A significant barrier was crossed when President George W. Bush spoke aloud, Monday, about the possibility of an Iranian role in the 9/11 attacks on the United States. By doing so, he was responding -- in a language that the ayatollahs would understand -- to escalating threats and provocative behaviour from Iran. No matter who is President after November, it appears the U.S. and Iran are now on course for another history-making collision.
The movement of known Afghan-Arab Jihadis through Iranian territory from Afghanistan, both before and after the U.S. invasion, is now so well established in fact that even the CIA has acknowledged it. But as ever, it is nearly impossible for the CIA or any other Western intelligence service -- who do not have their own agents in the field, and thus rely entirely on second-hand information -- to confirm much beyond that.
I fear Mr. Bush is about to repeat a mistake he made in his approach to war in Iraq. This is to develop a case for war, based on narrow, legalistic arguments. As we discovered before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq, this concedes most of the debate to nitpickers in the media and the political opposition: an especially hard course when we remember that agencies like the CIA have proved entirely incompetent in establishing the facts upon which legalistic arguments can be based.
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