For John, BLUF: Ignore Iran's Nucs for a second and focus on their "special forces". Nothing to see here; just move along.
At the new Blog, War on the Rocks, retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew♠ writes about "Iran's Cartel Strategy: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Western Hemisphere". From the lede and subsequent paragraph:
On October 11, 2011, Iranian nationals Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri were indicted by the Southern District Court of New York for plotting to kill the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, by bombing a Washington D.C. restaurant. The “Saudi Ambassador Plot,” which was initially disregarded by official Washington, was the first instance (that we know of) of Iranian use of Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) to attack targets in the United States.Read the whole thing and consider that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not the current primary threat. The exploitation of TCOs by Iran is the present problem.That the Iranian security apparatus would stage such an attack in the nation’s capital in which scores of Americans would have been killed or wounded, and that they would attempt to use a TCO to make the hit, sounds audacious and irrational – like something out of a movie that ends very poorly for Iran. But it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with both the scope of Iran’s penetration of the Western hemisphere and its association with TCOs at every level. Understanding both the nature of this new combination, and American weakness in dealing with it, requires some knowledge of TCOs, the security apparatus of the Iranian state, and their links.
Frankly, it is past time for the United States to focus a lot of attention on this Hemisphere. Not that we should be a bull in the china shop, but that we should be doing a lot of intelligence collection and sharing and we should be providing support to various government in terms of police and military assistance. We should not be trying to muscle other Governments, in that such action would be counter-productive, but we do need to be aware and awake. One of the first things we could do it make US Southern Command the top priority Combatant Command in the Department of Defense. Another thing is the US Congress could make funds available to help the Department of State upgrade our presence South of the Border. We can't ignore the rest of the world, but we definitely need to be looking more to the South.
Regards — Cliff
♠ Colonel Killebrew writes and consults on national defense issues as a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
The US has to stop thinking of the Big War. Mostly it is not going to happen. It is simply too costly to contemplate and execute. Rather, the conflict will be and is being fought through a thousand cuts. If one wants to deny that, I would suggest a more thoughtful review of how life in the US has changed since 9/11. That the US is much more constrained, conflicted, hesitant, frightened, confused is undeniable. The specter of a building blowing up or a train or plane being destroyed is in the back of the American mind almost continually. So..if "winning" defines success in aggression, they are simply by keeping the US off balance. And we are.
ReplyDeleteI would be willing to bet the farm that Iran has sleeper cells already here to take action....preplanned action....and I'd also include in the bet that Iran and the various AQ entities are engaged in a very well formed coalition.
Just because our severely constrained intelligence machinery doesn't report all the foregoing doesn't mean it doesn't exist.