Official fictions

I am as usual very confused about international military strategy; the American people can count themselves lucky that I'm not their chief executive.  Still, I've been impressed with Lee Smith's reporting on the appalling Russian collusion story to have some confidence in his ability to sift through propaganda and outright lies, so I thought I'd give his Iranian analysis a try:
The Iranian revolution was evidence to our ruling class of how much their fathers had gotten wrong—and thus proof of their own virtue.
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U.S. policymakers preferred the fiction that Hezbollah was a homegrown product because it supported both their emotional needs and their policy goals: The West had earned the righteous anger of the natives, and there was nothing to be done except atone by way of offering human sacrifices.
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Six U.S. administrations were complicit in turning Iran into a regional power. In that context, the Obama administration’s decision to flood Iranian war chests with cash and recognize its right to build a nuclear bomb was the logical culmination of the rot eating away at the Beltway for four decades. It was perhaps to be expected that an outsider who often doesn’t know when to keep quiet, and can’t stay off Twitter, would be the one to sing out like the boy in the fairy tale. It’s true, the emperor has no clothes. The rules have changed but that doesn’t mean the Iranians won’t be looking for revenge.

4 comments:

Christopher B said...

Don't discount the need to keep the oil flowing as a factor in the calculations, especially as a bribe to keep the western Europeans on our side in the Cold War. I'd hazard a guess that W's actions vis a vis Iran would have been significantly different if fracking had been as significant a factor in 2000 rather than around 2010. Obama and the Democrats squandered one of our most powerful strategic assets with their insistence on forcing a reduction in domestic oil and gas production in the name of 'preventing climate change'.

MikeD said...

I will throw in, fear of the Soviets absorbing the Iranians into the Soviet Bloc was also a valid concern up into the 1990's. In fact, it was one of the major fears specifically in regards to how the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Iran-Contra affairs were handled. Iran uniquely held a place in geopolitics as a "hands off" region for us because they bordered the Soviet Union, were presently unaligned, had no great love for us, and only one place to reasonably turn if we were to become an existential threat to them. Mind you, it's the same reason the Soviets were hands off with them, as well. And it allowed a particularly virulent ideology to fester because of it.

ymarsakar said...

Good for stock traders though, due to buying the dip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94hChHDLrTo

In other news... this war is going well.

E Hines said...

fear of the Soviets absorbing the Iranians into the Soviet Bloc was also a valid concern up into the 1990's.

Whether still justified by the '90s, it was borne of reality: we'd already confronted the Soviets over their effort to physically absorb Iran in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

Eric Hines