Word: sunni
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Administration claims that Iran has been supplying arms to Iraq's Sunni insurgency have never made any sense. Coming soon after Washington initially accused Tehran of arming Shi'ite militias, they have seemed like a weak attempt to remake its case tying the country to attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq - the vast majority of which are carried out by Sunni, not Shi'a, forces...
...unshakable foundations of Iranian foreign policy is support for Iraq's Shi'a, who now more than ever are bloody foes of the country's Sunni minority. And if for some unfathomable reason Iran were arming the Sunni insurgency, would it leave behind evidence to implicate itself...
...weren't for a still classified lucky break, we would have had no evidence the Iranians were behind it. It is unlikely in the intervening years Iran lost its touch. It certainly isn't clumsy enough to leave serial numbers or factory markings on weapons going to the Sunni insurgency...
...intel official recently assigned to Baghdad told me he too thought the Administration's claims are ridiculous. Iraq is too chaotic and the insurgency too fragmented - both the Sunni and Shi'a - to determine the origin of arms. The Iranians certainly are arming Shi'a militias, but what happens to the arms once they get to Iraq are anyone's guess. Among other things, Sunni insurgent groups regularly raid Shi'a caches...
...turns out to be more complicated. Even before Saddam fell, Hizballah and other Lebanese militias opened up shop in Iraq. (A large part of Hizballah's leadership has strong historical ties to Iraq, including Hizballah secretary general Hasan Nasrallah, who studied in Najaf.) Iraqis - both Shi'a and Sunni - fought with Hizballah in southern Lebanon in its 18-year war against Israel, picking up battlefield experience we're now seeing in Iraq, including knowledge of explosive-formed projectiles, EFP1s...