AN ALLIANCE OF THE DAMNED – AT 8:55 A.M. ET:   Again we urge our readers not to avert their eyes from the international situation as we concentrate on our election campaign here.  As Red Buttons used to say, strange things are happening.  From The Wall Street Journal:

KABUL—Iran has allowed the Taliban to open an office in eastern Iran and discussed providing them with surface-to-air missiles, ramping up the potential for cooperation with the insurgents, according to senior Afghan and Western officials.

Iran's shift came after the U.S. and Afghanistan sealed a long-term partnership agreement in May, and in an effort to expand its options for retaliation should its nuclear facilities be attacked, the officials said.

Iran, a Shiite theocracy, wasn't friendly with the Sunni Taliban government ousted by the U.S. in 2001 and hasn't permitted an official Taliban presence in the country until now. But these days both sides "see America as the bigger enemy" a Western official in Kabul said.

"Iran is willing to put aside ideology and put aside deeply held religious values…for their ultimate goal: accelerating the departure of U.S. forces from Afghanistan," the official said.

The Iranian Embassy in Kabul and consulate in Herat, in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran, didn't respond to requests for comment.

COMMENT:  A very instructive story, reminding us that politics does indeed make "strange bedfellows."  We are constantly told by "experts" that certain forces in the world will not unite with other forces because of cultural or ideological differences.  We then see them unite because of their common hatreds.

We see, for example, an ugly alliance between radical Islamists and Western leftists, even though the two disagree on fundamental values, like women's rights.  We've seen repeatedly that Western leftists are more than willing to give up presumably basic values, including those women's rights, in favor of efforts to hurt the United States. 

An alliance between Iran and the Taliban, as the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, can have devastating consequences for us in that part of the world.  Does anyone in Washington care?

August 1, 2012