For decades, Iran has been a leading U.S. nemesis, including, in recent years, charter membership in the “axis of evil.” So why don’t U.S. intelligence services know more about what’s going on inside the country?
That’s the timely question asked last week by a House Intelligence Committee report that noted “significant gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the various areas of concern about Iran,” especially its nuclear program and leadership intentions.
Iraq is a textbook case of what happens when policy is based on bad and selective intelligence. Are we going down a similar blind alley in the present standoff with Iran?
It’s more evidence the United States is failing to develop old-fashioned human intelligence assets abroad. Spies on the ground, more than high-tech snooping, likely will be key to understanding emerging threats against this country.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
-
Registered?
Commenting on WE Blog now requires you to be a Kansas.com member. Use the links above to register, if you haven't already, or to log in. -
Contact us
Daily Archives
-
Recent Comments
- Chrisfrommactown on Foulston could face fight
- KSGolfnut on McCain’s surprise pick for veep
- Rage on Obama nomination transcends partisanship
- Mr_Kia on McCain’s surprise pick for veep
- Monkeyhawk on McCain’s surprise pick for veep
- CF2K on Obama nomination transcends partisanship
- beber on McCain’s surprise pick for veep
- JMWalker on Democrats hit back on patriotism
- lindainks55 on McCain’s surprise pick for veep
- beber on McCain’s surprise pick for veep
34 Comments
Iran isn’t America’s “nemesis” they are simply Bush’s little campaign for political purposes. Bush doesn’t care how many innocents he kills.
But employing human spies don’t put too much money in defense contractors’ hands!
Bush: Anger over war won’t change U.S. policy
MSNBC and NBC NewsUpdated: 10:12 p.m. CT Aug 29, 2006NEW ORLEANS - Calling resistance against terrorism the “defining struggle of the 21st century,”
Ed: The “defining struggle of the 21st century,” is getting rid of Bush.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14560336/
Ahmadinejad offers Bush TV debate
“Ahmadinejad said the debate should be uncensored” { Bush will get his clock cleaned } Yee Haa.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C748DD25-FA65-4BDE-8145-FD7DD993D5F8.htm
Good morning Ed.The debate is a nice fantasy.Not gonna’ happen.Remember, we’re the good guys with the white cowboy hats.We don’t deal with terrorists.Too bad that by GW’s definition, 80% of the world is terrorists.
Can you say Carter and the Hostage Crisis.
The “War on Terror” is a fraud.
Perhaps The Rogue State of Israel ought to clean-up its own act before it claims its self-righteous “right to defend itself.”
Start with removing the sea and air blockade from Lebanon. It’s destroying that country. When Israel raided Lebanon in 1982 they murdered 17.000 Lebanese people in Beirut alone. Now Israel has dropped over 7000 bombs on Lebanon and scattered thousands and thousands of small “cluster bombs” everywhere. Kids pick them up thinking they’re toys. Are you proud of yourself Olmert?
Proof.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7828123714384920696
Can you say Reagan and the Hostage Crisis?
Islam
Islam has been demonized by Israeli supporters {MSM} to frighten Americans and for those with susceptibility to believing the worst, it’s working.
Demonizing Islam allows subjects like torture and profiling and flat-out bigotry a fertile ground in which to grow. Also furnishes an excuse to deprive Americans of their basic freedoms.
As the elections draw near ABC, CBS, and NBC, will program more and more “terrorist plots” than most people can stand, in order to heighten fear in America about Arabs in general.
The FBI was recently all gong-ho about making a big deal about those 7 losers in Florida who were supposed to blow-up the Sears Tower, when in fact they were just kids being manipulated by the FBI to appear that way.
Americans can also expect more “staged” terrorist plots as ways of swaying voters easily frightened.
Carter lost his re-election bid based on the Hostage Crisis.
A simple mind requires a simple answer. You’re not going to change your monolithic thought line no matter what I say, but you’ve asked politely and deserve an answer.
Freud would say you’ve used to term “axe grinder” to describe yourself.
9/11 was a reaction by Arabs for murdering, humiliating, and stealing the land of Palestinians from 1948-2001. The United States financed the Israelis to do that.
The 9/11 Report says as much.
The Arabs hit the twin-towers to kill the largest number of Jews possible. Next the Pentagon that furnished the weapons for the slaughter and finally the White House where the commands came from { that plane crashed in Pennsylvania }.
That’s not pretty, but that’s what happened.
The United States acted like a drunk with a broken beer bottle, staggering-out to the parking lot to settle the score. Why? Because that’s the way countries do things. That’s the way countries have always done things.
Nuclear weapons exist in this world and the only way to keep a lid on they’re use to find a new way to stop acting like a drunk with a broken beer bottle to settle differences.
You can stop the fight in the parking lot by going home and sobering-up.
The next morning you can realize the situation and start making deals to keep the peace. That’s what we did with the Soviet Union.
Like I said, it ain’t pretty, but it beats the next worst thing, and that’s where we’re headed right now.
I’m sorry about being so blunt.
The really sad part is that the USA has supported and armed our eee-ville adversaries in the past.How many times have we propped up some dictator and pumped up his arsenal, only to do a 180 and send in boys against our own weapons?The cluster bombs were made by the thousands right here in Kansas during the VietNam war, probably some of the same that Israel uses now.
We need to stop having other people do our dirty work Tracy. That has been the problem. We’ve been going at it the wrong way because we don’t want any of our own people killed and we want to wash our hands of the problem.
So we prop or arm others to do our own dirty work. But as you say, it always backfire.
But going to Iraq, we are finally taking on the responsibility of taking care of it ourselves. But it is very politically unpopular and our own gets killed quite often.
