If At First You Don't Succeed

Today's Fresh Air has a captivating (and terrifying) interview with Seymour Hirsch on the administration's Iran policy. My take-away so far is that politics in the middle east are so convoluted that there is absolutely no action that we can take that doesn't somehow contradict our national interests. Of course all politics is compromise, but these situations are serious enough that they would seem to argue for us to step back and disengage on many fronts.

Among the interesting things that I learned while listening: when they invaded Iraq, the administration allied with the Shia, which makes sense because Saddam's Baath regime was predominantly Sunni. Some intelligence analysts warned that because Iran is a predominantly Shia state, there was a risk of Iraq falling under Iranian influence. The administration, on the other hand, believed that the memory of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s (in which we openly supported Saddam and the Iraqi Sunni) would keep the Iraqi Shia closer to the new Iraqi government and away from Tehran. As we all know, the administration has now changed course and is telling anybody who will listen that Iran is fomenting terrorism among the Iraqi Shia. This seems to me another case of the administration creating a theory and making plans under the assumption that it was true, rather than using any sort of real-world evidence. Remember being "greeted as liberators"?

Another interesting tidbit: members of the Joint Staff have threatened to resign if the administration does not remove the "nuclear option" from its contingency plans to bomb Iran. In fact, the Times Online has reported that there are a number of top military leaders who have threatened resignation if we even attack Iran. Good for them, I wish I had some leverage to get my voice heard. Hey, Phil: if CoreStreet attacks Iran, I'm going to quit.