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.
Iranian-made munitions found in Iraq include advanced IEDs designed to pierce armor and anti-tank weapons. U.S. intelligence believes the weapons have been supplied to Iraq’s growing Shia militias from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is also believed to be training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran.
Put on your tin-foil hats, ladies and gentlemen. Here we have unnamed senior defense officials leaking information about smoking gun evidence that Iran is churning out shaped IED’s and other G.I. killing hardware and shipping it directly to Iraq. The timing, and anonymity, is delicious.
It doesn’t mean that it could not be true. Perhaps it is true. That would not be very surprising. I don’t like the idea of Iran directly facilitating the killing of American soldiers. But I think it is but one more object lesson on why we are in a no-win situation. Rather than teaching Iran a lesson, we ought to start learning some lessons of our own.
The right-wing is already taking this leak as a justification to strike Iran. Remember the source and remember the timing, but I can understand the desire to deter Iran from further actions of this type. The problem is that I do not think we can deter them. We need to stop digging. We need level heads.
