America handed Iraq to iran !..

A detailed, well-written article about the situation in the ME with Iran, Iraq, among other players.

For those interested in coverage of international affairs, the "Asian Times" is easily the best there is on the net. Their articles (op-eds among others) are very good, detailed, and informative.

Here is the article:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GH11Ak01.html

The Iranian nightmare
By Michael Schwartz

In 1998, neo-conservative theorist Robert Kagan enunciated what would become a foundational belief of Bush administration policy. He asserted, "A successful intervention in Iraq would revolutionize the strategic situation in the Middle East, in ways both tangible and intangible, and all to the benefit of American interests."

Now, over two years after Baghdad fell and the American occupation of Iraq began, Kagan's prediction appears to have been fulfilled - in reverse. The chief beneficiary of the occupation and the chaos it produced has not been the Bush administration, but Iran, the most populous and powerful member of the "axis of evil" and the chief American competitor for dominance in the oil-rich region. As diplomatic historian Gabriel Kolko commented, "By destroying a united Iraq under [Saddam] Hussein ... the US removed the main barrier to Iran's eventual triumph."

The road to Tehran is mined
At first, events looked to be moving in quite a different direction. Lost in the obscure pages of the early coverage of the Iraq war was a moment when, it seemed, the clerical regime in Iran flinched. Soon after Saddam fled and Baghdad became an American town, Iran suddenly entered into negotiations with Great Britain, France and Germany on ending its nuclear program, the most public point of friction with the US. After all, it was Saddam's supposed nuclear program that had been the casus belli for the American invasion, and Bush administration neo-conservatives had been hammering away at the Iranian program in a similar fashion.

Two developments ended this brief moment of seeming triumph for Washington. As a start, American officials, feeling their oats, balked at the tentative terms negotiated by the Europeans because they did not involve regime change in Iran. This hardline American stance gave the Iranian leadership no room to maneuver and stiffened their negotiating posture.

At the time, in the wake of its successful three-week war in Iraq, the Bush administration seemed ready, even eager, to apply extreme military pressure to Iran. According to Washington Post columnist William Arkin, the official US strategic plan (formally known as CONPLAN 8022-02) completed in November 2003, authorized "a preemptive and offensive strike capability against Iran and North Korea". An administration pre-invasion quip (reported by Newsweek on August 19, 2002) caught perfectly the post-invasion mood ascendant in Washington: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."

A second key development neutralized the American ability to turn its military might in an Iranian direction: the rise of the Iraqi resistance. During the several months after the fall of Baghdad, the Saddamist loyalists who had initially resisted the US occupation were augmented by a broader and more resilient insurgency. As the character of the occupation made itself known, small groups of guerrillas began defending their neighborhoods from US military patrols.

These patrols were seeking out suspected "regime loyalists" from the Ba'athist era by knocking down doors, shooting whomever resisted, and arresting all men of "military age" in the household. As the resistance spread, its various factions became more aggressive and resourceful. Over the next year, it blossomed into a formidable and complex enemy that the US Army - to the surprise of American officials in Washington and Baghdad - did not have the resources to defeat. It was, then, the swiftly growing Iraqi resistance that, by preventing the consolidation of an American Iraq, forced an Iranian campaign off the table and back into the shadows where it has remained to this day.

The nuclear conundrum
The rise of the Iraqi resistance drastically changed the equation for the Iranian leadership. The threat of an imminent US assault had reduced the long- term Iranian nuclear option to near pointlessness, which was why the Iranian leadership was willing to negotiate it away in exchange for a guarantee of safety from attack. Once the prospect of a protracted guerrilla war in neighboring Iraq arose, however, the Iranian leadership suddenly found itself with an extended time horizon for tactical and strategic planning.

