Where’s the Smoking Gun on Iran?

By Robert Baer

Time, Feb.13 – As the Bush Administration inches closer to confronting Iran, don’t expect it to produce a bona fide smoking gun. Despite the claims made at the highly secretive military briefing in Baghdad over the weekend, intelligence conclusively implicating Iran in attacks on American forces isn’t there — and never will be.

By Robert Baer

Time, Feb.13 – As the Bush Administration inches closer to confronting Iran, don’t expect it to produce a bona fide smoking gun. Despite the claims made at the highly secretive military briefing in Baghdad over the weekend, intelligence conclusively implicating Iran in attacks on American forces isn’t there — and never will be.

There’s little doubt that the Iranians have free run of much of Iraq; are supplying arms and ammunition to Shi’a militias; and are committed to seeing the United States fail in that country. Iran already essentially owns Basra as well as several other large Shi’a towns in the south. And, unlike our own, Iranian interests in Iraq are unambiguous. In 2004, when I was in Qum, an influential Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Sanae, told me with chilling clarity: Should the situation in Iraq deteriorate to the point that the Shi’a are seriously threatened, Iran will have no choice but to step in militarily. Even, he made clear, at the risk of American retaliation.

But that does not answer this question: Are the Iranians themselves pulling the trigger, killing our troops, or are they ordering their Iraqi surrogates to do so? There are a couple of good reasons the Administration can’t tell us. For one, the group the Administration named Sunday as providing weapons to the insurgents — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds force — is virtually impenetrable. Secretive and disciplined, the Quds force is more a cult than anything else. Its members are all believers, meticulously selected, vetted and controlled. Another reason we’ll probably never catch the Quds force red handed is that it communicates sensitive information by courier. No blogs or calling home to brag to mom about everything they’re doing in Iraq for Allah and Iran.

The Quds force maintains the same discipline when comes to handling its Iraqi surrogates. It demands and gets plausible deniability. I got a glimpse of that when I was in northern Iraq in the 1990s. Iraqi Shi’a leaders under Iran’s thumb would only meet me with their official Iranian minders standing by. I had the impression every word that came out of their mouths was pre-approved by Tehran.

This leaves the Administration in a quandary, especially trying to sell a confrontation with Iran to a suspicious Democratic Congress and an American public that now knows it was duped by bogus intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion.

If indeed a confrontation is in the cards, I don’t see that the Administration has a choice other than to provoke an incident — force the Iranians to fire back in the clear light of day, letting the United States invoke self defense, U.N. Article 51. Options might include arresting or assassinating the Mahdi Army leader Moqtada Al-Sadr, chasing Iranians in hot pursuit across their border, or, more bluntly, bombing a Quds Force base in Iran in the name of force protection.

In any event, don’t expect Condoleezza Rice to appear in front of the U.N. with a stack of grainy satellite photographs and sketchy telephone intercepts. She’s going to need something a lot more convincing, and it’s doubtful she’ll ever get it.