More problems with Iran

From The Washington Post:

Last week, the CIA sent an urgent report to President Bush's National Security Council: Iranian authorities had arrested two al-Qaeda operatives traveling through Iran on their way from Pakistan to Iraq. The suspects were caught along a well-worn, if little-noticed, route for militants determined to fight U.S. troops on Iraqi soil, according to a senior intelligence official.

The arrests were presented to Bush's senior policy advisers as evidence that Iran appears committed to stopping al-Qaeda foot traffic across its borders, the intelligence official said. That assessment comes at a time when the Bush administration, in an effort to push for further U.N. sanctions on the Islamic republic, is preparing to publicly accuse Tehran of cooperating with and harboring al-Qaeda suspects.

The strategy has sparked a growing debate within the administration and the intelligence community, according to U.S. intelligence and government officials. One faction is pressing for more economic embargoes against Iran, including asset freezes and travel bans for the country's top leaders. But several senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials worry that a public push regarding the al-Qaeda suspects held in Iran could jeopardize U.S. intelligence-gathering and prompt the Iranians to free some of the most wanted individuals.

Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization and Iran is a Shiite nation. The Sunnis and Shiites hate each other and each regards the other as apostate from true Islam and deserving of death. Theoretically a member of one of those sects has a greater duty to kill a member of the other sect than they do to kill Westerners, Christians or Jews. However in the past 20 years or so they have cooperated to some extent against Israel and the US.

It is not a surprise that Iran which has ambitions of being the leader of the Islamic world and the chief sponsor of terrorism directed against Israel and the greater West would take actions designed to weaken al-Qaeda. You will also note that Iran supported the execution of Sunni tyrant Saddam Hussein.

As the WP article goes on to acknowledge Iran is holding some al-Qaeda figures to use as bargaining chips with Washington. We know what the Iranians would want in return for those chips, an end to any sanctions or threat of sanctions and the approval of their continuing program to build nuclear weapons. This is something that the US simply cannot do.

So why leak the details of the internal debate to the press? It believe that it is another attempt by the shadow government (the cabal of State Department, Pentagon and CIA left-wing career bureaucrats who have waged a covert war against the administration at least since 9/11) to sabotage the Bush presidency.

Now literally anything the President does can be shown to have been done against the advice of one or another group of advisors. Any future problem can be used by Bush haters with 20/20 hindsight to prove that he made the wrong choice and any future success can be diminished by comparing it to a speculative greater success if the other path had been chosen.