Becoming (or at least continually threatening to become) a nuclear power again became a promising path of deterrence against future American threats - at least if the North Korean experience was any guide. So the Iranians began pushing ahead with their nuclear program; and while no one could be sure whether their work was aimed at the development of peaceful nuclear energy (their claim) or nuclear weapons (as the Bush administration insisted), their moves made it conceivable that they might actually be capable of building a bomb in the many years that it would take - it now became clear - for the US to have any chance of pacifying Iraq.

The increasingly destructive, devolving American occupation in Iraq also deflected the anger of an Iranian population that had been growing restless under the harsh clerical hand of Iran's political leaders. At the time of the invasion, opinion surveys in Iran indicated both "widespread discontent within the Islamic republic" and a generally positive attitude toward the United States. ("The average Iranian does not bear ill will against America.")

American officials interpreted this to mean that "the clerics may have lost the upper hand" in Iran. However, this widespread discontent quickly dissipated under the pressure of regional events; and two years later, Iranians elected as president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, a fundamentalist militant and electoral underdog, who eliminated the US-favored "moderates" in the first round of voting and then, in a runoff round, soundly defeated a less radical representative of the Iranian establishment, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. Moreover, he ran on a platform that advocated making Iran's nuclear program - then at a halt while negotiations were once again underway with the Europeans - a priority. Unlike his defeated opponent, who said he would "work to improve relations" with the US, Ahmadinejad claimed "he would not seek rapprochement".

In other words, instead of deterring or ending the Iranian nuclear effort, the US invasion and botched occupation encouraged and accelerated it, lending it national prestige and rallying Iranian public opinion to the cause.

The China connection
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran stand one-two-three in global estimated oil and natural gas reserves. The Iraq invasion, which unsettled world energy politics in unpredictable ways, set in motion portentous activities in China, an undisputed future US economic competitor. China's leaders, in search of energy sources for their burgeoning economy long before the American invasion of Iraq, had already in 1997 negotiated a US$1.3 billion contract with Saddam to develop the al-Ahdab oil field in central Iraq.

By 2001, they were negotiating for rights to develop the much larger Halfayah field. Between them, the two fields might have accounted for almost 400,000 barrels per day, or 13% of China's oil consumption in 2003. However, like Iraq's other oil customers (including Russia, Germany and France), China was prevented from activating these deals by the UN sanctions then in place, which prohibited all Iraqi oil exports except for emergency sales authorized under the UN's oil-for-food program. Ironically, therefore, China and other potential oil customers had a great stake in the renewed UN inspections that were interrupted by the American invasion. A finding of no weapons of mass destruction might have allowed for sanctions to be lifted and the lucrative oil deals activated.

When "regime change" in Iraq left the Bush administration in charge in Baghdad, its newly implanted Coalition Provisional Authority declared all pre-existing contracts and promises null and void, wiping out the Chinese stake in that country's oil fields. As Peter S Goodman reported in the Washington Post, this prompted "Beijing to intensify its search for new sources" of oil and natural gas elsewhere. That burst of activity led, in the next two years, to new import agreements with 15 countries. One of the most important of these was a $70-billion contract to import Iranian oil, negotiated only after it became clear that a US military threat was no longer imminent.

This agreement (Iran's largest since 1996) severely undermined, according to Goodman, "efforts by the United States and Europe to isolate Tehran and force it to give up plans for nuclear weapons". On this point, an adviser to the Chinese government told Goodman, "Whether Iran would have nuclear weapons or not is not our business. America cares, but Iran is not our neighbor. Anyone who helps China with energy is a friend." This suggested that China might be willing to use its UN veto to protect its new ally from any attempt by the US or the Europeans to impose UN sanctions designed to frustrate its nuclear designs, an impression reinforced in November of 2004, when Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told then-Iranian president Mohammed Khatami that "Beijing would indeed consider vetoing any American effort to sanction Iran at the Security Council."

