medicineman
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Welcome to Washington Spectator OnlineOne Letter Off—"We're not looking for a fight with Iran," Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns recently told the New York Times. But recent events point to a contrary reality. President Bush publicly threatened Tehran during a January 10 speech announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq (as if one escalation wasn't enough). A day later the U.S. military raided an Iranian consulate in northern Iraq and detained five Iranian employees. The Washington Post reported that such activities are now undertaken with alarming regularity. "For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents," the Post reported. "Last summer . . . Administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing."
The march to war with Iran is like that with Iraq, circa 2002–2003, on steroids. The State Department is clashing with hawkish aides at the Pentagon and White House; accusations are being peddled by the Bush Administration with little public evidence to support them; an authoritarian ruler who's trying to develop nuclear power, he says, for non-military purposes, is being called the greatest current threat to world peace; sanctions have been approved by the U.N.; a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group is moving into the Persian Gulf. History keeps repeating itself, as Karl Marx noted, first as tragedy, then as farce. The tragedy is all too present. Here's the farce: The factions Iran is helping in Iraq, namely the Shia government and its allied militias, are the very people the U.S. invasion empowered. If America's main foreign policy goal was to contain Iran, it should have kept Saddam Hussein, with his Sunni base, in power. Yet instead of acknowledging recent history, the Administration appears hell-bent on ignoring it. "Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," CIA director Michael Hayden said recently. Sadly, so are we.
The march to war with Iran is like that with Iraq, circa 2002–2003, on steroids. The State Department is clashing with hawkish aides at the Pentagon and White House; accusations are being peddled by the Bush Administration with little public evidence to support them; an authoritarian ruler who's trying to develop nuclear power, he says, for non-military purposes, is being called the greatest current threat to world peace; sanctions have been approved by the U.N.; a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group is moving into the Persian Gulf. History keeps repeating itself, as Karl Marx noted, first as tragedy, then as farce. The tragedy is all too present. Here's the farce: The factions Iran is helping in Iraq, namely the Shia government and its allied militias, are the very people the U.S. invasion empowered. If America's main foreign policy goal was to contain Iran, it should have kept Saddam Hussein, with his Sunni base, in power. Yet instead of acknowledging recent history, the Administration appears hell-bent on ignoring it. "Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," CIA director Michael Hayden said recently. Sadly, so are we.