Bob's Links and Rants

Welcome to my rants page! You can contact me by e-mail: bob@goodsells.net. Blog roll. Site feed.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Coalition of the Axis of Evil

TEHRAN: Iranian President Mohamed Khatami yesterday hailed a “turning point” in relations with Baghdad as Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari made a historic visit to Tehran aimed at strengthening ties after decades of enmity.

Following talks with the first Iraqi head of government to visit Iran since the fall of Saddam Hussain, Khatami said that Iran was prepared to do anything it could to help its one-time foe, with whom it fought a devastating eight-year war from 1980-1988.
...
Jaafari, who took refuge in Iran during the rule of Saddam Hussain, visited the tomb of Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini yesterday, and paid homage by laying a wreath of flowers.
Amazing, isn't it, that these two Shiite-Muslim-majority nations would realize, 25 years after the start of the brutal Iran-Iraq war, that there's really no basis for enmity. US reaction to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis was so overboard that President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iraq in September 1980, starting a war which killed hundreds of thousands (according to Wikipedia, Saddam Hussein boasted he would be in Tehran in 3 days). During the Reagan-Bush years, the U.S. armed both sides of the conflict, sending Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to offer assistance to Saddam while secretly arranging arms deals with the Iranians. Henry Kissinger seems to have summed up the real US policy: "Too bad they can't both lose." Actually, in very real ways they both did.

Now that Iran and the not-quite-puppet regime in Baghdad have realized that they really shouldn't be enemies, it probably won't take long for them to realize who their real enemy is, and has been for the past 52 years.

Billmon comments:
It would be interesting to see what kind of reaction al-Jaafari's little Tehran tete-a-tete would cause here in Great Satan Central, if it got 1/20th the coverage of Karl Rove's pimply ass. How would the folks back home feel if they knew their sons and daughters were getting limbs blown off so that Iraqi politicians could jaunt off to Tehran and say warm and fuzzy things about the crazy old man who gave us the Iranian hostage crisis?

And what kind of surrealist cover story would the GOP propaganda machine come up with to convince the Fox News audience that fighting and dying to keep Khomeini lovers in power is really a good thing?