The long-term oil relationship between China and Iran, sparked in part by the American occupation of neighboring Iraq, would soon be complemented by a host of other economic ties, including an $836-million contract for China to build the first stage of the Tehran subway system, an expanding Chinese auto manufacturing presence in Iran and negotiations around a host of other transportation and energy projects. In 2004, China sought to deepen political ties between the two countries by linking Iran to the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (SCO), a political alliance composed of China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. China and Russia soon began shipping Iran advanced missile systems, a decision that generated angry protests from the Bush administration. According to Asia Times Online correspondent Jephraim P Gundzik (The US and that 'other' axis, Jun 9), these protests made good sense, since the systems shipped were a direct threat to US military operations in the Middle East:

Iran can target US troop positions throughout the Middle East and strike US Navy ships. Iran can also use its weapons to blockade the Straits of Hormuz through which one-third of the world's traded oil is shipped. With the help of Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is becoming an increasingly unappealing military target for the US.​

At the June meeting of the SCO, after guest Iran was invited into full membership, the group called for the withdrawal of US troops from member states, and particularly from the large base in Uzbekistan that was a key staging area for American troops in the Afghanistan war. The SCO thus became the first international body of any sort to call for a rollback of US bases anywhere in the world. A month later, Uzbekistan made the demand on its own behalf. The Associated Press noted, "The alliance's move appeared to be an attempt to push the United States out of a region that Moscow regards as historically part of its sphere of influence and in which China seeks a dominant role because of its extensive energy resources."

Not long afterward, outgoing Iranian president Mohammad Khatami ended his first summit conference with Chinese President Jiang Zemin with a joint statement opposing "interference in the internal affairs of other countries by any country under the pretext of human rights", a declaration reported by the Iran Press Service to be a "direct criticism of Washington".
In other words, the war in Iraq - and the resistance that it triggered - played a key role in creating a potentially powerful alliance between Iran and China.

The rise of pro-Iranian politics in Iraq
The combination of a thoroughly incompetent American occupation and a growing guerrilla war also set in motion a seemingly inexorable drift of Iraq's Shi'ite leadership - many of whom had lived in exile in Iran or already had close ties to Iran's Shi'ite clerics - toward an ever more multi-faceted relationship with the neighboring power.

The first (unintended) American nurturing of these ties occurred just after the fall of the Saddam regime, when US military forces demobilized the Iraqi army and police, and focused their military attention on tracking down "regime remnants". The resulting absence of a police presence produced a wave of looting and street crime that engulfed many cities. The Coalition Provisional Authority found a remedy to the situation by tacitly supporting the formation of local militias to deal with the problem.

Three pre-existing groups with strong ties to Iran quickly established their primacy in the major Shi'ite areas of Iraq. The Sadrists, centered largely in Baghdad's enormous Shi'ite slum, now known as Sadr City, had historically been the most visible leadership of internal Shi'ite resistance to Saddam and were accused by the Saddam government of accepting all manner of clandestine support from the Iranian government. The Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Da'wa, on the other hand, had organized military and terrorist attacks inside Iraq, working from bases in Iran. Both had long been openly associated with the Iranians and were committed to an Iraqi version of Iranian-style Islamist governance. Once Saddam fell, all three groups immediately sought leadership within Iraqi Shi'ite communities and dramatically increased their standing by recruiting large numbers of unemployed young men into their militias and assigning them to maintain order in their local communities.

The Sadrists, with their Mehdi army militia, also became the backbone of Shi'ite resistance to the occupation, leading two major revolts in Najaf in April and August of 2004, and highly visible non-violent protests at other places and times. SCIRI and Da'wa took a more moderate stance, following the lead of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and working, however cautiously, with the occupation authorities. At the same time, all three groups provided much of the actual local governance in southern Iraq, including establishing offices where citizens could ask for individual and collective help, and adjudicate local disputes.

