But of course, the learned analysts all know that Shi'ites and Sunnis will never work together! "Reports Bolster Suspicion of Iranian Ties to Extremists," by Siobhan Gorman and Jay Solomon in the Wall Street Journal, July 27 (thanks to Moishe):
WASHINGTON--Cooperation among Iran, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups is more extensive than previously known to the public, according to details buried in the tens of thousands of military intelligence documents released by an independent group Sunday.U.S. officials and Middle East analysts said some of the most explosive information contained in the WikiLeaks documents detail Iran's alleged ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the facilitating role Tehran may have played in providing arms from sources as varied as North Korea and Algeria.
The officials have for years received reports of Iran smuggling arms to the Taliban. The WikiLeaks documents, however, appear to give new evidence of direct contacts between Iranian officials and the Taliban's and al Qaeda's senior leadership. It also outlines Iran's alleged role in brokering arms deals between North Korea and Pakistan-based militants, particularly militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and al Qaeda.
WikiLeaks released a cache of intelligence documents Sunday that detail raw intelligence reports over a five-year period. The information is fragmentary, and its not known how many reports were corroborated by other sources. "Some parts are more believable than others, but this sort of raw stuff could be gold or a dud," said a senior U.S. official working on both Pakistan and Iran.
The apparent links are striking because Iran has historically been a foe of the Taliban, who generally view the followers of Shiite Islam--Iran's predominant faith--as heretics.
The Iranian mission to the United Nations condemned the allegations of ties to extremists. "Any allegation about any collaboration or relation between Taliban and al Qaeda is absolutely false and baseless," a spokesman said....
Several reports describe Iran as a hub of planning activity for attacks on the Afghan government. A May 2006 report describes an al Qaeda-Hekmatyar plot to equip suicide bombers and car bombs to attack Afghan government and international targets--using cars and equipment obtained in Iran and Pakistan.
By April 2007, the reports show what appears to be even closer collaboration. A report that month describes an effort two months earlier in which al Qaeda, "helped by Iran," bought 72 air-to-air missiles from Algeria and hid them in Zahedan, Iran, in order to later smuggle them into Afghanistan....
What time is it? Pigman answers....
Known to whom? CIA Leon Pannetta(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Panetta)? George Tennet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tenet)? President (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States)?
Known how much (actually, how less)?
Throw out the elected officials and their parties, if they know so little, pretend to know even less when they and heir families live-off off the same voters who are endangered.
Was Pakistan's support for Taliban 'previously known'? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704700404575391152099593496.html#articleTabs%3Dvideo
Inside the bar room, two men glower at each other. They've mistrusted each other for as long as they can remember. They've deeply disliked each other, even to the point of murderous hatred, and at long last they are alone, ready for the long-awaited reckoning. Just then someone form outside, someone from far away, whom they do not know, but whom, for various reasons, both men inside the bar hate even more than they hate each other, even though that stranger has never done anything to them. And that stranger hesitates on the threshold. He looks over the swinging doors, sees that the two men inside are about to do harm to each other, and he feels compelled to enter and hold them apart, prevent them from doing one another harm. But what he does not realize is that his mere entry into the bar room will cause both of those men to forget about their mutual enmity, and turn their reeentment and rage on him. If he enters, in order to keep them apart, they will both turn on him, and do him the very harm he wishes to prevent them from doing to each other.
Should he enter the bar room?
And if he's already made a great error, by entering that barroom, even perhaps bearing gifts for both men, as a way to bribe them into peaceful behavior, how fast should he exit from that barroom after they turn on him?
Fast?
Very fast?
As fast as is humanly possible?
"Any allegation about any collaboration or relation between Taliban and al Qaeda is absolutely false and baseless," a spokesman said...." !!!
Systematic lying to the infidel, must be considered part and parcel of Islamic tactics.
http://crossmuslims.blogspot.com/2010/07/perfect-man.html
It's too bad we Americans have Obambi and his cabal of left-wing ideologues in the White House or else I have doubts that the Lefty anti-American Wikileaks would have released all of those documents and give the American public another legitimate reason to support the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities. I suspect Wikileaks creepy founder Julian Assange is counting on Obambi & Co. to do nothing more than express faux-outrage at the release of these docs.
