Newsnight revealed tonight Iran offered to withdraw all support for Hamas and Hizbollah in Spring 2003. It is also clear the Iran was willing to hand over Al Quaeeda people they believed to be operating in Iran. All the Iranians wanted was for the USA to stop the activities of a terrorist group called the "People's Mojahideen" (also called the MEK or MKO). This group, based in Northern Iraq, wants to overthrow the Iranian regine.
What Newsnight asked was why this offer from the Iranians was rejected by US vice president Dick Cheney.
Imagine what the effect on Iraq might have been without Iran funding and supporting the Shias ? And all this was preventable if the US had stopped allowing terrorist attacks being launched from Iraq in to Iran.
The problem, as Newsnight revealed, is that although the "People's Mojahideen" are a listed terrorist organisation, some within the "Neo-Con's" saw the "People's Mojahideen" as a way of possibly removing the "People's Mojahideen".
However many people have died because of this wanton act of American's posturing.
1 comment:
I understood that despite their anti-Iranian stance the Mujahideen-e-Khalq had the living c*ap bombed out of them in 2003 by the US.
The resistance to negotiating with the Iranians was far more philosophical and far more rooted in recent history and US pride - and perhaps a justified distrust in the Iranian regime.
Nonetheless, I agree that the US should have taken advantage of the Iranian's weakness to extract concessions out of them, rather than being bloody-minded and winding up trapped between the IED rock and the uranium-enriching hard-place.
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