Rough Sledding for Bush's Covert Iran Finding: Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Seven weeks ago, as exclusively reported in CounterPunch, President Bush signed what was formally designated as a "lethal finding" authorizing stepped-up covert actions on various fronts against Iran. The campaign was to cover a wide area of operations, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, wherever the hated Ayatollahs challenged American power. So far, according to former officials with knowledge of the finding, the results have been in line with most other U.S. initiatives in the region, i.e. the strengthening of Iran.

In Lebanon, the ambitious effort to get the Siniora government to hit at Hezbollah by ripping up the latter’s fiber-optic communications system (immune to US/Israeli electronic interception) ended with the U.S. surrogates in headlong retreat in the face of Hezbollah's efficiently swift occupation of Beirut, not only withdrawing their earlier demarche, but caving in to longstanding political demands by the Iran-allied group.

Washington may be drawing a little more encouragement from reports of activity inside Iran itself. In the north, PJAK, the U.S.-assisted Iranian Kurdish group killed six Iranian Revolutionary Guards within the last few days, while the bombing of the Martyrs Hossenieh mosque in Shiraz on April 12 that killed twelve people is now being blamed by the Iranians on U.S. funded groups. Counterpunch