President Donald Trump has confirmed the U.S. has tried to arm the Iranian opposition, but claims that the guns meant for Iranian citizens never got to them. So what exactly did we send, and where’d they end up?
Details on the operation (which I sincerely hope as called Operation Farsi and Furious) remain scant, but Trump on Monday generally confirmed what Fox News’s Trey Yingst reported over the weekend: an untold number of weapons were sent to the Kurds with the expectation that they would be given to Iranians willing and ready to take to the streets in armed opposition to the IRGC and the mullah’s running the Iranian government.
They were supposed to go to the people so they could fight back against these thugs. You know what happened? The people that they sent them to kept them because they said, “What a beautiful gun, I think I’ll keep it.”
So I’m very upset with a certain group of people and they’re gonna pay a big price for that. But the Iranian people will fight back. As soon as they know they’re not going to be shot, and as soon as they can get weapons — if they had weapons, not many of them, if they had weapons — that would go the other way, and you know what would happen?
Iran would give up in two seconds because they wouldn’t be able to take it. But in Iran, they have absolutely no weaponry, and they’ve been told point blank: if you come out, if you came out to the streets, you would be killed. As of this morning, and we have this on pretty good information, 45,000 protesters have been killed. Pretty bad.
Interestingly, the WSJ reports that “senior Iranian Kurdish officials” have denied Trump’s claim that any guns were delivered to them, much less that they’ve kept them.
So, is this a bit of psychological warfare from Trump that’s designed to rattle the regime, or did we actually deliver some number of arms to the Kurts with the expectation that they’d end up in Iran?
At this point we have no way of knowing, but the idea of just handing off an untold amount of weaponry to a group of Kurds in the hopes they’d be used against the regime strikes me as, well, silly.
First off, the most likely middleman in that situation would be the Kurdistan Workers’ Party; a group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. The Obama administration allowing guns to be walked into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels was bad enough, but it would arguably even worse for the Trump administration to deliver guns to a terrorist group in the hopes they’d soon pass them off to a third party.
Even if those guns ended up in the hands of a group like the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (which has also been designated as a terror group by the U.S., while the Iranian government contends it’s actually supported by the United States), the group typically operates along the Iraq/Iran border hundreds of miles from Tehran and other major Iranian population centers. An armed Kurdish uprising could force the Iranian regime to respond to the threat by diverting troops and security forces from other parts of the country, but even then you’d be left with a largely disarmed populace in Tehran and other cities. If they haven’t fought back before now, why would they start to fight back under those circumstances?
Again, it may very well be that Trump’s comments are an intentional bit of misdirection aimed at the Iranian government. I actually hope that’s the case, because the most likely scenario if Trump is telling the truth is that we shipped who knows how many guns to groups we consider terrorists and were shocked to learn that they decided to keep them instead of handing them off to their intended recipients.
Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense here at home.
Help us continue to report on their efforts and legislative successes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.
Read the full article here
