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Why on earth would Israel sell weapons to Iran when Iran has been calling for Israel's total destruction ever since the ayatllah brought fundamentalist theocract to Iran.
Richard
IGNORE AND REPORT THIS TROLL.
Anonymous
"If"? That's what the Iran-Contra scandal was. Iran was supplying the Palestinians and the Lebanese with weapons by smuggling them. Israel was catching a fair bit of the smugglers because its intelligence network is so advanced. So Israel was accumulating this massive storehouse of confiscated weapons from Iran.
The US then in turn bought the weapons from Israel, but Congress hadn't approved that purchase, so the US, well, Reagan via the CIA, had to buy them off-book, under the table, as it were, which I'll get to in a minute. The CIA then used them as payment to buy cocaine from Colombian drug lords that CIA agents were smuggling into the US impersonating drug smugglers, literally smuggling because the CIA couldn't let the Coast Guard, DEA, FBI, or anyone know that that's what they were doing. The CIA used the weapons as payment because the CIA knew that Colombia was turning around and selling the weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua at a premium and making more money than they'd make if they just got paid cash.
How did the CIA know this? The CIA knew it because the CIA was really the ones buying the guns for the Contras. The Contras had no money. They were just a bunch of rag-tag anti-communist rebels, which is why Reagan wanted to back them and supply them with weapons, even if Congress said no. So the Contras got the money from the US, via the CIA doing an end-run around Congress by funding the buys off-book.
So where did the CIA get all this money if Congress didn't budget it? Why by selling the drugs of course! One might have thought the CIA would've flushed all those drugs since it was all part of a ruse, but, no, the CIA needed to fund both ends of the operation, this purchase of Iranian arms from Israel as well as the purchase of those same arms at a much higher price from Colombia, so what the CIA did is funnel all that cocaine it was truly smuggling into the US onto America's streets, CIA agents impersonating American drug kingpins and the CIA becoming America's biggest drug dealer throughout the 80s.
You see, this whole elaborate plan was to mask that the US or Israel was involved at all. The Contras were led to believe that they were buying the guns via the Colombians from Iran. That's because the CIA agents represented themselves as arms dealers serving as middle-men dealing weapons for Iran.
So why wouldn't Columbia cut out the middle-man and just buy directly from Iran, because Iran would never sell weapons to anyone in the Western hemisphere because of the Monroe Doctrine, which states that any interference in the Americas by anyone outside of the Americas, the US will see as an act of war. It worked, because if the Colombians ever approached Iran or had contact with Iran to try and verify the source, Iran of course would disavow, would deny. The thing is, that's exactly what they'd do if the weapons weren't coming from them, too, and exactly what Iran did do, deny and disavow.
The Colombians and the Contras, though, took that as just what they would of course do in order to not unnecessarily provoke a war with the US, and the Colombians and the Contras had every reason to believe those weapons were coming from Iran, seeing as how they were all Iranian weapons.
Well, all didn't go according to plan because Iran grew wise after Sandinistas, who the Contras were fighting, started seeing that all the Contras' weapons were Iranian, like when captured and so forth, which got back to the USSR, so the USSR started coming down on Iran for supplying the anti-communists with weapons when the USSR and Iran were supposed to be sort of allies. Iran, though, knew damn well it wasn't selling weapons to the Contras, so then it started digging into what was really going on, and it all started to unravel when Iranian weapons confiscated off of Contras by the Sandinistas were weapons Iran knew had been previously confiscated by Israel.
Next thing you know, the Iran-Contra scandal breaks and we get weeks of Congressional hearings on TV and everyone learns about this guy who was kind of in charge of the whole thing through the Pentagon, a guy named Col. Oliver North. Incidentally, it was also during these hearings that Senator Al Gore was going after Col. Oliver North for a high-tech security system installed in his house as some kind of kickback in order to secure him against all the unsavory people he was dealing with. So Senator Al Gore asked him who he thought was so dangerous that they could reach him in the United States, and Col. Oliver North answered Osama Bin Laden for one, and Senator Al Gore said, "Osama Bin who?" and laughed at him. Col. Oliver North said he considered him the single most dangerous individual in the world. Senator Al Gore then again laughed in his face. That was the first time the name Osama Bin Laden was ever said on US national television and the first time Americans ever became aware of somebody anmed Osama Bin Laden.
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The drugs must be GOOD in your world