Nir Rosen On Selling A War With Iran

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This same American alliance with the so called "moderate" Sunni Arab countries, which are in fact dictatorships with gruesome human rights records, is backing Sunni militias in Lebanon and nearly succeeded in a coup attempt to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas in Palestine and install Fatah thugs in their place. Iran indeed has a strategic alliance with Hamas and Hizballah, groups that the United States condemns as terrorists but millions of others view as national liberation movements who also provide for and protect their people. Why assume that the Bush administration's interests are more legitimate than those of the Iranian regime's? What is wrong with Iraqi resistance groups that oppose a foreign military occupation that has killed and imprisoned thousands of innocent civilians while bringing only ruin an already tortured country?

It is true that some Iraqi militias use Iranian weapons, but they also use American weapons, Soviet bloc weapons, Austrian weapons and anything else they can purchase. And the Mahdi Army actually often uses weapons originating with the Americans and given to the Iraqi Army and Police. Mahdi Army men also purchased weapons originating in Iran from offices of the Supreme Council and Badr in southern Iraq. Iranian weapons are smuggled into Iraq. In a region with porous borders and rife with corruption this does not make it a state policy. Iraqis do not need arms, the country is awash in them, and they need little help in being violent, as we have seen.

Most of those who fight the Americans in Iraq do so not at the bidding of a foreign power but out of genuine and sincere opposition to the American occupation. The Americans never grasped this and always assumed it was about the money, or al Qaeda, and now part of a silly Iranian conspiracy. After at first siding with Iraq's Shiites much to the consternation of America's so called "moderate" Sunni allies, the Americans are now targeting Shiites and perhaps even Shiite Iran as Bush prepares for once last war on his path to the "New Middle East." But without the help of an acquiescent media supplicating to Bush administration and US military officials they might not be able to go to war once again.

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—Jonathan Schwarz