Syria and Iran - Axis of Evil or Brokers of Peace?

[cal04]

It's all a very far cry from three years ago. Now, with George Bush and Tony Blair facing their last days in office shorn of authority, they have turned in desperation to the unlikeliest of partners. And this is why...

It was probably a slip of the tongue. Downing Street insisted yesterday that Tony Blair never meant to agree with his interviewer, David Frost, that the invasion of Iraq had turned out to be "a disaster". But the contretemps was an apt finale to a bad week for the Prime Minister and his closest ally, George Bush.

As they approach their final days in office and begin to think about their perceived legacy, both leaders are haunted by Iraq's slide into anarchy and civil war. They hoped to bring about a new era of peace and democracy in the Middle East; instead they are seeing Iraq turn into the kind of terrorist hotbed they claimed it was under Saddam Hussein. Now the only priority for Britain and the US seems to be to find a way out.

And the search for an exit strategy is causing them to turn to the unlikeliest "peace partners": Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran - who glorifies the country's nuclear programme and insists Israel should be "wiped off the map" - and Bashar Assad of Syria, who was left out of President Bush's original "Axis of Evil", only to be included later. We are clearly a long way from the triumphalist days of 2003, when Saddam's statue had no sooner been toppled than Washington neocons such as Donald Rumsfeld were openly speculating whether Tehran or Damascus would be the next destination. "Wimps stop at Baghdad" was the boast of the hour.

Now Mr Rumsfeld has gone, and James Baker, a close former aide of Mr Bush's father, is leading the Iraq Study Group (ISG), charged with seeking some new options in Iraq. It is a measure of Mr Blair's distraction that the week began with a Downing Street briefing that he would propose dialogue with Iran and Syria when he spoke to the ISG on Tuesday, only for this to set off so much speculation that when he made his annual foreign affairs speech at the Guildhall on Monday, the Prime Minister appeared to be going out of his way to denounce both countries.



http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1996343.ece

[orpupilofnature57]

1. The answer is as ambiguous as our needs.

[liberal N proud]

2. Depends on what currency they are using

If they are using the Euro vs. the Dollar, the bu$h regime has tagged them as part of the Axis of Evil.