I hope and pray we Americans can throw Obambi out in 2012 before it's too late.
I love Pigman, he's a role model for anyone fighting izlam.
He should never have entered the bar room, but since he already has, he should exit with the speed of light.
This lesson to be gleaned from this article is actually surprising: It is a mistake to perceive the Islamic world exclusively through an Islamic prism. Human nature, nationalism, internal power struggles and other criteria often factor into the actions of Muslims.
This is why Sunni and Shia can work together in common cause at the same time they are killing one another over doctrinal differences; why Iran has consistently backed Christian Armenia in its conflict with Muslim Azerbaijan; why the Saudis and the UAE are eager to see Israel bomb Iran's nuclear facilities (and make no mistake, even if there was no confessional difference between the Saudis and Iran, the national rivalry would still exist); why Muslims foster alliances with Leftists, even though their respective world-views are antithetical to one another; why money and even women have induced Palestinian Muslims into spying for Israel.
I could go on.
The point is, while a thorough understanding of Islamic doctrine is indispensable in comprehending the motives and actions of Muslims, we fall into a trap if we perceive EVERYTHING they do through that singular prism. Life is just not that simple.
OT
Muslim brides becoming virgins again with hymen replacement operations on the NHS
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1298684/Surge-virginity-repair-operations-NHS.html#ixzz0v6vWjuYB
Let me first say that I don’t agree with this policy of paying billions of our tax payer dollars to governments that use portions of that aid to kill our wonderful soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. I would like to attempt to give you a brief glimpse into what is called “strategic thinking” and how this guides U.S. foreign policy. Our govt “played” both Iran and Iraq against each other as it suited our “strategic” needs. Both Iran and Iraq were threats to the Middle East status quo.
America’s interests were (are) two-fold. 1, protect our vital energy interests (oil), and 2, maintain our strong support of the only truly open and democratic country in all of that region; Israel. When Iran was to powerful, we aided Iraq with money, intelligence (mostly via satellite photos and wire intercepts of communications) and pressure via the United Nations. The same was true of when Iraq began to emerge as a threat to the region’s stability.
When we invaded Iraq and took out the evil Hussein’s (Saddam and his two sons) we believed (unfortunately) that the Iraqi people would be so happy to be freed of Saddam’s evil tyranny that they would welcome us with open arms and quickly become a U.S.A. loving, Democratic-lite democracy. We not only failed in that incredibly optimistic prediction but we actually ensured our own failure in the first year following the invasion by allowing the puppet Iraqi govt to instill Sharia Law as the “highest” law of the nations new Constitution. We made the exact same mistake with Afghanistan and now both these countries “liberated” by primarily U.S. forces don’t allow religious leaders from faiths other than Islam into their countries; all because our “leaders” have failed to understand (even now) the so called “Religion of Peace.”
But back to Strategic thinking and U.S. foreign policy; Iraq happens to be majority Shiite Muslim, just like Iran. By failing to apply realistic “strategic” thinking our foreign policy has now allowed Iraq to teeter (and I believe ultimately to succumb) to becoming an Iranian satellite state. In other words we have destabilized the region through this action and the fact that the current U.S. administration has clearly established the fact that they will not stand in the way of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. This fact alone bodes no good for the Middle East future, or that of the worlds, for decades to come.
As bad as we have allowed the situation to become in the Middle East, we have also committed the same error with regards to Afghanistan. With India on the Pakistani eastern border and Afghanistan on its western border, it was only natural that Pakistan, looking out for its own best national security interests, aided (through its ISI agency) in establishing the Taliban in Afghanistan, in order to secure its own western borders.
Past U.S. policy has been to play Pakistan against India to maintain regional stability in that region of the world as well. The Pakistani national interests haven’t changed and for the better part of the past ten years they have had to play a very careful balancing act between appearing to appease the powerful U.S. and maintaining good relations with the Taliban. After all, the Pakistani govt has always known that the U.S. was not interested in securing and “keeping” Afghanistan and that it was just a matter of time before we would leave. The current administration told them so with a scheduled withdraw date for all U.S. forces by mid-2011.
