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Juan Cole's got the fascinating story:

A prominent Iran specialist is suggesting on a private email list that very likely, it is explained by one name: Ali Reza Asghari.

Asghari had been head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon in the 1980s. He is someone who knows where all the bodies are buried with regard to Iranian covert operations, from involvement in the 1983 attack on the Marines in Beirut, to the training of the Badr Corps (now back in Iraq) and any Iran links to the Mahdi Army. Likewise he was allegedly privy to information on Iran's nuclear research. He rose to be deputy minister of defense. It is alleged that around 2003 he was recruited by a foreign intelligence agency (very likely that of Turkey) as a spy. The Iranian authorities may have gotten wise to him in late 2006, forcing him abruptly to flee to Istanbul in early 2007.

Cole, professor of Islamic studies at Univ. of Michigan, also expounds on what the tension in Iraq and Iran is really about:

Cheney and Bush have probably known since at least April that Iran has no weapons program.

I can only speculate, of course. But I believe that Bush and Cheney want regime change in Tehran. Being oil men, they are very well aware that petroleum switched over in the late 1990s to being a seller's market. There was a danger of China doing proprietary deals with Iran (and Iraq and others) that would ultimately deny the US access to the Gulf oil and gas bonanza.

If Iran learns how to close the fuel cycle, it could always make a bomb fairly quickly if it thought that the US was planning an invasion. (If you use centrifuges to enrich to 5% for fuel, you could theoretically keep feeding the uranium back through them to enrich to 80% for a bomb).

In short, regime change by force becomes impossible if Iran has the knowledge of how to make a bomb. And if you can't do regime change by force, you might well not be able to forestall a new Iran-China economic and military axis, in which the US increasingly risks being cut out of the petroleum not only in Iran but in the Oil Gulf more generally.

So from a hawkish Cheney point of view, it is irrelevant whether Iran has a weapons program. It cannot be allowed to develop enrichment capabilities even for civilian purposes.

If China found a way to monopolize Gulf petroleum, the US could be reduced to a third rate power during the next century. That's why Bushco invaded Iraq, and it is why they keep the pressure on Iran. They want to ability to maneuver and to use conventional force if necessary to secure US energy security.

It sure makes a lot of sense, especially in light of comments by China's ambassador to the UN today that sanctions are no longer needed against Iran.

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