Bush Lies About Iran

Informed Comment

Among the more fantastic charges that Bush made against Iran was that its government was actively arming and helping the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. In fact, the Taliban are extremist Sunnis who hate, and have killed large numbers of Shiites. Shiite Iran is unlikely to support them. The neo-Taliban are a threat to the Karzai government, which represents the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks) along with non-Taliban Pushtuns. The Hazara are Shiite clients of Iran, and both the Tajiks and the Uzbeks are close to Tehran. The neo-Taliban are being supported by Pakistan, which resents the Northern Alliance, not by Iran, which favors it.


That Iran is trying to destabilize the Shiite government in Baghdad is absurd. The Bush administration charge that Iran is the source of explosively formed projectiles is based on very little evidence and flies in the face of common sense; in fact these bombs are probably made in Iraq itself or perhaps come from Hizbullah in Lebanon.


The charges are frankly ridiculous, and certainly are so if proportionality is taken into account. That is, if one bomb was sold by an Iranian arms dealer to the Taliban for profit, a hundred bombs were given to the Taliban by Pakistan for tactical reasons. Likewise, the Shiite militias in Iraq have killed very few American troops when the US troops have left the Shiites alone; most attacks on the US come from Sunni Arabs.


The Senate Kyl-Lieberman resolution helped legitimize this new Bush policy, which is why the senators should not have voted for it. It took us one more step down the road to war with Iran.