Double standards of our ‘war on terror’

Western governments like to depict terrorism as a uniquely moral evil which democratic states do not engage in. But history is filled with instances in which even democratic governments have sanctioned or perpetrated acts of violence that would ordinarily be described as 'terrorist', from bombings and assassinations to black ops and 'dirty wars'.

Consider the latest report by US journalist Seymour Hersh on the Bush administration's secret war inside Iran. According to Hersh in the New Yorker, US Special Forces are supporting a number of violent organisations in Iran, including a Sunni fundamentalist group called the Jundallah whose followers, according to one US academic, "attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists".

These revelations follow Britain's recent removal of the National Resistance Council of

Iran from its list of proscribed terrorist organisations. The Resistance Council is generally considered a front for the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), an enigmatic Marxist-Islamist group based in Iraq which carried out dozens of attacks on Iran over the years with the support of Saddam.

As well as bombings and assassinations of Iranian state officials, the MEK is accused of killing Americans, and aiding Saddam's 1991 repression of the Kurds and Shia. In the build-up to the Iraq war these activities were cited by the Bush administration as evidence of Saddam Hussein's supposed sponsorship of 'international terrorism'. Today the MEK appears to have become a US asset in a new war against Iran.

Covert operations are generally carried out by unaccountable sectors within the state machinery that conduct their activities beneath a veneer of 'plausible deniability'. Such operations owe more to Machiavelli than they do to Mother Teresa and they tend to make use of whatever groups are available to inflict maximum carnage on their opponents. These alliances can also bite