MORE LGF HYSTERIA

Charles Johnson (LGF) is beating the war drum again:

What will it take for the United States to acknowledge that Iran is openly at war with us, and has been for decades?

What will it take for Charles to acknowledge that U.S. relations with Iran are much more complicated than he realizes? Perhaps he has forgotten the long-standing hostility between Iran and the Taliban ¹ and the help given to the U.S. by Iraq during the Afghanistan war².

NOTE:SOURCES ALL COME FROM LEXIS-NEXIS SEARCHES

¹
Deutsche Presse-Agentur, September 30, 2001, Sunday, BC Cycle
10:14 Central European Time
The Iranian stance and that of the daily is very clear and Teheran has right from the beginning (1996) not acknowledged the Taliban group due to its orthodox interpretation of Islam and due to the massacre of Iranian diplomats, the daily said.

Iran was on the verge of a war with the Taliban after the groups agents massacred in 1998 eleven Iranian diplomats and one reporter of the state-run news agency IRNA in the northern Afghan town of Mazare Sharif.

Iran supports ousted President Burhaneddin Rabbani who is close to the main Taliban-opposition known as the Northern Alliance which controls over ten per cent of Afghanistan.

The Independent (London)
October 5, 1996, Saturday

An Iranian cleric has accused Afghanistan's radical Islamic Taliban movement of giving Islam a bad name. "They stop girls from attending school, stop women from working . . . in the name of Islam," Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told worshippers in Tehran. Shia Iran supported the ousted government of Burhanuddin Rabbani and is hostile to Sunni Taliban.


The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario)
September 12, 1998 Saturday Final Edition

Taliban troops were reported to be 16 kilometres from the town of Bamiyan, where some 300,000 Hazaras from neighbouring villages have taken shelter to escape being massacred. The Taliban massacred thousands of Hazaras when they captured Mazar-e-Sharif.

The Hazaras, a Mongol people, are Shia Muslims and intensely disliked by the Taliban -- who are Sunni Muslims and drawn from another ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Iranian planes have been flying supplies to the besieged Hazaras, who have been backed by Iran for four years in their resistance to the Taliban.



²

The Boston Globe
December 31, 2001, Monday ,THIRD EDITION

Then came Sept. 11. And, within days, President Bush made one of the most important decisions of the war on terrorism, throwing his lot with the ragtag Northern Alliance and pressuring Pakistan to desert its Taliban clients.

To help arm the alliance, the Bush administration made a previously unthinkable deal, intelligence sources said: It agreed to finance a Russian transfer of arms to the alliance fighters. At about the same time, the United States started getting valuable intelligence from a longtime adversary, Iran.

The United States was desperately short of on-the-ground intelligence in Afghanistan. So, in addition to Pakistan, the United States turned to an unlikely partner, Iran. For many years, Iran had been an archenemy of the United States, having taken American embassy workers hostage two decades ago and encouraged anti-American sentiment. But the relationship had improved slightly in recent years, and Iran had long supported the Northern Alliance.

"This was clearly a case where Iranians had an interest in Afghanistan," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former counterterrorism chief. "They hated the Taliban. We got information from the Iranians. They did it very quietly."

Global News Wire - Asia Africa Intelligence Wire
Copyright 2002 BBC Monitoring/BBC
BBC Monitoring International Reports January 28, 2002
Text of article by Mehdi Razavi published by Iranian newspaper Azad on 13 January

Over the past two decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran not only paid the heavy expenses imposed by the presence of defenceless Afghan immigrants, but also dedicated more than 3,000 martyrs in the course of fighting narcotic drugs. Moreover, Iran was in apparent and deep conflict with the Taleban from the very outset. Indeed, more than any other country, it was exposed to the reactionary enmity of the Taleban group. Perhaps, in a way, the Islamic Republic of Iran was the real enemy of the Taleban.

Following the 11 September attack, America actually carried out a parallel operation with the Islamic Republic of Iran against the Taleban.