Are we already at war with Iran?

From A Daily Briefing on Iran:

16 trucks carrying weapons and large sums of money from Iran were discovered over the past few days en route to Iraq, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry source.

Speaking to the Iraqi daily Al-Mashreq, the source said that the weapons included rifles, mortar rounds, and explosives. He said that those arrested admitted to being agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and said that lodging had been provided for them in Samara, Balad, Najaf, and Latifiyeh.

The individuals revealed that they work working on behalf of the MOIS in conjunction with Iran’s Fajr Forces. During interrogation the Iranian agents also revealed the names of a number of Fajr commanders and MOIS agents whom they worked for.

That forms a pretty good companion piece with this item from last month.  Remember Seymour Hersh’s article? Here’s a refresher from the CBC:

NEW YORK – American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says U.S. commandos have been inside Iran for at least six months looking for evidence to support an attack.

Hersh, who exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, makes the allegations in Monday’s edition of the New Yorker magazine. He says the special forces are looking for potential air strike targets, including nuclear sites and missile installations.

[…]

Speaking on CNN’s Late Edition on Sunday, Hersh said the Bush administration has “extensive” plans for an attack on Iran. The forces are hunting for evidence of weapons in order to avoid what happened in Iraq, he says.

If both of these articles are true, that suggests that a low level of war already exists between the United States and Iran.  Consequently, it may be less relevant to wonder whether we will go to war with Iran than to ask whether the current state of hostilities will escalate.

There’s another excellent post on A Daily Briefing on Iran that suggests that the Bush Administration’s next strategem in dealing with Iran should be pressing human rights concerns with the international community. I certainly think that would be appropriate and long past due: I think that we should have announced a U. S. policy of regime change in Iran five years ago for just this reason. But any notion that the EU will place meaningful economic sanctions on Iran are fanciful in my opinion.

The EU has the same problem in negotiating with Iran that we have in negotiating with China. A strong negotiating position requires that you be willing to withhold something that your trading partner actually wants. In the case of our negotations with China, we won’t withhold trade. The Chinese are confident we won’t withhold trade (and their hand gets stronger with every Treasury Bond they hold). And as long as that’s true we can’t make much headway in negotiating with them in other areas that are interesting to us including human rights, nuclear proliferation, and their support for the North Korean regime.

Similarly the EU (along with China and Japan) won’t stop buying Iranian oil. And the mullahs know that. And as long as that’s true no negotiations with the mullahs will make much headway on human rights, their nuclear development projects, or their aid for terrorists (inside Iraq and elsewhere).

Still, I think that an actual hot war with Iran would be imprudent and that there are actions short of an actual shootin’ war that I would hope are being discussed at least privately.

As a brief aside I don’t believe in private diplomacy. I believe that it strengthens the positions of elites in countries engaging in it. And, as both a good democrat and a good republican (note the lower case), I oppose such strengthening. Do we really need to strengthen the positions of the State Department here or the mullahs in Iran or the Central Committee in China? Additionally, just as centralized control of the economy conceals market information from the commissars that they need to manage the economy efficiently, private diplomacy conceals information about the true state of foreign affairs that the electorate needs to make prudent judgments in voting. But back to the matter at hand.

One such contingency is blockade. It is absolutely within our power to blockade Iran. And it wouldn’t take resources away from Iraq that are needed to keep the situation there under control. It would make the EU, China, and Japan very, very unhappy. The Russians would be publicly highly critical but privately rubbing their hands with glee: it would put them in the catbird seat as an oil-selling power.

But those considerations shouldn’t distract us from the critical question: can we live with a nuclear-armed mullahocracy in Iran?