language will not survive the requirement for a 60% majority to pass it, since she will need Republican votes to do it.
At least that is one way to look at the script. I lived part of this movie already. Hostages are taken. Military posturing and provocation by the kidnappers follow. My unit lingered for months afterwards, as preparations began for a response. Months after that, something happened.
Other people seem to remember, too, and they seem to have the jitters. It is impossible to miss the external signals; they are blaring on the media. But the key to reading it the news properly is to contextualize it, and ignore the obvious.
Fifteen British sailors and Marines were kidnapped last week and transferred to Tehran on Saturday. This has happened before, and the Iranians knew that the rules of engagement used by Her Majesty's forces would not permit them to fight back.
That is not true of the Americans, who have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
At my monitoring station in Big Pink, I reviewed the reports of semi-official Fars news agency. I am restricted to open-source information these days, and their lies are useful tools in interpreting the crisis.
There is at least one woman among the hostages, one Faye Turney, which adds a new wrinkle. Deputy Foreign Minister Mehzi Mostafavi is adamant that the hostages were not taken to be used as pawns to be used in exchange for five Iranians who are being held in Iraq.
I hate to disagree with the Minister, but that is preposterous. We are all pawns in this one.
The hostages have ratcheted up the jitters. Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that Britain's campaign to free them would move into a “different phase” if they were not released.
The Iranian “diplomatic” personnel in Iraq are one of the sub-plots. They have been detained without regard to their claimed status, which can only be a sort of inside joke to the leaders in Tehran, who have a long tradition of taking diplomatic hostages.
They are also concerned that defector/kidnappee Revolutionary Guard General, Ali Reza Asquari could spill the beans. He disappeared last month from his hotel in Istanbul last month, and had been a deputy minister of defense until 2005. He also is rumored to have been associated since then with Iranian undercover operations in central Iraq.
There are those who link him to the armed group that conducted a snatch-n-kill raid on the joint Iraqi-American operations center in Karbala. It was a sophisticated and well-financed operation, featuring new vehicles and captured uniforms. Four Americans were murdered after capture, three outright and one mortally wounded when they were found. Another was killed in the attack.
The Americans could not let this atrocity go unanswered, and that may be why the General disappeared. If so, he has some information that could be very embarrassing that goes back a long way.
The Russians are pouring gas on the fire. Military sources are reporting an upsurge on American activity on Iran's borders, and are saying that there are preparations underway for both an air and ground operation against Iran.
The Russians say that there does not appear to be a final decision on the timing of an attack, which would be massive, surgical, and intended to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost.
There is a hidden imperative in the posturing. It is the problem with the Israelis, who have been quiet but implacable in their assertion that a nuclear-armed Iran cannot be permitted.
Here in Washington, The State Department authorized senior Iraq advisor David Satterfield to appear at one of the think tanks and announce that the US Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That is hyperbole, of course, but true to a degree. USS John C. Stennis with eighty F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornets, escorted by eight support ships and four nuclear submarines has just arrived in the Gulf, and is conducting combat missions over Iraq. USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since Dec 2006.
Nerves are getting a little ragged. LCDR Charlie Brown, the US 5th Fleet Public Affairs officer took the podium at the headquarters in Bahrain to announce that reports of a missile being fired at a US ship was erroneous. All ships in the Gulf had been checked and the rumors were untrue.
There is a lot of that going around. To get a sense for the unease, I would do what the Iranians are doing. Take a look at the calendar, and the moon phase. The second Gulf war kicked off on the 20th of March, 2003.
The date precise date is not nearly as important as the season, and it is still early in this one, though time is running swiftly. But modern military operations have something in common with all those conducted in the past.
The light of the silvery moon is great for romance, but as we all know, action is best conducted in the dark.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com