Harold Rhode is under investigation (quietly, no further information) for his role in the infamous Rome meeting in 2001 with Iranian exile and arms dealer and sometime Mossad agent, Manucher Ghorbanifar. Reading about this, I found myself thinking about the Bush administration's headlong rush into Iraq, whose government had nothing to do with 9/11.
I thought about the push in Israel, then as now, to bomb Iran's nuclear sites crossing through (of course) Iraqi air space to accomplish the mission. I came back to the Iraq invasion in 2003: What was the strongest motivation, the one that made the guys in the White House get hot? Forget about democracy. Forget about controlling all that oil in Iraq. Forget about removing that vicious pig, Saddam Hussein. In the end what the administration really wanted in the end was to settle scores with Iran, big time, using a vast military/industrial/diplomatic/Starbucks/BurgerKing complex in Iraq to accomplish the take-over and put the fear of the red-white-and-blue well into Central Asia and to the Chinese border.
Laura Rozen has read the Senate Intelligence Committee report carefully, noting the recrudescence of Iran-Contra personnel in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. She writes:
...One subject of one of the recent Senate Intelligence committee reports has told associates that he has hired a defense attorney in connection to a federal investigation. Pentagon civilian official Harold Rhode, a civilian employee of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments who participated in controversial meetings with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in Rome and Paris, did not respond to messages sent to his home and Pentagon emails inquiring about the Senate’s report on the Ghorbanifar channel, and questions over a possible federal investigation involving him and the hiring of an attorney. Calls to his home went to a fax machine and he did not answer his Pentagon office phone over the past several days.
The Senate report found that former Reagan administration consultant and Iran contra figure Michael Ledeen had brought two Farsi-speaking Pentagon officials—Rhode and Larry Franklin—to a December 2001 meeting in Rome with two unidentified Iranians as well as Ledeen's old Iran contra interlocutor Ghorbanifar, the subject of a CIA burn notice. Also attending the Rome meetings was at least one official with the Italian military intelligence service SISMI, which provided logistical support and a location for the Rome meetings. The Senate report found that Rhode later went to Paris for a second meeting with Ghorbanifar in June 2003—several months after then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley had ordered Ledeen and the Pentagon to shut down the Ghorbanifar channel.
Revelations that Iran Contra figures Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved in a new channel to the Bush administration set off alarm bells throughout the US government, and prompted multiple inquiries into whether the channel amounted to an unauthorized covert action and a possible counterintelligence threat. The latter issue was never resolved, after a top Pentagon official shut down the counterintelligence inquiry only a month after it had begun.
The US -- and particularly the US under Republican leadership -- has had a series of dependent/destructive relationships with certain countries over the years. After all, Reagan played games with both Iraq and Iran, choosing not to think of them as "evil" as long as they were playing the game. The Reagan and Bush administrations have used both Iranian and Iraqi exiles as sources of intelligence and validation, most of whom used us more successfully than they let us use them.
What this most recent defense industry and oil dependent administration has revealed to us finally -- and at enormous human cost -- is that we don't have the political power or will to control either Iraq or Iran, much less both. In the end, they wind up pulling our strings. Worse, we've spent our capital, we're in deep debt, and we're having to do our damnedest to keep up with China and India.
