Arming the crazies is the pattern John Kiriakou named on 3 March 2026, days into the American and Israeli war on Iran, when Ted Rall said he had become convinced that civil war was the war’s most likely outcome.
Kiriakou’s answer was that something worse than civil war was already visible in it. “And you know what would be worse? Um is and you know it’s going to happen, that the United States and the Israelis are going to begin arming factions in Iran.”[1] Asked whether that meant radical factions, he agreed — “Most likely” — and Rall put the general question to him: why, in Afghanistan, did the United States arm the Mujahideen rather than some other force, and why does it always go for the crazies?[1]
The pattern behind it
Kiriakou reached further back than Afghanistan for the precedent, to the Russian civil war and American support for the White Russians against the Red.[2] He did not claim to have a satisfying explanation for the recurrence — “Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, I never understood” — but he was precise about the reasoning it rests on, calling it “always this very short-sighted analysis. Always.”[2]
The analysis, in his rendering of it, is a sequence of deferrals: “these these really terrible people, they’re going to help us win today. And if they win, then we’ll deal with them later. And or and they’ll they’ll owe us. They’ll remember us.”[2]
The assumption doing the work is the last one — that the armed faction will treat the arming as a debt. Kiriakou’s objection is not that the calculation is immoral but that it has never once come out right, and that the record of it was available to anyone making the same calculation about Iran.[2]
In the 2026 war
The prediction sits inside a larger judgement he gave minutes earlier in the same conversation: that the United States could destroy Iran if it wanted to, and that what destruction would actually look like is “decades of chaos” — an outcome he read as serving Israel rather than the United States or the Gulf states.[3] Arming factions is the mechanism by which the chaos would be produced and sustained.
He made the same reading of the war’s aims elsewhere, holding that chaos rather than disarmament was the Israeli objective, and that Libya rather than regime replacement was the model.