Why Peace in the Middle East Is a Fantasy
America’s Middle East policy is childish and futile. It is impossible to win a war while embracing the enemy.
During a meeting with a select group of journalists on Wednesday last week, President Obama stated that Iran and the United States have a “mutual interest” in fighting the Taliban. According to David Ignatius, who was present at the gathering, Obama said that Iran “could be a constructive partner” in the creation of a stable, U.S.-friendly government in Afghanistan.
It took less than 24 hours before this fallacy was exposed.
In its yearly report on global terrorism, released last Thursday, the U.S. State Department declared that Iran “remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism.” The report also identified Iran as a primary sponsor of the Taliban, as well as other Islamic terrorist groups responsible for turning Afghanistan and much of Pakistan into war zones. According to the report,
Iran’s Qods Force provided training to the Taliban in Afghanistan on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons. [And] since at least 2006, Iran has arranged arms shipments to select Taliban members, including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 105mm rockets, and plastic explosives.
So much for Iran having a “mutual interest” in defeating the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the mass dumping on the Internet of 90,000 classified U.S. military documents last month provided further evidence of extensive collusion between Iran, the Taliban and al Qaeda. As Canada’s National Postnoted, the massive Wikileaks dump furnished bountiful evidence suggesting Iran “could now be almost as crucial to the Afghan insurgency as Pakistan” (emphasis mine throughout).
A leaked report from February 2005, for example, showed how “Iranian intelligence agencies brought 10 million afghanis (approximately us$212,800)” into Afghanistan to fund terrorists. Another report from the same month described how a group of Taliban leaders living in Iran were orchestrating attacks on U.S. and nato forces in Afghanistan. A leaked 2007 report revealed that al Qaeda, with “help from Iran,” had hidden more than 70 missiles in Iran. Reports from 2009, documented U.S. soldiers witnessing Taliban fighters using grenade launchers marked with the phrase “Made in Iran.”
Ultimately, the onslaught of classified reports merely confirms what many, including now-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, have said for months. “The training [of Taliban fighters] that we have seen occurs inside Iran with fighters moving inside Iran,” McChrystal told reporters in May. “The weapons that we have received come from Iran into Afghanistan.”
Of course, this massive pile of evidence trashes the widely held belief that Iran, a Shiite Muslim state, refuses to support the Taliban or al Qaeda because both are Sunni Muslim organizations. The truth is out, and it shows that although fundamental religious differences do exist, Iran and the Taliban willingly unite in pursuit of a common goal. As one captured Taliban leader put it in July 2009: “Our religions and our histories are different, but our target is the same. We both want to kill Americans.”
Even still, the White House holds fast to what will ultimately be for America a suicidal policy of embracing Iran as a “constructive partner” in regional discussions on how to create peace in Afghanistan!
It gets worse: Iran’s relationship with the Taliban gives it significant and increasing reach into nuclear-armed Pakistan!
For years the government in Islamabad has been plagued by political unrest and conflicting loyalties. Amid this chaos, the Taliban has cut itself footholds within Pakistan’s government, including within the military. In particular, Taliban sympathizers have infiltrated the Inter-Services Intelligence (isi), Pakistan’s intelligence agency, giving the terrorist organization access to critical intelligence and in effect transforming the government department into an arm of the Taliban—and increasingly, Iran.
One reality made abundantly evident by the Wikileaks dump, noted Dan Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor, is that the “Taliban are stronger than ever and a crucial component of their success is the support they receive from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence.” For example, last year, when it realized that President Obama intended to step up America’s campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military, reportedmemri, “recalibrated its strategic position and brought the Taliban [further] into its fold, to serve as its proxy in a confrontation with the U.S. forces.” In March 2009, the New York Times reported that the isi was actually giving military supplies, funding and other help to Taliban fighters who were attacking U.S. and nato forces in Afghanistan.
If we step back and consider all the parts, the picture looks something like this.
The Taliban is a radical Islamic organization that—in addition to cruelly enforcing some of the strictest interpretations of Sharia law—is motivated by a fanatical desire to slaughter Americans, Jews and ultimately all non-Muslims. It was flung from governing Afghanistan in 2001, but has since revived and is currently regaining military and political control over Afghanistan. In addition, the Taliban brandishes significant and growing influence inside Pakistan, a nation in a state of near-collapse that possesses 60 to 100 nuclear weapons.
Over the past year an abundance of evidence has surfaced exposing Iran as the primary guarantor of the Taliban’s existence and operations, particularly in Afghanistan. It is now known, beyond doubt, that in addition to sponsoring and directing Islamic terror in the Middle East—think Hezbollah, Hamas and the terrorists in Iraq—the Islamic theocracy in Tehran sponsors and sustains the most deadly terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Yet, almost unbelievably, America’s president rejects the evidence exposing Iran as the nexus of Islamic terror—and the West’s ultimate enemy in the war against radical Islamic terrorism—and embraces the Islamic theocracy as a “constructive partner” in forging a path to peace in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, Israel and the larger Middle East region. It is a sad and condemning sign of the upside-down nature of America’s foreign policy that most of America’s leaders—including many Republicans—consider Iran to be part of the solution to the Middle East’s problems when in fact it is the central cause of radical Islamic terrorism!
Since its inception in 1990, the Trumpet has explained that Iran (at the head of radical Islamic terrorism) is the “king of the south” discussed in Daniel 11:40, and the nation largely responsible for setting off the catastrophic violence prophesied to occur immediately before the return of Jesus Christ. As early as July 1992, our editor in chief forecast: “It looks very much like the end-time king of the south will rule the radical Islamists! … Much of the world is unaware of what a powerful and dangerous force the Islamic camp is becoming.”
Eighteen years later, piles and piles of concrete evidence exist that ought to make people aware of what a “powerful and dangerous force the Islamic camp” headed by Iran is!
Still, America is engaged in a futile policy of seeking peace by embracing the very nation responsible for causing war. Very soon, as Iran continues to nudge the world to the cataclysmic end-time violence prophesied in the Bible, America will come to see—far too late—that its greatest foreign-policy blunder over the last two decades has been its failure to confront Iran.
