Today's release of the news that the MEK, the most popular acronym for the Iranian freedom fighting and terrorist group the Mujeheddin e Khalq, is working hand in glove with the Israeli intelligence service Mossad to decimate Iranian nuclear scientists with car bombs and such has made a bit of a splash today, if its hardly a surprise.
Its hardly a surprise, since doing such a thing is among the oldest state strategies there is: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Thus, the MEK, having lost out to the Islamist opposition to the Shah of Iran, after however having killed numerous Americans during the 1970s and having helped organize the takeover of the American embassy in 1979, became our off and on friend, like the MEK was with Saddam.
Saddam and the MEK fought together against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, which if it permanently discredited the MEK with the mass of Iranian people, has made it a permanent regional proxy, unless they become inconvenient at some future date, which has been known to happen.
Of course, Iran can't really complain with too much sincerity, due to its sponsorship of Hizbollah and Hamas, among other proxies, and its all just life in the Big City, fun games for a certain type of mentality.
That's life in the big city, if there is a flaw in the enemy of my enemy strategy always worth remembering; sometimes the enemy of your enemy isn't really a friend, but another enemy.
Whether that's ultimately going to be the case with the MEK remains to be seen, given their involvement in certain tangential elements of a large event, but, its always worth keeping eyes in the back of your head when dealing with rent a proxies, and that's what the MEK is, a rent a proxy, who would be perfect for lots of people with interests in Iranian and Middle Eastern politics to use, as that's life in the big city.
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Comments
Expect Israel to respond much as they did in 1967, in an unexpected way. That's how they won then, in fact, that's how they keep winning.
And those Bible stories, I notice how that's how they won then too, they did what their enemy wasn't expecting.
My fear is that they will keep delaying, taking orders from Obama. I heard, don't know if it's true, that Obama blinked, declining to order OBL's execution, Panetta had to step in and order it.
I had thought he was a liberal pussy. I'm glad to be wrong about that.
By the way, having a motorcycle is different from owning a car. Everyone around you notices. It's not something you can be anonymous about. Which means the Iranians will catch the people orchestrating these actions.
And, my guess, not one of them will be found to be Jewish. Every one of those arrested will be a Muslim. Just a guess...
Iran and Israel are curious as to having had relations in the past per the common enemy of Saddam, so there might be some exceptions to that, if with Ahmadinejad types not. He's not the whole story of the Iranian state either, as neither is Khamenei, as there are "White Persians" in the sense of the "Whites" in Russia who both opposed the Revolutions, and they aren't just exiles either, if they got massacred in the Armed Forces, if maybe not quite all of them, due, like the Russians, to the imperatives of technical proficiency during war. They'd be long in the tooth now, and most left, but, there are a lot of ties to the Persian diaspora that offer recruitment opportunities still, especially of an informal "you don't like these maniacs either, and we can't really pay or have a tie, but..."
Its a rough neighborhood, and when in rough neighborhoods... one works with what one has, recognizing though that just because you work with some types of people doesn't really mean that their friend, only that at that moment in time, its convenient, or seems so, as blowback comes from such things all the time too.