This past week, the world has been treated to the reassurances of Condoleezza Rice, GWB's new "Secretary of State", claiming that Iran is not on the US agenda for invasion.
Superficially, I'd suspect that this is quite true - the US is unlikely to invade Iran tomorrow, or even next month. A certain election in Iraq has their attentions focused.
Meanwhile, of course, she's all worried about a "common front" where Iran's nuclear programs are concerned.
Okay, apparently someone in the White House has figured out that they did a few things wrong by sneering at the UN before they invaded Iraq. Good for them - it demonstrates at least a modicum of sentient thought is possible.
Sadly, I suspect that there is at least a grain of truth in claims on al-Jazeera that the US is flying over Iran on spy missions.
The US is still smarting from the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979-1980. I doubt that Iran has too many friends within the senior ranks of either the US military organization, or US diplomatic forces. The reality is that Iran gave the US a very public bloody nose in that incident.
Would the current administration welcome an excuse to invade Iran? Probably. That would give them effective political control over a substantial chunk of the Middle East - or perhaps more accurately, it would put most of that region under US military occupation, thus giving a substantial _sense_ of control to Americans back home.
Of course, these occupations ultimately have little to do with liberating a country. The Americans will occupy Iraq as long as they need to in order to ensure that they have effective control over the access to Iraqi oil and other resources. No more, and no less. (Of course, this makes Afghanistan a bit of a puzzle, other than its military importance should Russia once again emerge as a rival to US power in the world.
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3 comments:
Afganistan is the window dressing for Iraq. It's hard to claim that you're fighting the War On Terror (TM Pat. Pend.) if you don't invade the country harbouring the terror organization that just wiped out a large building in your country first. With Afganistan safely out of the way Iraq was ripe for the invading.
JN
www.nishiyama.tzo.com/jweb/blog
And world domination is next...
Afghanistan was an obstacle and an anoyance to BushCo. It distracted from their goal of invading Iraq.
You have to realize that BushCo was sabre-rattling about Iraq pretty much from the moment they were elected in November of 2000. They intended to force a war with Iraq and 9/11 actually delayed it's start. If it wasn't breath-takingly obvious to everyone that bin Laden was being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, they would have ignored it completely. Occupying Afghanistan gives the US nothing, and they couldn't care less about the assorted human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban. But like the Doolittle Raid, they had to be seen to be doing something.
I think the occupation of Iraq would have benn a year earlier if it weren't for 9/11.
Quixote
http://www.livejournal.com/users/quixote317/
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