It’s a hard decision, but we’ve learned from our mistakes in the past. Let’s do it ourselves, let’s not trust others, especially “enemy of my enemy is my friend” mentality. If it is an enemy it will always be an enemy.
Joe
Like Japan or Germany?
Joe
Like Russia?
Joe
Like China?
Joe
Like Vietnam
Joe
Like The British?
Wasn’t Iran-Contra Affair deals with negotiating hostage taking in Lebanon by Hezbollah?
“Ed: The “defining struggle of the 21st century,” is getting rid of Bush.”
hee hee hee hee hee hee hee
Funny Ed!!
Joe, I believe Amsterdam has the answer:SELL LEG, NOT ARMS!!
ED, LIKE THE AMERICAN INDIAN??
The Mexicans, the Panamanians, etc.
Siniora: Lebanon will be last country to make peace with Israel
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said Wednesday that he refused to have any direct contact with Israel, and that Lebanon would be the last Arab country to ever sign a peace deal with it.
“Let it be clear, we are not seeking any agreement until there is just and comprehensive peace based on the Arab initiative,” he said.
Siniora was referring to a plan that came out of a 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut. It calls for Israel to return all territories it conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War, the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem - all in exchange for peace and full normalization of Arab relations with Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756716.html
http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/
Lie by Lie: Chronicle of a War Foretold: August 1990 to March 2003The first drafts of history are fragmentary. Important revelations arrive late, and out of order. In this timeline, we’ve assembled the history of the Iraq War to create a resource we hope will help resolve open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them? This is the first installment in our Iraq War timeline project.
Bush actually thinks he’s getting his orders on this crusade from God.
{ war of terror }
He said coming out of church: ” I get my orders from a higher power.”
He said coming out of church: ” I get my orders from a higher power.”
Ed, maybe he was talking about Cheney and Rove? HA
Who knows? It could even be Barney for all we know.
You are correct Joe that the hostage situation cost Carter the presedency. But what is your point? We dealt with the the terrorist Stern Gang immediately after it took power; these successors to the hostage-takers are a generation later.
“Iraq is a textbook case of what happens when policy is based on bad and selective intelligence.”
That’s close, Randy.
Iraq is a textbook case of invading a country to control its critical resource (oil) and then justifying it on the ridiculously flimsy and transparently false justification.
Bush Co. wanted the oil. They couldn’t get the oil because of the sanctions on Iraq–Saddam was selling Iraqi oil to European firms to “punish” the US for supporting sanctions.
9-11 provided the hysteria for Bush Co to move to control Iraq’s oil.
And to think that until 2 months ago Siniora was a strong ally of the United States. That we had convinced him to break with Syria and the rest of the Arab world. That we convinced him to strip Lebanon of anti-aircraft defense capability.
“Siniora: Lebanon will be last country to make peace with Israel
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said Wednesday that he refused to have any direct contact with Israel, and that Lebanon would be the last Arab country to ever sign a peace deal with it.
The Iran problem was also in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush years.
Wasn’t it these two that made deals with our so-called enemy to further their political careers? Hence, the Iran-Contra scandal.
Of course I don’t expect any Bush supporters to even fathom this because George W. made it so clear - if you are not with us, you are against us.
What camp does that put his father in?
One of the reasons Iran and other countries in the region might want to be able to protect themselves from a certain rogue state:
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/breaking_news/15399759.htm
Israeli cluster-bombing deemed ‘immoral’SARAH DiLORENZOAssociated PressUNITED NATIONS - The U.N. humanitarian chief on Wednesday accused Israel of “shocking” and “completely immoral” behavior for dropping large numbers of cluster bombs on Lebanon when a cease-fire in its war with Hezbollah was in sight.
Jan Egeland said Israel had either made a “terribly wrong decision” or had “started thinking afterwards.” The remarks were unusually harsh even for Egeland, who often ignores an unwritten rule that U.N. officials should not criticize member states too severely.
“What’s shocking and I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution,” Jan Egeland said at a news conference.
“Every day people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordnance,” Egeland said.
U.N. and human rights organizations said Wednesday that 13 people, including three children, had been killed between the Aug. 14 cease-fire and Tuesday, and 46 people had been wounded.
“Every day we have to revise our count of what the scope of the problem is,” said Chris Clark, program manager of the U.N. Mine Action Coordination Center in southern Lebanon. “We just don’t know how big the problem is, only that it is huge at the moment and getting bigger every day.”
Human Rights Watch researchers have said the density of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon was higher than in any place they had seen.
Egeland urged countries that sold cluster bombs to the Israelis, including the United States, to have “serious talks with Israel.”
Keep this in mind:
The Corrupt Corporate Occupation of Iraq (December 11, 2006)In light of the Iraq Study Group recommendations and their failure to address the real problems facing Iraq, the author of this TomPaine opinion piece advises that the US end the corporate invasion of Iraq. US companies, which were awarded lucrative contracts by the US government following the 2003 invasion, failed to reconstruct war-torn Iraq as intended. The author concludes that “the Bush administration must abandon its plan to remake Iraq into an economic wonderland for US corporations,” and return Iraq to the Iraqi people “to remake as they themselves see fit.”
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/reconstructindex.htm
==============================================
The longer we stay the higher the price tag in tax dollars. It is in the economic best interest of the USA to bring this Bush admin war for oil to an end. Should USA and British oil firms privatize Iraq oil the troops will not be allowed to come home per se. This alone is going to cause the breaking up of many family homes. Iraq will likely not be a safe haven to ship families. Reducing Iraq and Afghanistan to rubble is not an acceptable goal.