Today’s Must Read

Last summer, the administration decided to make an aggressive shift against Iran in Iraq, The Washington Post reveals this morning. Commanders, the paper reports, are now under orders to “kill or capture” Iranian operatives in Iraq, a strategy calculated to make Iran “back down” by “[hitting them] hard.”

The change came because the administration decided that their policy of “catch and release” of Iranian agents in Iraq wasn’t aggressive enough. The U.S. has detained and then released “dozens of suspected Iranian agents” in the past year, the Post reports.

But the policy is meant to reach beyond Iraq:

Advocates of the new policy — some of whom are in the NSC, the vice president’s office, the Pentagon and the State Department — said that only direct and aggressive efforts can shatter Iran’s growing influence. A less confident Iran, with fewer cards, may be more willing to cut the kind of deal the Bush administration is hoping for on its nuclear program. “The Iranians respond to the international community only when they are under pressure, not when they are feeling strong,” one official said.

It’s a policy with a long list of potential consequences, especially “if Iran responds with escalation,” putting “U.S. citizens and national interests at greater risk in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

But perhaps that’s the point?

A senior intelligence officer was more wary of the ambitions of the strategy.

“This has little to do with Iraq. It’s all about pushing Iran’s buttons. It is purely political,” the official said. The official expressed similar views about other new efforts aimed at Iran, suggesting that the United States is escalating toward an unnecessary conflict to shift attention away from Iraq and to blame Iran for the United States’ increasing inability to stanch the violence there.

Note: In a second must read today, The New York Times provides yet another unflattering portrait of the Iraqi parliament, this one featuring the parliament’s speaker yelling “shut up” to quiet the din caused by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s (a Shiite) accusation that a Sunni leader in parliament had been involved in Shiite kidnappings.