Credibility Issue

12 February 2007



Bush Charges Iran with Arming Iraqi Insurgents

The US government has charged that officials in the highest levels of the Iranian government are arming Iraqi insurgents. “We know more than we can show” one anonymous official said to MSNBC. Another said there is a “growing body of evidence” that Iran is behind some roadside bombs. Maybe so. However, this whole thing would be more believable if the US government hadn’t gone to war over weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. The new charges are serious, but are readily brushed off by a world that doesn’t believe anything the Bush White House says.

The fact of the matter is that weapons have undoubtedly come in from Iran. The border is porous, and there are more than enough weapons left over from the Iran-Iraq war to stage a reenactment. Whether the “highest levels” of the Iranian government are involved or not is rather secondary to those facing car bombs and such. It would not be surprising to find weapons of all sorts short of tanks and fighter aircraft have come from Iran. What the Bush administration plans to do about it isn’t hard to guess given the Iraq-Nam precedent.

The question is whether the Iranian government would supply such weapons to proxies in Iraq-Nam. Well, why not? Last week, the Americans charged that Jamal Jaafar Mohammed, a Shi'ite elected to the Iraqi parliament in December 2005, has been a huge conduit for arms from Tehran. He appears to have fled to Iran. The US also says that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force, which answers directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was also involved. When a few Iranians were detained in Irbil, Iraq-Nam, a senior Quds operations officer was among them.

Yet, somehow, one wants to say “so what?” After Colin Powell’s performance at the UN in February of 2003, there isn’t much credibility when it comes to US intelligence in that part of the world. Other explanations are making their way around the global media. One has it that the Iranians are selling the stuff to middlemen; after all, the White House keeps telling everyone that Iran’s economy is falling apart. Another story says the CIA planted all of this stuff (this journal doesn’t buy conspiracy theories, but there are many who do, and this administration has done such foolish things). For all anyone knows, the evidence was made up in Hollywood and shipped to Iraq-Nam.

The trouble is that Mr. Bush and his crew just aren’t credible. The Iranian Ambassador to the UN said to the media, “Iran has no interest in providing weapons to any insurgent groups in Iraq. But the problem is that the United States has decided on a policy and is trying to find or fabricate evidence if it cannot find one -- and I believe it hasn’t been able to find an evidence [sic] -- in order to substantiate and corroborate that policy. And that seems to be at the bottom of this problem, and it's an alarming problem because if you’re looking for a crisis, then you’re certainly not looking for solutions.” And the world believes his government is innocent because it hasn’t gotten caught lying all over the front page.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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