With Us or Against Us ?  

Jeff Vail has another insightful post up, this time looking into the murky relationship between the various militia and tribal groups in Iraq and Iran, and the reasons behind US backing of them.

So why is the Bush administration funding a marxist-secular revolutionary group in Iran? Specifically, the MEK marxist-secular organization which is also the group that Saddam used to repress the Kurds and Shi'a in Iraq--people who are now ostensibly our allies? Something tells me that the Kurds and Shi'a wouldn't be that happy that we're backing the MEK. The Shi'a aren't just standing still on the issue--they know. They've taken the BADR brigades (the Iranian backed, pro-shia group that fought Saddam before he became a 'constant gardner') and "dismantled them", taking the senior officers and installing them in all the leadership positions of the "new Iraqi army"--especially the special forces units--which they're now using in a classic tribal "erratic retaliator" strategy, killing Sunnis to spread the general perception of the new Shi'a power in Iraq.

But since the Shi'a politicians (elected!) are largely pro-Iranian (especially the Sharistani element), the US can't just sit back and let this whole democracy concept backfire on them, turning Iraq into a quasi-Iranian puppet state. So they're funding the MEK. Why can't the US just support the "legitimate" democratic opposition, the pro-capitalist, pro-US, pro-freedom and democracy and apple pie crowd? Easy--because those people are patriotic Iranians, and they want Iran to control Iran's oil. The US can't have that--they need Iran's oil, and they can't be bothered to pay market price for it, so they need to put a group in power (MEK) that they can control via the classic "exploitation policy" to control a country by putting a distinct minority party in power with US support. What would the Iranian-majority patriots do if they had their way? They're already doing it: they're building an oil and gas pipeline to India--a direct threat to the continuation of hydrocarbon supply to "the West".