Iran the winner, not Israel.

Further to my mission of trying to unravel the trajectory of Larisa's series, and my questions about Wilson's apparent claim that the apparent goal of the iraq invasion was

'a fundamentalist military conglomerate... sitting right on the border of the Kuwait and eastern Saudi oil fields' where "Iran is the big winner"

I note that Larisa threw the same thing into her interview with Ledeen:

Larisa: [snip] Obviously, the Iraq war has made Iran the winner, not Israel.

Interestingly, Ledeen ignored this statement (aka 'he didn't bite') - which is quite odd (although he did answer Larisa's substantial question, so perhaps we shouldn't read anything into it). As you know, Ledeen famously ends his articles about Iran with the "Faster, please" exhortation.

With all that in mind, let's remember that the iraq war has never made any sense - nobody has a clue why it happened - including me, still. for example, here's what i said a coupla years back:

"given that it seems near impossible to divine a reason/purpose for the iraq thing, im left with the sinking feeling that iraq was merely the entree - and trying to ascertain the purpose of the iraq thing is like trying to understand the strategy of an entire chess game by simply looking at the opening pawn move."

larisa uses the same chess analogy (although in a more constrained context)

I'm still trying to get my head around all of this - let's start with what we know about Iran (the following classifications aren't mutually exclusive):

Nukular:
1) Iran wants nuclear technology - they say for civilian purposes, although many argue they want nukes
2) some accounts (John Pike, per larisa) say that iran will have whatever nuke technology that pakistan and north korea have (via the AQ Khan network)
2a) AQ Khan is walking free, working for/with the pakistan govt.
3) Plame's main gig was WMD, specifically nukes, specifically focussed on Iran (Larisa says both to and from iran)
3a) plame's work necessarily, though peripherally, touched on the AQ Khan network

Drugs:
1) iran is on the afghan heroin smuggling route (and is also a producer)
2) drug smuggling and arms/nuke trafficking piggyback on the same network
3) brewster jennings necessarily came across drug trafficking networks
4) sibel speaks about arms & drugs trafficking by elected and unelected, career and appointed politicians
5) the OVP was desperately fascinated by Plame (cf Libby's record keeping)
6) if cheney had a soul, he'd sell it, or rent it, or lease it - and if his soul was mortgaged to the hilt, he'd collateralize the souls of his subordinates - addington, edelman, libby et al.
7) i've long argued that there is nothing ideological about this crew - they are out and out criminals - driven purely by the selfish/profit motive

'Espionage' (intentionally in quotes):
1) rhode & franklin both worked on iran, and both speak farsi, and both of them gave state secrets to iran (and israel)
2) sibel speaks/translates farsi
3) re franklin, sibel says " Because despite however it may appear, this is not just a simple matter of state espionage."
3) re franklin, sibel says "But it will be interesting to see how far they pursue it – whether they will be satisfied just to make an example out of the fairly low-level guys they're looking at now, or want to keep going higher."
4) sibel speaks about arms & drugs trafficking by elected and unelected, career and appointed politicians
5) the investigation that picked up Franklin has been ongoing since at least 1999
6) chalabi was passing info to iran
7) larisa talks about "intel trafficking" as a major enterprise - although i think we need to differentiate between a) personal, for profit intel traffickingb) tactical intel trafficking c) strategic intel trafficking d) geopolitical intel trafficking

Economic
1) iran has lots of oil
2) iran's major trading partners include italy and china (see this latest CSIS pdf report for an overview of the china/iran stress points - excerpt here)
3) Iran's Major export trading partners: Japan 22%, China 9.9%, Italy 6.4%,
Major import trading partners: Germany 10.8%, France 8.5%, China 8.3%, Italy 8.0%, United Arab Emirates 7.8% (link)
3a) italy's pollari was at the ghorba meetings
3b) italy's sismi was apparently involved, somewhere, in the niger forgeries - (as was Ledeen, apparently)

Other Things of Note:
1) aipac and the neocons seem to be in a frenzy about invading iran
2) iran offered to co-operate with america re alqaeda and the deal was scuppered by (at least) rumsfeld
3) joe wilson threw a bomb in his book about jamerson and grossman
4) ledeen threw the bomb that his meetings were authorised by hadley, and therefore Rice.

let me repeat that the above characterisations aren't necessarily complete, nor necessarily causal - and i'm not even ready to draw, or imply, any implications. i was simply trying to capture some of what we what we know, and attempt to break the separate issues into some sort of preliminary characterisation/classification in an attempt to try to understand them better, as the basis for further investigations.

having said that, i am prepared to reiterate my position that the most appropriate framework for viewing this entire mess is through the lens of personal, self-interested, criminality. sibel often uses the analogy that the USG is arresting the street-level drug dealers while intentionally ignoring the mid and macro-level perpetrators. my sense is that her oft-repeated analogy is mostly correct - but also that her analogy somehow misses the turf-war component. my (preliminary) sense is that iran is the turf.

who'd have thought that in 2006 that carbon-based stuff and geography was so important?

returning to the premises at the top of this post - i still dont understand how "Iran is the big winner" - unless they can somehow extract a higher 'toll' from the drug/arms traffic (in and out)

in any case, i was only trying to lay out what we know in this post, not come to any conclusions - consider this version 0.8

more to come.