"I think you've got to remember that the Al-Qaeda organization is primarily made up of radical Sunni Islamists, of course, and the Iranian regime is Shia-dominated -- Shia. So there's not a natural fit there,"Such was the response from VP Cheney to a question about whether Iran was a supporter of al-Qaeda, as Ledeen recently suggested. Cheney's quote comes from a recent chat he had with Hugh Hewitt. Transcript can be found at the Radioblogger.
It's tempting to lump all Islamic terrorism in the same basket, but factions do exist. AQ zombie-warrior Ayman al-Zawahiri once criticized Iran due to their practice of Shia Islam. As mentioned several times here, Ramzi Yousef was suspected of an attack against an Iranian Shia mosque. Yousef hailed from Baluchistan, a lawless area stretching from southeast Iran through Pakistan, which is primarily Sunni. Some suggest they even backed Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. And check out these MEK guys.
Several books devoted to Bin Laden suggest such an ideological split, however Yossef Bodansky's narrative provided evidence that charismatic Sudanese leader Hasaan al-Turabi was trying to get all of Islam to come together, which also included Iraq, in an effort to defeat their common enemies.
So it's probably a moot point. At last check Hezbollah's mission statement was still to "push Israel into the sea", or "off the map" as Ahmedinejad says. Like Germany and Japan during WWII, the two can work together now and sort out their differences later.
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