05 April 2007

The Long List



It is a relief that this part of the crisis has been defused. President Ahmedinejad was magnanimous in handing back the captured sailors and Royal Marines as “a gift to the British People.” He has a lot of style, the President does. He made the surprise announcement yesterday at the end of one of the rambling press conferences he is renowned for, and then had a photo op with the captives.

They were attired in the same fashions sported by the President, except for Leading Seaman Faye Turney, who was primly scarfed within an inch of her life.

I have decided to add the look to my fashion short list for Spring. Apparently the vest is back, and the necktie is long gone. It is effective. The suit quotes a certain formality, while the open-neck dress shirt shouts out a devil-may-care disregard for other people's standards.

It should help with business. Severe, but relaxed.

The British hostages had about exhausted their propaganda value, anyway. I suspect the Iranian President took a peek at the calendar and saw that the dark of the moon is coming up on the 17th, the time when stealthy aircraft are at their stealthiest.

Besides, the British kids did not know anything of interest. Not like the Iranians who are being held by the West.

The commentators are trying to score the encounter, only a day into it, seem to think that the Prime Minister came out of the embarrassment pretty well. He did not have to apologize to the kidnappers, and if he said that the Royal Navy would not intrude in Iranian waters again, it was a carefully parsed sentence, worthy of Mr. Clinton.

There were some quiet quid pro quos. An Iranian diplomat named Jalal Sharafi popped up in Iraq on Tuesday. He had been grabbed by unknown uniformed personnel two months ago. Yesterday, even as fifteen sailors and Marines were flying home, four British soldiers were murdered near Basrah. They were bushwhacked by an IED plant and follow-on ambush.

The command and control in this struggle is neither precise nor immediate, so the linkage of events gets a little fuzzy. In a larger sense, though, it is all part of one long list of related events.

Iran has been having a grand time in Iraq, having deployed members of the Al-Quds organization of the Revolutionary Guard. They are loosely the equivalent of the American Special Operations Command, and specialize in covert action. They are suspected of complicity in the kidnap-murder of five American soldiers in late January at the Provisional Joint Coordination Center (PJCC) in Karbala.

The bodies of four of the five U.S. soldiers killed in the attack were found later miles away from the compound. The raid featured insurgents in US uniforms speaking English, carrying US weapons and driving new SUVs common to American forces. The level of sophistication suggests the raid had an Al-Quds flavor, and possibly was in response to the disappearance of Revolutionary Guards general Ali Reza Asgari in Istanbul last December.

He is widely presumed to be held by the Americans, and is being de-briefed. He is reported to be ambivalent about Iran's nuclear agenda, and he knows the long list in all its particulars.

The raid at Karbala was undoubtedly in response to the snatch of five Iranians- junior Al-Kuds players- in Kurdistan on the 11th of January. The willingness of the American forces to irritate their Kurdish hosts is an indication of how significant they considered the operation.

Sources I do not trust in England say that the real targets were Mohammed Jafari, deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, Revolutionary Guards chief of intelligence.

These two men certainly had diplomatic status, even if the junior troops did not. They were in Kurdistan to visit Massoud Barzani, President of the elected Kurdish Government, and had previously passed through Baghdad where they paid a call on the Iraqi President.

If they were the real targets of the snatch, someone must have thought it was worth the cost. I remember chuckling at the time at the outrage of the Iranians that someone might not respect diplomatic immunity, since it was the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran that marked a major incident on the long list.

I am not old enough to have much feeling about the joint British-American coup that deposed Iranian Premier Mossadeq in 1953. For me, and for most of my generation, the list begins in Iran in1979, and continues to Lebanon, where Iranian surrogates murdered all the young Marines, French and American, and my shipmate Wheels in the embassy bombing, and the kidnap and murder of the CIA station chief, and all the other assorted killings that trail all the way to the bombing of the synagogues in Argentina.

It is a very long list indeed.

My supposition is that General Asgari is talking about the links between the Islamic Republic and Imad Fayez Mugniyeh, a Lebanese Shiite who has put many items on the list. He is a murderous bastard, but remarkably ecumenical of late, providing a link between Shia and Sunni terror streams. Western services have been looking for him a long time, and the General may be able to connect some dots that Tehran may not wish connected.

That is the other shoe that is waiting to fall, and it will come with the Nuclear question and sanctions still very much on the front burner. I am glad these hostages are freed, and home. The tit-for-tat violence will continue, of course, though perhaps in not so spectacular a fashion as the affront to the Royal Navy. President Ahmadinijad will probably prefer a lower profile, at least until the moon is fuller.

The question at hand is what the holders of the list of connected dots intend to do with it, and whether or not anyone will care when it is released.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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