Office of Special Plans reincarnated as the Iran Directorate

Great Debates
1

Actually, this is old news – dating from about June '06 – but it seems to have dropped off the radar since then, and the latest hearings about the OSP give it fresh timeliness. The Iranian Directorate is an office within the Pentagon, situated in the same offices as the OSP used, sharing some of the same personnel with the OSP (including the OSP’s director, Abram Shulsky; but the name of director of the ID remains a secret), and set up to . . . well . . . read these accounts:

Wikipedia

SourceWatch

Mother Jones

therawstory

Unlike (AFAIK) the OSP, the ID has a State Department counterpart, the Office of Iranian Affairs. (Actually, the distinction between the two is none too clear; they appear to use the same offices.)

Issue for debate: In the current political climate, when Congress obviously is going to look a lot more closely at “intelligence” reports than it has in the recent past, and it’s very clear we don’t have the resources for military action against Iran anyway*, is there any good reason for this agency to exist? What’s the point of it?!

*And yes, that includes an airstrike – because wargame simulations show there’s no way to prevent an airstrike from spinning into a general regional war.

2

Oh, crap . . .

3

From BrainBlutton’s link:

Ain’t nothin’ accidental about it…

4

It’s worse than that . . . we might never really know if it was accidental or not.

5

Uh, to come up with special plans to attack Iran? What is wrong with that? Do you not think Iran is a threat? Do you not think the U.S. should be working feverishly to plan all sorts of contingencies regarding possible conflicts with Iran?

6

Isn’t that special?
:eek:

7

No. I don’t. I don’t think anyone is a plausible threat to a nation with several thousand deliverable thermonuclear bombs.

8

I see. No plausible threats there at all, huh? Noted.

9

Not to the United States.

10

There’s only one reason for this. Bush plans to take us to war against Iraq before the end of the year. That’s virtually certain. Does anyone want to bet otherwise?

11

Almost the exact same events that led to the invasion of Iraq, and yet the same people are playing the same records. How many years are we going to have to be in Iran dodging insurgents and IEDs before the drum-beaters will admit that the American left was correct again?

12

And, scary as it may sound, I trust Iran not to attack us more than I trust Bush not to attack Iran.

13

I’m guessing the next renaming will be to Department of Peace.

14

Wha? Huh? Iraq? With a “Q”? Advise.

15

Actually, this would make a nice little diversion from the existing mess in Iraq. Once you start some good old fashioned nuclear posturing with Iran, people will forget all about losing a few soldiers a day (not to mention dozens or hundreds of noncombatants) next door. Heck, it worked with Afghanistan.

I think Bush is really too busy to mind all the details of the "p"s and "q"s. So a little “n” worked it’s way into Iraq; what, are you going to make a big deal about it? (I’m kind of surprised that Bush doesn’t get the country confused with a muscle car.)

Why not just go all the way and rechristen it the Ministry of Peace?

*On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns — after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces — at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy…The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax…Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.*[right]-- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four[/right]

Stranger

16

Oops. That should’ve been Iran. Guess I made the same mistake there that Bush made in 2002.

17

Because we have ‘departments’ here. :wink:

18

They’re really variant names for the same country – you know, like Holland and the Netherlands, or China and Japan.

19

Is that irony? I’m Gen X and I’m all corn-fused now.

20

Its irony, but its not post-modernist irony.