The editors at the Washington Post let this go forward. They've published a Washington Post Syndicate column titled "Iran’s fingerprints in Fallujah."
The claim goes that Iran has inserted Al Qaeda agents into Fallujah, Iraq, where they are making various mischief and have enabled an Al Qaeda invasion of Ramadi and Fallujah.
This is crazy stuff.
We do know that the RWNJs have gone overboard for the "Straight Line" persuasion system. SLIPS is all about point-of-sale propaganda. Verifiable facts don't matter. Getting caught in lies doesn't matter. What does matter is that they project imagery that appeals to their target audience.
In fact, back here in the real world: the Al Qaeda people are fanatical Salafi Sunnis. Every one of us who paid attention to Usama bin Laden knows that.
On the other hand: Iran as well as Maliki and his people are Shia. There is no way the Shia are backing Salafi fanatics.
There's no two religious groups on earth who are less on the same page than Salafis and the Shia. In Iraq these extremist Salafis finance suicide bombings that murder hundreds of Shia every year. They are mortal enemies.
But going off crazy with "Iran’s Fingerprints in Fallujah" kicks an image of White House weakness. It tries, desperately, to tie Iran to Al Qaeda. So this trash goes on the WaPo editorial page. It drops names of Iraqis and Iranians. It lies the WaPo xss off. This is as bad on the facts as Birther Madness.
Survey of text of this column below the orange muffin:
The second paragraph states twin conclusions:
Like everything else about Iraq, this is a tragic and confusing story. But two points seem clear:
-- First, the Obama administration, in its rush to leave the country, allowed the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to undo many of the gains made against al-Qaeda.
-- Second, Iran has waged a brilliant covert-action campaign that turned Maliki and Iraq into virtual clients of Tehran — and in the process alienated Sunnis and pushed them toward extremism.
If you have paid much attention to Iraq, you'll know already that the Al Qaeda element in Iraq is a relatively new organization. It exists outside of and in opposition to the traditional Sunni tribes. Financing for Al Qaeda in Iraq comes from foreign Salafis, who never had as much as a foothold in pre-war Iraq.
The fight against Al Q in Iraq is being carried forward by the traditional Sunni tribes. Maliki and the Iraqi army are not involved at Ramadi or Fallujah. Even years ago when it was U.S. Special Forces and SEALS doing night time raids on Al Q, the intelligence info for the raids came from Sunni tribes, not the Baghdad government.
Ignatius's statement that Maliki undid "many of the gains made against al-Qaeda" is contrary to facts on the ground. Those gains were achieved by strengthening the Sunni tribes. General Petraeus and then the Gulf States facilitated these efforts from 2007 to present. Maliki short-changed the Sunnis on the issue of oil revenue, but that has nothing to do with their military alliance with the U.S. and support from the Gulf States.
Al Qaeda forces are being crushed, today, by these Sunni tribes. It is a fight between a few hundred cheap foreign mercenaries with very few locals versus tens of thousands of local Sunnis.
Then the text switches over to Iran and Iranian influence. Ignatius goes off howling "Boogey Man !!"
His bete noire is Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He is described as "brilliant" and able "to ride many horses."
But we're dealing only with Sunnis for the Fallujah mess. Nobody there on either side is connected with Iran or with their Qods Force. They're all Sunnis, not a Shia in sight.
It is absurd to claim out of nowhere that the Sunni tribes have formed Qods Force alliances.
Iran has achieved little of substance since the 2010 changes that saw the U.S. depart. There is not even one pro-Iran political party. Once oil revenues picked up in 2011, Maliki set a foreign policy that avoids Iranian objectives. And there has been no Iranian financed terrorism, no hidden Qods Force power on the ground as has continued in Lebanon for thrity years. Nothing but the usual connections between Shia and Teheran with the shared religion.
There's one more bit of wack-job twistiness in this column.
Ignatius follows RWNJ dogma by omitting any and all mention of the large-scale debacles of Ronald Reagan presidency.
The twist comes when Ignatius goes off into more of the boogey-man stuff: he refers to "...Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who allegedly helped plan the 1983 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait."
That's cute. It is the very least of what Muhandis did in the early 1980s.
What this man Muhandis did, back then, was that he started out by planning and executing the suicide truck bombing that wrecked the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, on January 18th, 1983. The blast killed 63. It ripped off the front of the building.
Then in the following months Reagan's team forgot that bombing. Nine months later Muhandis's team found open security gates at the Marine BLT Barracks. The barracks were undefended. The building was destroyed on October 23rd, 1983, with loss of another 241 people.
Altogether, Muhandis's team and his Lebanese allies killed 398 with truck bombs. This effort drove Reagan out of Lebanon in March of 1984. By 1985 the prestige of that victory led to formation of Hizb Allah, which remains today the dominant Shia organization in Lebanon.
Lebanese with no Iranians in-country carried out that Kuwait embassy attack. The Lebanese used home-produced detonators that failed, which we've known for more than a decade. There was minimal damage in Kuwait.
Kuwait was nothing at all like what happened in Lebanon.
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Persians are ten-feet tall. They are blue. They ride flying carpets.
Good for them.
And America is beset with a plague of liars. On the whole, I'd as soon have locusts.