(June 15, 2007) – A senior official at the U.S. State Department accused Iran this week of funneling arms into Afghanistan in order to help the Taliban terrorist group continue their insurgency against U.S. forces, according to the Associated Press (AP).

 

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said Iran is “trying to flex its muscles, but in a way that’s injurious to the interests of just about everybody else in the world,” he said. “I think it’s a major miscalculation.”

After Burns’ remarks this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates also spoke up, basing the Iranian government’s support of Taliban fighters on fresh intelligence. He told the AP that considering the large amount of shipments crossing the border, “it is difficult to believe that it is associated with smuggling or the drug business or that it’s taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government.”

 

Earlier in the week, Iran provoked the U.N. Security Council into considering a third round of sanctions because the rogue country has continued to flout international demands for transparency over its nuclear program. It also continues to deny its involvement in Iraq, and now Afghanistan.      

 

Some reactions on Capitol Hill, contrary to mainstream sentiment, believe President Bush should demonstrate even more assertiveness.

 

U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman called on the Bush administration earlier this week to consider a military strike against Iran for its involvement in fueling the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq, reported the AP. “I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq,” he said this week.

 

“And to me,” he added, “that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”

 

Lieberman, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, also told the AP that by some estimates, the Iranians have helped to kill 200 American soldiers. “We can tell them we want them to stop that,” he said. “But if there’s any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can’t just talk to them.”

 

Meanwhile, the AP reported this week that Israel had successfully launched an advanced and sophisticated spy satellite. Israeli officials said the Ofek-7 satellite, now in orbit, would significantly improve Israel’s intelligence capabilities, including its ability to collect data on its most strategic threat—Iran.