License to kill Iranians in Iraq

The Bush Administration has authorized our troops to kill or capture Iranians in Iraq.

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran’s regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country’s nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

“There were no costs for the Iranians,” said one senior administration official. “They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back.”

Now there is.

And, of course, the caveats:

The wide-ranging plan has several influential skeptics in the intelligence community, at the State Department and at the Defense Department who said that they worry it could push the growing conflict between Tehran and Washington into the center of a chaotic Iraq war.

[…] Two officials said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, though a supporter of the strategy, is concerned about the potential for errors, as well as the ramifications of a military confrontation between U.S. and Iranian troops on the Iraqi battlefield.

Once again, if the Iranians are advising our enemy on more and better ways to kill our soldiers, they are already at war with us. It boggles the mind that the world cannot recognize the proxy armies of Iran spread throughout the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. Iran pays the salaries of Hamas, Hezbullah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran is responsible for the death of thousands, including hundreds of American soldiers in Lebanon (and thank you, George Bush, for finally stating that in your State of the Union speech on Tuesday).

How is it that America has lost the ability to identify her enemies? Even when Iran holds conferences calling for the end of America, we still have pundits claiming that’s just rhetoric.

I think not. Take a look at the posts I’ve written about Iran today, and read the articles linked, and you will see a disturbing pattern. Iran has been at war with Israel for decades, and is now expanding that war to include the United States. Let’s stop pretending it doesn’t exist.