The Associated Press is reporting this morning that Iran may be training teams of fighters to go into Iraq:
“Iraqi Shiite assassination teams are being trained in at least four locations in Iran by Tehran’s elite Quds force and Lebanese Hezbollah and are planning to return to Iraq in the next few months to kill specific Iraqi officials as well as U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to intelligence gleaned from captured militia fighters and other sources in Iraq.”
This sounds alarming at first, but we ought to remember a couple of things before we send out the planes to go bomb Iraq.
First of all, military intelligence about Iraq and Iran has proven to be very unreliable in the past. Remember how sources in Iraq told us just a few years ago that Saddam Hussein had built a secret arsenal of weapons of mass destruction so powerful that they threatened every nation in the world? That was alarming news too, but it wasn’t at all true. Alarming news that isn’t true isn’t any more worthy of action than a horror movie.
Secondly, the Associated Press is being rather selective in calling these Iranian-trained teams “assassins”. The Associated Press didn’t call American military teams dedicated to finding and killing Iraqi officials “assassins”. It gave them names like “special operations”.
Third, there are strong reasons to doubt the reports. The Iraqi government installed by the USA leans toward Iran already, so why would Iran send in teams to kill Iraqi officials?
I don’t know what the truth is in this matter. I don’t know whether Iran is really training teams of fighters to engage in attacks in Iraq or not.
If Iran is truly doing such a thing, then that’s a negative development, just as it was a negative development when the United States sent fighters to engage in attacks in Iraq. Government-sponsored violence is deplorable, whether it’s American or Iranian. However, one bit of government-sponsored violence is not a good excuse for more government-sponsored violence.
Out of control violence continues in Iraq, committed by many parties. It’s long past time that America stopped being a party to that violence. The American occupation of Iraq needs to end as soon as possible – but whether Obama or McCain wins the presidency, I don’t expect that we’ll see the last American fighter leave Iraq for a very long time.
