Depending on your view of things, this is either shocking or sadly familiar, or both. According to a report on Democracy Now, the U.S. and Israel are sponsoring terrorist attacks inside Iran by a Kurdish guerrilla group.

Apparently, both of these governments are working in a clandestine way with at least two different groups, classified as terrorist organizations by the State Department, to carry out terrorist activity throughout Iran. The primary group, called the PKK, is an ethnic Kurdish group that is responding to discrimination against ethnic Kurds in Iran with violence.

We have a history of getting involved with groups like this in the Middle East when it's served our political purposes--an involvement that's had dire consequences for us:

...On the one hand, the United States is very much opposes to the P.K.K.'s actions in Turkey. On the other hand they're supporting P.K.K.'s attack on Iran. This is kind of typical of the clandestine efforts by the United States when we saw the U.S. support for the Mujahadeen against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They sided with some pretty nefarious characters who ended up forming al Qaeda and bombing New York.

So once again, the U.S. is allying with one faction of this party, but not with the other, playing a very dangerous game and they're playing a very similar game with the Mujahadeen al-Halb, another Iranian group and with groups in Baluchestan which is near the Pakistan Iranian boarder where some revolutionary guard buses were blown up. It's a very very dangerous, duplicitous game that the United States is playing.

And news of this comes just shortly after the U.S. has very publicly chastised Iran on the world stage for supposedly sponsoring terrorist activity in Iraq (something for which good evidence has still not been found). Another lesson that when the Bush administration accuses another country of doing something wrong, we should start looking for evidence that we're in fact doing it ourselves.

Is this the way we uphold the noble ideals of freedom and democracy around the world? Is this the example we wish to set for other countries? Can you fight a "war on terror" with terror as your weapon? How tragic, and how sad.

Labels: Politics