It Was Iran All Along

Thousands of US government and military documents, obtained by the provocateurs at WikiLeaks, have just flooded onto the Internet and front pages world wide shedding a pale, sickening light on the Iraq War. Perhaps the biggest detail that the papers reveal is just how involved Iran has been in the conflict. The New York Times breaks it down here, and the level to which the Islamic Republic and their Republican Guards have meddled in Iraq is just staggering. Iran has been supplying weapons and given guidance and training to anti-US Shiite militias in Iraq, much the same way they support Hezbollah. Perhaps most astoundingly of all is the revelation of numerous border skirmishes between American and Iranian forces-

 - including a Sept. 7, 2006, episode in which an Iranian soldier who aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at an American platoon trying to leave the border area was shot and killed by an American soldier with a .50-caliber machine gun. The members of the American platoon, who had gone to the border area with Iraqi troops to look for “infiltration routes” used to smuggle bombs and other weapons into Iraq, were concerned that Iranian border forces were trying to surround and detain them. After this incident, the platoon returned to its base in Iraq under fire from the Iranians even when the American soldiers were “well inside Iraqi territory,” a report noted.

What these documents make clear most of all is that the current Iraq War is simply the latest in a series of long battles that have made up our 30 year war with Iran, which has its roots in the CIA ousting of their democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, but began in earnest with the overthrow of the US-backed Shah and the siege of our embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Then came the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988, where-in we supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, supplying money and weapons, stationing US war ships in the Persian Gulf, and even shooting down an Iranian passenger plane. Now this latest and bloodiest chapter, and we seem to be losing, what with the persistence of the militias, and Iran's hand print on the formation of the new Iraqi government. As genocidal and maniacal as he might have been, Saddam was the only thing that, for a time, prevented his country from becoming a big Lebanon, which is now what Iraq is turning into.

(Top: Iranian soldiers wear gasmasks to protect from Iraqi chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. photo from Wikipedia.)