As the occupation's military forces either withdrew to their bases in many cities in the south or became completely occupied in countering an increasingly resourceful and widespread armed revolt (mostly in the Sunni areas of central Iraq), the militias became increasingly important parts of local life, only adding to the ascendancy of the organizations they represented in Iraqi civil society. Given their historical connections to Iran, this ascendancy cemented a sort of fraternal relationship between the emerging Shi'ite leadership and Tehran's clerical government.

As the economic situation in Iraq deteriorated under the weight of corrupt reconstruction politics and the pressure of the resistance, Iran became an ever more promising source of economic sustenance. Saddam had forbidden Iranian pilgrimages to Iraqi Shi'ite holy sites in the twin cities of Karbala and Najaf, so the toppling of the Ba'athist regime opened the way for a huge influx of pilgrims and cash. Iranian entrepreneurs began to negotiate building projects for hotels and other tourist-oriented facilities in the holy cities. Iranian financiers offered to support the construction of a modern airport in Najaf to facilitate tourism.

From this foundation, other economic ties developed, though the hostility of the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority and its appointed Iraqi-run successor limited formal relationships. Nonetheless, a bustling cross-border trade involved hundreds of trucks a day carrying a variety of goods in both directions. These relatively unimpeded highways became even more crowded as the escalating insurgency began to threaten, or actually close, routes to Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon. When a combination of security and infrastructural problems shut down the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr in 2004, Iraqi merchants began using the nearby Iranian port of Bandar Khomeini to receive shipments of Australian wheat. In one ironic twist, according to persistent rumors, regular shipments of Johnny Walker Red and other imported American liquor brands were being smuggled across the border into prohibitionist Iran to feed an illegal market at bargain basement prices (as low as $10 per liter).

The Iranian-Iraqi relationship blossoms
The Iraqi elections in January and their aftermath made the growing symbiosis between the two neighboring areas fully visible. Though the Sadrists officially boycotted the election, the SCIRI and Da'wa parties, having asserted leadership within Sistani's Unified Iraqi Coalition, won a majority of the seats in the new parliament. The prime minister they selected, Da'wa leader Ibrahim Jaafari, had spent nine years in exile in Iran.

More open and formal relationships followed as soon as the new government took office. As Juan Cole, perhaps the foremost academic observer of Middle Eastern politics, put it: The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia." Beyond facilitating pilgrimages in both directions across the border and formalizing plans for Najaf airport, the new government facilitated connections that affected almost every economic realm in depressed Iraq. Among the many projects settled on were substantial improvements in Iraq's transportation system; agreements for the exchange of products ranging from detergents to construction materials and carpets; a shift of Iraqi imports of flour from the US to Iran; the Iranian refining of Iraqi crude oil pumped from its southern fields; and a billion-dollar credit line to be used for the Iraqi purchase of Iranian "technical and engineering services".

Though the Bush administration, with its control over both the purse strings and the armed forces of the new Iraqi government, undoubtedly had the power to nullify these unwelcome agreements, circumstances on the ground made it difficult for its officials to intervene. Any overt interventions in matters that touched on Iraqi economic sovereignty would surely have triggered loud (and perhaps violent) protests from at least the Sadrists, who might well have been joined by the governing parties in the regime the US had just installed. The most spectacular agreement, a proposed mutual defense pact between Iraq and Iran, was indeed abrogated under apparent pressure from the Bush administration, but American officials said nothing when "the Iraqi government did give Tehran assurances that they would not allow Iraqi territory to be used in any attack on Iran - presumably a reference to the United States".

The increasingly desperate circumstances that constrained Bush administration actions when it came to the developing Iranian-Iraqi relationship were addressed by Middle East scholar Ervand Abrahamian, who pointed to a similarly precarious American situation in Afghanistan. He concluded that the US could not afford a military confrontation with Iran, since the Iranians were in a position to trigger armed revolts in the Shi'ite areas of both countries: "If there's a confrontation, military confrontation, there would be no reason for them to cooperate with United States. They would do exactly what would be in their interests, which would be to destroy the US position in those two countries."