Most American’s would be surprised that India has long distrusted the U.S. and so it has allied and “played” off its largest regional neighbors, Russia and China. It is no coincidence that after pumping nearly 20 billion dollars into Pakistan that they have suddenly been reinvigorated in the pursuit of modernizing their nuclear capabilities and placing ever more modernized military hardware on the Pakistani-India borders, especially the disputed Kashmir region. Again, the American govt’s past missteps have created a much more volatile situation than had existed prior to 9/11.
Wasn’t our stated goals for militarily “taking out” both governments post 9/11, supposed to have been the War on Terror? Specifically, to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a staging base for Islamic terrorists, and the implied threat of the same from Iraq, who was also supposed to have WMD capabilities? Yet today we have Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Kosovo and Pakistan to worry about splinter al-Qaeda like Islamic terror groups to worry about?
Not to mention the modest estimate of 1.3 Trillion dollars of our nation’s wealth forever lost, with literally nothing to show for it? Iraq sold its oil drilling/shipping interests to numerous countries but not one of them were American. Opium prices are very low due to the incredibly large shipments coming out of the poppy fields of Afghanistan, most of which is financing the Taliban and other Islamic terror groups. China just signed a deal to build roads, dams, and mining rights with Afghanistan and we all know what President Karzai thinks of the current administration. Add to this our current and unprecedented rocky relationship with Israel and it doesn’t take a genius to see the grief that will visit this world in the current and not too distant future. Strategic thinking seems to have become a thing of the past….
So much for the Shi'ites never aiding the Sunnies. True, they occasionally massacre one another here and there, but when it comes to jihad against any "infidels", they are one. Our cowardly presidents, Republican and Democrat, the cowardly CIA, the cowardly State Dept. sociopaths, the cowardly generals and admirals in command of the US military know the true extent of Iran aiding al-Qaida AND Iran's role in the 9/11 attacks, but they cover it up from the American people, because if the truth comes out, they will be required to go to war on Iran, and for that, not one of them have any balls. Murdering Serb Christians and brutally eradicating Christianity from Kosovo to please the Muslims is all our so-called "superpower" is good for.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.
If all the non-Muslims and non-Muslim countries understood everything about Islam and our Muslim foes and were as united in purpose against them as they are united in purpose against us, we would either be clearly winning this conflict between the civilization of the non-Muslim world and the barbarism of the Islamic world, or we would have already won it.
As a case in point, the "cooperation among Iran, al Qaeda, and other Sunni jihad groups" is in stark contrast to the ignorance, denial, confusion, disunity, and conflict with regard to the subject of Islam, Islamic supremacism, etc. among the people of non-Muslim countries, most notably, and regrettably, the UK and America.
While we are aguing and denying, they are winning.
I haven't read all of the other comments here but those I have read are excellent!
Those in our government and in our military should (or should be forced to) read this stuff.
To those who have been following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and have also been teaching themselves about Islam and the culture and politics of Muslim countries, the 'revelations' coming from Wikileaks are not at all revelatory. Goings on such as the I.S.I. helping the Taliban have been in the public domain for many years as their relationship goes back to the Afghans war against the Soviets. Learning of the Iranians helping Al-Qaeda and Sunnis may be a new development, but not that unexpected. As Hugh stated above, they will join together when they perceive a common threat.
So perhaps Obama wanting to pull out in 2011 is not as terrible an idea as it first appears. If our troops aren't there, they just might go back to fighting each other, a schism which we could exploit. And we could finally abandon the Pakies as 'allies' and back India instead. I wouldn't even mind seeing the Russians go back into the 'stans, just so we could tell them "Sorry, we tried to be your friends, but you turned on us. You're on your own now."And if India were to invade Pakistan, we could say the same thing to them while providing the long suffering Hindus all the weaponry they could possibly want. [Though they would probably buy it from Russia instead.]
Which could lead to a strange outcome.
Suppose an alternate history had taken place. What if the US hadn't helped the Afghans against the Russians? What if the Indians had invaded Pakistan at the same time and we didn't help them either? What if the Russians had then gone into Iran as American Cold warriors of the `80's feared they would? What then?
The Russians would have been bogged down in those countries fighting an insurgency instead of us. The US could have had an excuse to put troops and bases into the the Middle East. India would finally be rid of it's hated enemy Pakistan. And the outcome of this alternate history would have been nearly the same as the possible future I outlined above in paragraph 2.
Food for thought.......