Monday, March 08, 2010
CHINA CONFIDENTIAL
Iran Getting Closer to Nuclear Weapons Capability
US Democracy Push Backfires in Post-Saddam Iraq as 'Iran-Friendly' and Pro-Iran Parties Gain at Polls
RFE/RL reports on Iran's rising influence in Iraq:It will take time until all votes are counted and more time until a new government is in place. But it is widely expected that Iraq's two strongest election alliances, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law and Ammar al-Hakim's Iraqi National Alliance (INA), will probably receive the biggest shares of the vote. These alliances are Iran-friendly or pro-Iranian, respectively.
Whether the two alliances form a coalition together (the less probable option) or partner with one of the other two major alliances, the Kurds and the secularist, Sunni-led Al-Iraqiyah bloc, neighboring Iran will continue to enjoy considerable influence in Iraq and be in a position to increase its influence further after the U.S. troop withdrawal is completed at the end of next year.
Read the whole thing here.
The Obama administration can't be blamed for this foreign policy failure. After 9/11, instead of crushing fascistic political Islam--from Afghanistan, which sheltered and aided Al Qaeda, to Iran and Saudi Arabia, the fountainheads, respectively, of the movement's Shiite and Sunni branches--U.S. President George W. Bush praised "beautiful and peaceful Islam," took too long to do too little in Afghanistan, relying on notoriously unreliable Afghan warlords, and attacked and conquered ... Iraq ... a contained enemy of the United States (led by a psychotic mass murderer who probably could have been eliminated without a full-blown war) that actually had no weapons of mass destruction and no meaningful Al Qaeda connections. Bush was apparently influenced by an idiotic, reverse domino theory, which held that democracy in Iraq, once installed, would somehow spread until it included every barbaric Arab and Muslim nation.
Nothing of the sort happened. Iraq turned into a quagmire that ended up benefitting Iran and discrediting the war against radical Islam--misnamed the "War on Terror"--much as the unnecessary Vietnam War and the original domino theory that spawned that protracted, draining conflict discredited the whole Cold War policy of containing the Soviet Union and combatting Communism in the eyes of a disillusioned generation.
It should be recalled that Hitler came to power in Germany through a parliamentary system and multiparty elections.
Tuesday 9 March 2010
For Iran, uranium enrichment is getting easier, bringing the Islamist nation closer to nuclear weapons capability, as reported here.
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