A "senior international envoy" quoted by Christopher Dickey in NewsweekOnline offered an almost identical opinion: "Look at what they can do in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon. They can turn the whole Middle East into a ball of fire, and [American officials] know that."

In light of all these developments, Juan Cole commented: "In a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime - but succeeded only in defeating itself."

The ironies of conquest
In a memorable insight, historian and writer Rebecca Solnit has suggested that the successes of social movements should often be measured not by their accomplishments, but by the disasters they prevent:

What the larger movements have achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas uncensored, violence and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated, rivers unpoisoned and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons unsprayed, wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources unextracted, species unexterminated.​

The Iraqi resistance, one of the least expected and most powerful social movements of recent times, can lay claim to few positive results. In two years of excruciating (if escalating) fighting, the insurgents have seen their country progressively reduced to an ungovernable jungle of violence, disease and hunger. But maybe, as Solnit suggests, their real achievement lies in what didn't happen. Despite the deepest desires of the Bush administration, to this day Iran remains uninvaded - the horrors of devolving Iraq have, so far, prevented the unleashing of the plagues of war on its neighbor.

Not only will that "success" be small consolation for most Iraqis, but such a negative victory might in itself only be temporary. Reading the geopolitical tea leaves is always a perilous task, especially in the case of Bush administration intentions (and capabilities) toward Iran. While there are signs that some American officials in Washington and Baghdad may be accepting the defeat of administration plans for "regime change" in Iran; other signs remind us that a number of top officials remain as committed as ever to a military confrontation of some sort - and that frustration with a roiling defeat in Iraq, which has until now constrained war plans, could well set them off in the end.

Among signs that a major military strike against Iran may not be in the offing are increasingly visible fault lines within the Bush administration itself. This can be seen most politely in various calls for accommodation with Iran from high-profile former Bush administration officials like Richard Haass. The director of the State Department's policy planning staff from 2001 to 2003, Haass published his appeal in Foreign Affairs, a magazine sponsored by the influential Council for Foreign Relations. More tangible signs of a surfacing accomodationist streak can be found in modest gestures made by the administration, including the withdrawal of a longstanding US veto of Iran's petition for membership in the World Trade Organization. Beyond this, one would have to note the rather pointed leaking of crucial secret documents, including the Military Quadrennial Report, in which top commanders gave a negative assessment of US readiness to fight two wars simultaneously, and a National Intelligence Estimate - the first comprehensive review of intelligence about Iran since 2001 - which evidently declared Iran about than 10 years away from obtaining "the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon". And, finally, the Bush administration endorsed a European-sponsored nuclear treaty with Iran that was almost identical to one it had opposed two years earlier.

But perhaps the most striking sign that some acceptance of regional realities and limitations is afoot can be found in the strident complaints by various neo-conservatives about Bush administration failures in Iran. Michael Rubin, a key figure in the development of Iraq policy, spoke for many when he complained in an American Enterprise Institute commentary that the Bush administration showed "little inclination to work toward" regime change there. He followed this claim with a catalogue of missed opportunities, policy shifts and other symptoms of a lack of will to confront the Iranians.

On the other hand, as military analyst Michael Klare reports, the Bush administration has never ceased its search for an on-the-cheap, few-boots-on-the-ground military solution to its Iranian dilemma. While the US military (like any modern military) develops contingency plans for all manner of battles and campaigns, and while most such plans are never executed, their existence and persistence give credence to the claims that an attack on Iran is still possible.

Most of the extant contingency plans evidently take into account the "immense stress now being placed on US ground forces in Iraq" and therefore seek "some combination of airstrikes and the use of proxy [non-American ground] forces". One plan, for example, evidently envisions several brigades of American-trained Iranian exiles entering Iran from Afghanistan. Other plans involve simultaneous land and sea assaults, coordinated with precision bombing of various military sites currently being charted by manned and unmanned aerial invasions of Iranian airspace.

