Alex has written twice now about Barney Rubin’s speculation that a determined campaign to soften up American opinion for war on Iran is now underway.
Count me a tad sceptical – we’ve heard these warnings before – but it’s still worth being vigilant. Rubin wonders whether we’ll soon start hearing of ‘very grave Iranian provocations’. One way to increase the chance of this is to redefine what an Iranian provocation would look like.
Michael Ledeen, Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the biggest cheerleaders for aggressive confrontation with Iran, shows how it’s done…
One has to stipulate that “Iraqi terrorist” is a term rather more complicated than outfits like al-AP [like al-Jazeera – geddit?] seem to understand. Many Iraqis went to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, where they were trained/indoctrinated by the mullahs for twenty-plus years. We’re talking about several million people, not a few cadres. Some of them, along with children, were sent into Iraq to fight us.
It’s very misleading to simply call them “Iraqis.” Maybe they—and their children even more so—should be called “Iranians of Iraqi origin,” or “Iranian agents” or some such.
