| By Jesse Singal - Apr 25th, 2008 at 11:44 am EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Maybe someone who's smarter than me can answer this convincingly, but this graf from today's Wall Street Journal confused me:
The U.S. military says it has found caches of newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq, leading senior officials to conclude Tehran is continuing to funnel armaments into Iraq despite its pledges to the contrary.
How does the premise (there are newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq) lead to the conclusion (the Iranian government is responsible)? Given that a newly-manufactured weapon has to go somewhere, and given the huge amount of instability in Iraq, all of which goes back to the Sunni-Shia divide and numerous other ethnic and political conflicts, what would prevent someone with access to Iranian arms from shipping them to his favored side in the civil war? Isn't this a supremely likely occurrence?
Politically and strategically, there is a miles-wide difference between some random Iranian lieutenant funneling arms to Iraq and the Iranian government doing the same. Where's the hard evidence that the latter is the case? Certainly the fact that the weapons are new points us slightly in that direction, but on its own that's a pretty flimsy case.

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