Ominously, the Bush administration appears to recognize that these sorts of assaults would not even fully destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, no less topple the Iranian regime itself, and that an added ingredient might be needed. Since 2004, therefore, contingency plans authorized by the Department of Defense have mandated that the use of nuclear weapons be an integral part of the overall strategy. Washington Post reporter William Arkin, citing the already adopted CONPLAN 8022, mentions "a nuclear weapons option" specifically tailored for use against underground Iranian nuclear plants: "A specially configured earth-penetrating bomb to destroy deeply buried facilities." Such a nuclear attack would - at least on paper - be coordinated with a variety of other measures to ensure that the Iranian government was replaced with one acceptable to the Bush administration.

Recently, former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi asserted in the American Conservative magazine that, as of late summer 2005, the Pentagon, "under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office" was "drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan mandates a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

The breadth and depth of the assault, according to Giraldi's Air Force sources, would be quite striking: "Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option." Since many targets are in populated areas, the havoc and destruction following such an attack would, in all likelihood, be unrivaled by anything since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After escaping the Cold War specter of nuclear holocaust, it seems unimaginable that the world would be forced to endure the horror of nuclear war in a regional dispute. However, the record of Bush administration belligerence makes it difficult to imagine America's top leadership giving up the ambition of toppling the Islamic regime in Iran. And yet, given that the conquest of Iraq led the administration unexpectedly down strange Iranian paths, who knows where future Washington plans and dreams are likely to lead - perhaps to destruction, certainly to bitter ironies of every sort.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the Internet at numerous sites, including TomDispatch, Asia Times Online, MotherJones, Antiwar.com and ZNet; and in print at Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.

 

What provience were you from?

And tigermission1, that was an amazing article.

 

Cheney's plans to advocate the use of nukes against Iran if we have another 9/11 incident is scary. . As we have seen, they won't hesitate to lie or deceive about Iranian involvment in a 9/11 incident , if they want to use that as a pretext to invade Iran.

Be patriotic. Protect our country and its future. Stop the neocons before they drag down our country as out of control militarists have done in the past to a number of countries. Napoleonic France and many other countries in history have declined when they have exhausted themselves in nedless wars.

 

Ahh, a Shah supporter I see

 

This one is more of a criticism of Neocon policies in the ME that empowered Iran, so it follows a similar theme:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20050810/cm_ucgg/irantookadvantageoftimeintheshadowstobuildpower

IRAN TOOK ADVANTAGE OF TIME IN THE SHADOWS TO BUILD POWER

WASHINGTON -- It is grossly unfair that crises always seem to arise in these "dog days" (with apologies to my cat, Nikko) of August.

President Bush is down at his Crawford ranch, still "cautiously optimistic" about Iraq and Iran. His approval ratings plummet even as temperatures inch up to 95 or 100 degrees. The world should leave us alone in August.

But that's never the way it happens. The first Gulf War started in August 1990 in 125-degree weather, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq. The big decision for us to invade Iraq came that hot American August of 2002, when Secretary of State Colin Powell dramatically went to the United Nations for support. So it goes in this dreary white heat of the end of summer.

And now, with the new Iranian president's decision to restart a uranium conversion facility, there is a kind of strange stirring about here in Washington. It is as though this were all somehow not kosher in our view of the Middle East. Rumors abound: "Cheney is in one of his hyper moods in Bush's absence and has missiles fixed and ready to strike at Iran's facilities ..."

To put it simply, the "Iran crisis" of August 2005 is really about how, with American power mired in the quicksand of Iraq, Iran has been moving to become an aggressive, and perhaps the major, power in the Middle East. The unspeakable ignorance of this administration about the history and culture of the region has finally caught up with it.

First, the surface story:

The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a rank conservative who was probably one of the American hostages' captors in 1979, this week made it clear again that Iran wants to generate electricity through nuclear power, which is legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the United States, along with most of the European states, fears that Iran is really after nuclear weapons and has so deceived inspectors for years about its activities that it has forfeited its right to the innocent electricity program.

