Is the enemy of our enemy our friend?

By William Douglas
June 25, 2014 | The Bellingham Herald

The United States considers Iran a top state sponsor of terrorism, a budding nuclear threat and a meddlesome supporter of President Bashar Assad’s regime in civil war-torn Syria. But those negatives apparently aren’t enough to prevent Washington from considering calling Iran a potential partner in the battle against a group of al-Qaida-inspired militants who are trying to overtake Iraq.

With options limited, the combination of crisis and mutual interest might make possible what many foreign policy experts once thought unthinkable: that the U.S. and Iran, archenemies since the taking of 50 hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, become partners, frenemies for the sake of Iraq.

“It may be an unholy alliance to some folks, but countries don’t have allies, they have interests,” said retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a senior adviser at the National Security Network, a liberal research center. “And in this case, Iran is a natural ally of the U.S. They want a stable country around them, and that’s what we want. From a purely realpolitik, Kissinger view of the world, we may have some strange bedfellows here.”