"The danger of these cross-border activities was explained to me by one intelligence source," Ignatius writes.
He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.
The Bush administration's covert action program against Iran includes American special operations troops dispatched into the country, according to Seymour Hersh's blockbuster in The New Yorker last weekend.
Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.
Over at the Christian Science Monitor, meanwhile, Shlomo Ben-Ami and Trita Parsi argue that "serious diplomacy, not military action, will bring regional security" to the Middle East.
Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.
Ben-Ami is a former foreign minister of Israel. Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance -- The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.
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