Then the dangerous subtext:

While America has been so dangerously and wastefully tied down in Iraq, Iran has been moving to form the diplomatic, political and military imprint of a kind of "Shiite Internationale" among the region's Shia populations. This would take in all the followers of the Shia sect of Islam, from the 60 percent of Iraq, to the oil-rich eastern regions of Saudi Arabia, to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrilla/political control of Lebanon.

Two of our most sagacious analysts of the area, Larry Johnson and Patrick Lang, both with years of apt experience in these areas, sent out an e-mail to their colleagues this week outlining the situation. It read:

"Iran, if things continue to go its way, finds itself on the threshold of controlling vast oil resources that stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean ... Iran is well on its way to achieving de facto control of significant portions of Iraq. Teheran is backing Shia cleric the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (a Persian, not an Arab) and the radical Muqtada al-Sadr. The Iranians are funneling money and training to supporters inside Iraq. The Iraqi Shia control the political process and comprise the majority of the security forces ... Iran is in a dominant position in Lebanon. The murder earlier this year of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has left Lebanon under the de facto military guard of Hezbollah. Iran remains the main benefactor, supporter and adviser to Hezbollah ..."

In fact, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way this week to accuse Iran of, at the very least, allowing weapons, especially deadly IEDs, or "improvised explosive devices," to be exported to insurgents in Iraq.

The odd thing is that Iran, not Iraq, was always the primary target of the neocon group that so distorted American policy after 9/11, in part because Iran was seen as the primary enemy of Israel; but Iraq seemed easier to them.

Thus, the Iranians were able to simply stand back while their archenemy, Saddam, fell at the Americans' hands and at no cost to themselves. Should it be any surprise that they should move, as ruthlessly as always, to achieve their goals? And now, with their exalted idea of themselves as the holiest of Shia, their goals have been perfectly complemented by the "Great Satan." (That's us.)

Iran is no unified state. There are special ministries which, often secretively, back revolutionary movements like Hezbollah; there are special military units, such as the Revolutionary Guards, the "Quds" (Jerusalem) forces and other militias. The new president, the former mayor of Teheran, is himself a kind of mystery; but we do know that he, too, represents a turn away from the liberalizing that was slowly progressing in Iran -- surely another reaction to the American occupation next door.

Michael Mazarr, professor at the U.S. National War College, wrote this week in The New Republic that "the only long-term solution to the problem of Iranian nuclear aspirations is integration into the world economy and a gradual return to reform." But the American overextension into the Middle East has made this, at least for now, impossible.

The administration was warned by many of these analysts before 2003 of every one of these historic alignments in the Middle East, and of every rather obvious danger. The administration very deliberately chose not to see them then, and there is little evidence that it sees them now.

 

Was he a "freedom lover" or simply fighting to maintaing the corrupt puppet Shah regime?

IMO, the former Shah regime and the current "Ayatollah" regime in Iran are both tyrannical, corrupt, and don't necessarily serve the interests of the Iranian people.

If by "freedom fighter" you meant someone who was against BOTH the Shah and the Khomeini regimes, then ignore what I just said.

 

Didn't write them, but glad to pass 'em on anytime!

 

unfortunatly this administration is closing thee eyes on saudi's mass HUMAN RIGHTS VOILATIONS. , BECAUSE THEY WANNA keep there oil contracts.

heck that's primarily why Iraq was attacked.. oil contracts..

 

Understand.

Unfortunately, my friend, you and I live in a world dictated by realpolitik, not idealism. Our interests (regardless of how they are achieved) trump any 'ethical' concerns. 'Human rights' won't power our SUVs and won't keep our massive economic machinary going. Realism dictates our world, even the supposedly 'fanatical' regimes/groups are motivated by rationality and self-interest.