Iranian Weapons Arm Iraqi Militia
U.S. officials say they have found smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories. According to a senior defense official, coalition forces have recently seized Iranian-made weapons and munitions that bear manufacturing dates in 2006.This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market. “There is no way this could be done without (Iranian) government approval,” says a senior official.
Of course it didn’t take a brain surgeon to conclude that this was happening, nor a rocket scientist to figure out why chaos in Iraq is to Iran’s advantage in multiple ways. The difficult question though is what do we do about it.
Some will predictibly see this as a reason to negotiate with Iran. I find that such a course is unlikely to be productive, as it is clear that they won’t work with us out of a sincere disire to help Iraq, therefore to coerce them would require either carrots or sticks. We are probably unwilling to deploy the sticks, and we really can’t give any carrots with the Iranian nuclear situation as it is. Of course an diplomatic initiative that delt with both problems at once could theoretically succeed, but we simply isn’t a big enough carrot in the world to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program. This is without even considering the obvious downsides of rewarding this behavior, and thus encouraging more of it.
Politically, a serious military option seems off the table. I think that is a horrible situation for us to be in, but there we are. Of course Bush is commander in Cheif and he could order strikes on his own authority, but I am not sure that the damage that would cause us domestically wouldn’t be worse than what Iran is doing. It would probably be the one thing that might convince Pelosi to try to impeach him, and however that worked out it would be horrible for the nation.
Sadly, Iran is in the drivers seat here, and has pretty much all the cards. That is a really terrible situation, but I don’t see much alternative for us other than trying to maintain the status quo until the situation changes in some way. One way might be a Hillary presidency, I expect thatAhmadinejad might find to his regret that she is a tough woman.
Yes, and Syrian arms are provided to the Sunni militias.
What does that make Syria?
Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are apparently “exporting” their Islamic radicals to Iraq as “cannon fodder”.
Interesting contribution to the “War against Terror”, no?