Ships Passing in the Night of the War on Terror

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari demanded Thursday that Iran stop firing artillery and mortars at Kurdish villages in northern Iraq and warned that more attacks could damage relations between the countries...

For the past two weeks, Iran has been shelling Kurdish farming villages on the Iraqi side of the border to root out rebels who belong to the Kurdistan Free Life Party, which Tehran accuses of conducting terrorist attacks in Iran. It's a branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party, which the United States has branded a terrorist organization.

Last week, Iranian troops raided at least 10 villages on the Iraqi side of the border in search of rebels, possibly in retaliation for the recent assassination of an Iranian intelligence official by Kurdish guerrillas. Since then at least 20 villages have been evacuated in the face of Iranian bombardment.

Maybe American and Iranian forces can at least shout out a friendly "hallo!" as they pass each other crossing the border, each invading new territory in their alternative versions of the War on Terror. We may as well get used to this anyway. When everyone's at least a potential terrorist, and "terrorist" is defined roughly as "a person or persons of suspicious epidermal pigmentation and cosmological bent behaving aggressively against one's own interests, aspirations, and perspective," then about the best we can do is curl up into a ball in the closet... or bake them cookies.