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Originally Posted by MrMaelstrom
So here's (yet) another pot shot: Binkie wrote that Iran used children as minesweepers in the 80's.
Would that be when Iran was considered a strategic partner and not a part of the Axis-Of-Evil?
You know, when reagan sold them missiles to support the contras in a guerrilla war trying to overthrow a legitimate democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua (the Iran/Contra scandal)? :P
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Thing is, Mael, we had funds coming in from all places. We did not
need to sell arms to Iran. We had Saudi's funding the same groups down there. So why did we even sell anything to the Iranians?
First of all, we'll have to travel back to 1985 when TWA flight 847 was hijacked by several radical Shias in Lebanon. It was no secret back then that Iran was "
exporting the revolution" to places such as Lebanon, where that country's Shia radicals unleashed hell in the 80s. For some odd-ball reason though, Ali Akbar Hasheim Rafsanjani, Iran's Parliament speaker, out of nowhere was asking for the release of the hostages. This is when dialogue began between Iran and the US on Iran's
badly needed arms sales. Iran needed these sales, the US didn't. Or did they? One of the agreements on behalf of these sales was that Iran would condition the release of US hostages being held by the Lebanese extremists. It was an arms-for-hostages deal. Take a stab at who ended up routing those arms sales to Iran? Israel.