"My country, righr or wrong"? Bush's New Authorization to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq

Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque Friday, 26 January 2007

Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq (WP)
The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort...

The real story here is the story behind the story. After all, George W. Bush has already authorized his agents to kill American citizens -- without arrest, charge, trial, or even any warning -- if the victim has been designated -- arbitrarily, at the whim of the "Leader," outside any judicial process or oversight -- as an "enemy combatant." This "authority," claimed by Bush in October 2001 (I first wrote about it in print in November 2001) extends to every person on earth, not just Americans, so Iranian "agents" or "Revolutionary Guards" or anyone else Bush or his minions decide to kill has always been fair game. The only new wrinkle here is the specific authority given to the U.S. military to carry out these "extrajudicial" assassinations -- a license to kill that had hitherto been reserved for the security organs.

For assassination -- Phoenix-program style -- is definitely what we're talking about here. Let's be very clear about this, and not get tangled up in all the euphemistic jargon that Beltway reporters are so enamored of. Who decides that an Iranian in Iraq is an "operative" with ill intent, a member of a Revolutionary Guard or an accomplice to the insurgency (which, by the way, is led almost entirely by Sunni Arabs, the sworn enemies of the Shiite Persians)? And will these "operatives" be arrested, charged and tried, provided with defense counsel? No; the story makes clear -- and is intended by the White House to make clear -- that Iranian "operatives" are to be killed outright; indeed, "Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority." Thus any one of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Iranians who stream across the border into Iraq each year, almost all of them involved in either religious rites or trade, can be arbitrarily denounced by someone for any reason -- good or bad, personal, political, ideological, financial -- and then be shot dead by U.S. forces. This is what Bush's direct "authorization" means, this is what it is: an order to commit murder outside all bounds of legality, morality and military honor.

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