- WASHINGTON -- Does the administration
of US President George W Bush still consider al-Qaeda and its associates
the main target in its almost three-year-old "war on terrorism",
or has its military victory in Iraq whetted its appetite for bigger game?
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- That is in effect the question that the powers-that-be
in Iran appear to be posing to Washington at a critical moment in the war's
evolution. The administration appears deadlocked over an answer.
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- According to a series of leaks by US officials, Iran
has offered to hand over, if not directly to Washington then to friendly
allies, three senior al-Qaeda leaders and might provide another three top
terrorist suspects that Washington believes are being held by Tehran.
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- But its price - for the US military to shut down permanently
the operations of an Iraq-based Iranian rebel group that is on the State
Department's official terrorism list - might be too high for some hardliners,
centered in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, who led
the charge for war in Iraq.
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- Members of this group see the rebels, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq
(MEK), or People's Mujahedin, as potentially helpful to their ambitions
to achieve "regime change" in Iran, charter member of Bush's
"axis of evil" and a nation that is believed to have accelerated
its nuclear-weapons program in recent months.
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- The question of what to do about the reported Iranian
offer is one of the issues being discussed this week in successive visits
to Bush's Texas ranch by Secretary of State Colin Powell (who returned
from there Wednesday night), Cheney, and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
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- Iran has confirmed that it is holding three al-Qaeda
leaders, including Seif al-Adel, considered the network's No 3 and chief
of military operations who already has a US$25 million bounty on his head;
its spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith; and Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's
third-oldest son.
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- In addition, Washington believes Tehran also has custody
of three other much-sought-after targets: Abu Hafs, a senior al-Qaeda operative
known as "the Mauritanian"; Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has been depicted
by the administration as a key link between al-Qaeda and former Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein; and possibly Mohammed al Masri, an al-Qaeda associate active
in East Africa, according to a recent report by a special investigative
team of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain.
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- "If Washington could get its hands on even half
these guys, it would be the biggest advance since the fall of Afghanistan
in the fight against al-Qaeda," said one administration official who
declined to be identified. "If we could get them all, that would be
a huge breakthrough."
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- The State Department has been pushing the administration
to engage Iran more directly in pursuit of the best deal possible and was
reportedly authorized to hold one meeting with the Iranians two weeks ago.
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- Washington and Tehran broke off bilateral relations during
the US Embassy hostage crisis in 1980, but quiet meetings were held over
the past year, until they were broken off in mid-May after administration
hardliners charged that a series of terrorist attacks carried out against
US and other foreign targets in Saudi Arabia on May 12 were organized from
Iranian territory, presumably with the approval of elements of its government.
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- But the same hardliners reportedly oppose a deal with
Tehran, which they depict not only as a sponsor of terrorism determined
to acquire nuclear weapons, but also an exhausted dictatorship teetering
on the verge of collapse that could be easily overthrown in a popular insurrection,
with covert US help or even military intervention.
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- The hawks are backed by the Likud government in Israel,
which has been urging Washington to go after Iran since even before the
war in Iraq. As soon as Iraq is dealt with, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
told the New York Post last November, he "will push for Iran to be
at the top of the 'to do' list".
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- Pentagon hardliners, who exert the greatest control over
the occupation authority in Iraq, last month authorized the rebirth of
the arm of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service - the Mukhabarat - that
worked on Iran, according to the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress
(INC), which is helping in the effort.
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- That was the same unit that worked closely with the MEK
under Saddam Hussein.
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- The MEK, which began in the late 1960s as a left-wing
Islamist movement against the Shah but broke violently with the leaders
of the Islamic Republic after the 1978-79 revolution, was given its own
bases, tanks and other heavy weapons by the Iraqi leader during the Iran-Iraq
War, all of which it retained during his regime to use in raids against
Iran, but also to help Saddam put down unrest, particularly after the 1991
Gulf War.
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- US forces bombed the group's bases in the initial phases
of the Iraq campaign this year, but negotiated a ceasefire and eventually
a surrender as Washington expanded its control over Iraq. Yet the group
has been permitted to retain most of its weapons, remain together, and,
despite its listing by the State Department as a terrorist group and Tehran's
demands that it be completely dismantled, continue radio broadcasting into
Iran.
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- Although the MEK, which displays many of the characteristics
of a cult in its hero-worship of its "first couple", Maryam and
Massoud Rajavi, appears to have intelligence assets inside Iran - the group
was the first to alert Washington to the existence of a previously unknown
nuclear facility this year - most Iran specialists believe it has no popular
following there whatsoever, and is mostly despised because of its alliance
with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war.
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- "It's hard to see how they could ever be seen as
a political asset to the United States in Iran," one administration
official who favors a deal said recently. "The [MEK] is precisely
the kind of common enemy against which both the reformists and the conservatives
- and even the students - are likely to rally against."
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- A deal would also reconfirm to an increasingly skeptical
Islamic world that al-Qaeda was indeed the primary target of Bush's "war
on terror" and not simply a pretext for a major intervention in the
Middle East and the Persian Gulf to ensure US and Israeli domination of
the entire region, say analysts here.
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- "Our priority should be al-Qaeda, and if we can
engage the Iranians tactically to get some high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives,
we should," Flynt Leverett, the top Mideast expert on the National
Security Council under both presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush until
his departure this year, told the New York Times on Saturday.
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- The same analysts argue that disbanding the MEK would
help demonstrate that Washington is not applying a double standard to different
terrorist groups, depending on their usefulness. But the Pentagon reportedly
remains resistant to stronger action against the group.
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- "There is no question that we have not disbanded
them, and there is an ongoing debate about them between the office of the
Secretary of Defense and the State Department," Vince Cannistraro,
a former counter-terrorism director in the Central Intelligence Agency,
told USA Today this week.
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- It appears that some officials believe the MEK could
yet serve some purpose.
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- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH09Ak01.html
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