TIME: Neo-cons tried to recruit Robert Baer to Iraq after invasion for an Iran operation

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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1624993,00.html

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Once again, neo-cons are urging the U.S. to take advantage of Iraq's long border with Iran and finally do something about the Iranian regime. I even got a call not long after the invasion from a neo-con asking if I wanted to go to Iraq to handle the Mujahideen-e-Khlaq, an Iranian dissident group on the State Department's terrorist list. The mission was supposedly to collect intelligence on Iranian nuclear facilities. (I declined, and I don't know where it went from there.) And I still keep hearing rumblings that Elliot Abrams is pressuring our Arab allies and Pakistan to fund and arm Jundallah, a fundamentalist Sunni Iranian Ballouch group, to attack the Iranian government — in other words, an off-the- books covert action. But neither the MEK nor Jundallah has the wherewithal to change the regime in Tehran.

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If the Bush Administration continues to feed the American people the same dog's breakfast of bad intelligence, we'll be in Iraq until Bush leaves office. And while we're at it, just maybe in a war with Iran.

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East and Time.com's intelligence columnist, is the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down