Up to 1991, Twix, the candy bar by Mars Inc., was sold in Europe under the name Raider. When the name was globalized and changed to Twix, product sells fell dramatically and several chain stores delisted it.
After some month into the debacle Mars launched a huge advertising campaign. The slogan for that campaign, Aus Raider wird Twix … sonst ändert sich nix (Raider becomes Twix … nothing else changes), has become a metaphore for somewhat botched introductions of "new" products by sole relabeling.
U.S. Moves to Weaken Iran, says the LA Times. The piece describes the State Department program run by Dick Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth and David Denehy, a former deputy directory of the CPA’s Office of Democracy and Governance in Iraq. They work on Voice of America programing in Farsi, financial support for opposition groups and they send special "Iran watchers" diplomats to countries with Iranian expatriats.
Writes the LA Times:
officials emphasize that this time around, State Department diplomats rather than Pentagon war planners are in charge
So this looks new, but further down we read:
The administration’s efforts are taking shape on the second floor of the State Department, where a new Office of Iranian Affairs has been charged with leading the push to back Iranian dissidents more aggressively, boost support to democracy broadcasters and strengthen ties with exiles.
Nearby at the Pentagon, an Iranian directorate will work with the State Department office to undercut the government in Tehran.
…
[T]he Pentagon’s directorate began with six full-time staff members. But they can draw on expertise throughout the government, providing access to potentially hundreds of specialists.
This new Iranian directorate is indeed a very well known shop:
At the Pentagon, the new Iranian directorate has been set up inside its policy shop, which previously housed the Office of Special Plans.
…
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable declined to name the acting director of the new Iran office and would say only that the appointee was a "career civil servant." Among those staffing or advising the Iranian directorate are three veterans of the Office of Special Plans: Abram N. Shulsky, its former director; John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst; and Ladan Archin, an Iran specialist.
The Office of Special Plans was, as you well remember, the place where the false Iraq intelligence was prepared and stovepiped into Cheney’s office.
Let’s look up the people named.
Seymour Hersh on Shulsky:
The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation.
Karen Kwiatkowski on Trigilo:
Trigilio and I had hallway debates, as friends. The one I remember most clearly was shortly after President Bush gave his famous "mushroom cloud" speech in Cincinnati in October 2002, asserting that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction as well as ties to "international terrorists," and was working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons with "nuclear holy warriors." I asked John who was feeding the president all the bull about Saddam and the threat he posed us in terms of WMD delivery and his links to terrorists, as none of this was in secret intelligence I had seen in the past years. John insisted that it wasn’t an exaggeration, but when pressed to say which actual intelligence reports made these claims, he would only say, "Karen, we have sources that you don’t have access to." It was widely felt by those of us in the office who were not in the neoconservatives’ inner circle that these "sources" related to the chummy relationship that Ahmad Chalabi had with both the Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president.
And Jeffrey Steinberg on Archin:
Ladan Archin, an Iraqi-American Wolfowitz protégé from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, who came to the OSP from the International Financial Corp. of the World Bank, and reportedly serves as a liaison to Ahmed Chalabi and the INC.
These people, who have worked on the Iraq campaign in the Office of Special Plans, have now moved on to the "Iranian directorate". Conveniently, they did not even had to change their rooms, only the door plates.
Aus Raider wird Twix … sonst ändert sich nix.
The former "WMD and terrorists" product was named Iraq and it sold quite well at its time. It has now been rebranded to Iran but it is prepared by the same people to the same recipe in the same old factory.
Now somehow I have the impression the traction for this new product seems to lack the enthusiasm and demand the old one had.
To a lot of people the old product did taste well at that time, but they still have this crappy stomach feeling. The serving was just a bit too big.
Even with the rebranding campaign underway, they just may not buy this product again.