Bush
Floats War Against Iran
By Ted Rall
29 July, 2004
Commondreams.org
Cuba
needs dollars. But a Cold War-era trade embargo prohibits American tourists
from visiting. Fortunately, ingenious border control officers thought
of a solution: When U.S. citizens arrive at Havana, the Cubans don't
stamp their passports. When tens of thousands of Americans come back
home to the U.S., they tell immigration that they were in Mexico or
Canada instead. Which they were--to change planes.
Israel offers a
similar courtesy. "Do you plan to visit any Muslim countries?"
customs clerks ask travelers at Tel Aviv. If the answer is positive,
they affix the visa stamp to a separate piece of paper. Nicholas Berg,
the American entrepreneur beheaded in Iraq (news - web sites), didn't
know to ask. His Israeli passport stamp got him picked up at a Iraqi
checkpoint, and cost him his life.
For reasons ranging
from economic dependence upon migrant labor (hello Rio Grande!) to religion
and politics, numerous nations fail to document the movement of foreign
nationals through their territory. Sometimes, for reasons no one asks
and nobody tells, border guards don't bother to stamp a passport upon
entry from abroad. It's happened several times to me at JFK in New York.
Failing to stamp
passports is commonplace. Yet the Bush Administration, operating on
the assumption that most Americans don't know that, is floating the
possibility of war against Iran based on that innocuous practice.
According to a Newsweek
report about the new 9/11 Commission Report, "Iranian officials
instructed their border inspectors not to place Iranian or Afghan stamps
in the passports of Saudi terrorists traveling from Osama bin Laden
(news - web sites)'s training camps through Iran." Calling this
"the strongest evidence yet of a relationship between Iran and
Al Qaeda," the report notes that "eight to ten of the 'muscle'
hijackers of the September 11 plot" crossed through Iran from Afghanistan
(news - web sites), "undoubtedly help[ing] the 9/11 terrorists
pass into the United States without raising alarms among U.S. Customs
and visa officials...the report raises new, sharper questions about
whether the Bush Administration was focused on the right enemy when
it decided to remove Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)."
The invasion of
Iraq was preceded by similar trial balloons in the press. Should Bush
remain in office this November and the "we invaded the wrong Ira-"
argument catch fire among a complacent and compliant media, we may be
fighting a third unwinnable war against a Muslim state a year from now.
There's even less
evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iran than between Al Qaeda and
Iraq--but that's not stopping E-Z Boy warriors like Cheney and Rumsfeld.
First and foremost,
there's no reason to believe that Afghan or Iranian visa stamps would
have caused alarm at the U.S. border. My passport is thick with stamps
from countries in Central Asia and the Middle East, including those
issued by both the Taliban and Northern Alliance governments of Afghanistan.
Only two countries, France and Israel, have asked me about them. Even
after 9/11, U.S. Customs never examined them.
Furthermore, Iran
doesn't stamp Saudi passports for good reason: the Saudi government,
dominated by Wahhabi Sunni extremists, despises Shia Iran. Viewing Shiites
as pseudo-Islamic heretics more contemptible than infidels, the Saudi
regime takes a dim view of those who travel to Iran--a fact that Iranian
customs takes into account when welcoming Saudi visitors so they don't
get into trouble back home.
Another mystery:
Why does the December 2001 National Security Agency memo cited by Newsweek
mention Afghan visa stamps? Iran has no more ability to issue Afghan
visas than Mexico has to issue American ones.
The big reason to
doubt an Iran-Al Qaeda connection is historical. In one of many events
unknown to most Americans, Taliban forces under Mullah Mohammad Omar
seized the Iranian consulate at Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998. After the Afghans
murdered ten Iranian diplomats and one journalist there, Iran massed
troops on the border and threatened war against Afghanistan. (The crisis
passed when the Taliban apologized and turned over the bodies.)
To say the least,
it's extremely unlikely that Iran would have formed a cozy alliance
with Mullah Omar's bosom buddies in Al Qaeda just two years later in
2000, as the Bushies now claim. In fact, despite having no diplomatic
relations with the United States, Iran provided back-channel assistance
to the Bush Administration during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in
2001, including turning over Al Qaeda suspects and offering to rescue
American pilots shot down near the Iran-Afghanistan border. "It's
definitely the case that there was no love lost between Iran and the
Taliban," John Pike, director of the defense think tank Global
Security, said in 2002.
Odds are that others
will see through the current attempt to blame tie Iran to 9/11. That's
why they've already got a new argument in reserve: the "yet unknown
role" Iran allegedly played in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers
apartment complex in Saudi Arabia. It's the same tactic we saw during
the run-up to war against Iraq: lie, retreat, repeat. The question is,
will we fall for it again?
Copyright 2004 Ted
Rall