Juan Cole relays the news that American forces has kidnapped another Iranian in Iraq. The occupation army claims the captive is an arms smuggler from the Revolutionary Guards; but the Kurds — America's main ally in Iraq — say that he is a legitimate trade official from an Iranian province. Professor Cole lays out the absurdities:
Either the US suspicions about [Aghai] Farhadi are baseless, or the Kurds are the major conduit for Iranian arms into Iraq. Five other Iranians were kidnapped from Irbil by the US military. Farhadi would not be doing what he was doing in Sulaimaniya unless he was the guest of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
If he was smuggling in arms, he was smuggling them to the Peshmerga, the Kurdish paramilitary, which is allied with the United States. Presumably this means that the Peshmerga is either transfering the weapons to the Badr Corps or selling the arms off on the Iraqi black market.
If this scenario is correct, then it is pure propaganda for the USG to complain so loudly and bitterly about Iranian meddling in Iraq, when it is being facilitated by some Kurds, who are in turn putative US allies.
This is of course yet another deliberate provocation on the part of the Bush Regime, one of the blizzard of pinpricks they are currently inflicting on Iran, hoping to draw a response big and juicy enough to "justify" the coming attack. Grabbing an official and falsely claiming he is a smuggler or spy is very much in line with the tactics applied before the war of aggression against Iraq, when Bush sent American planes on pointless missions through the "no-fly zones" (where U.S. pilots had long complained "there's nothing left to bomb"), risking their lives in the hopes that Saddam would shoot down a plane and short-circuit the diplomatic sham that Bush and Blair were playing out.
It is also reminiscent of Bush's pre-war suggestion to Blair that the two Christian statesman paint a U.S. spyplane in UN colors and send it into the danger zone, again hoping Saddam would fire on the plane. If the pilot and crew were killed — so what? Bush's voicing of this frankly Hitlerian plan has never been disputed by the British government, which has gone to great lengths to suppress the official memo that revealed it.
And this is the regime that Senate Democrats, and millions of Americans, still somehow regard as legitimate: military aggressors, Hitlerian schemers, kidnappers, liars and thugs. How any Democrat — or Republican for that matter — can in good conscience still participate in this murderous farce is beyond me.
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