excellent, comprehensive article about BushCo's Iran conundrum, from Mother Jones . . .http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/08/iranian_ironies.html(snip)
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 ten 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 neoconservatives 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.
- more . . .http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/08/iranian_ironies.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
