G
gilliam
Guest
The Wheel’s Still in Spin
Austin Bay, returned from Iraq begins with this provocative leader:
Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt. …
Put a circle around Jan. 9. That’s the day Palestinians go to the polls to elect a president. … Draw another circle around Jan. 30. That’s Iraq’s first election day. Underline the two weeks prior to Jan. 30. That will be a savage fortnight in which terror campaigns and political campaigns collide. Democratic candidates will be assassinated and polling stations will be blown to bits, as Saddamite and Al Qaeda reactionaries – the Middle East’s ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist – attempt to force an oppressed people to submit one more time to the yoke of fear.
But they are going to fail.
And earlier **Belmont Club **post linked to a Marc Ruel Gerecht article which argues much the same thing in principle: that a new Iraqi state represents a real threat to the Mullahs in Iran. He explains why.
Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran’s primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran’s clerical dictatorship. … What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. … The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran’s ruling mullahs view as their greatest–only–foreign success, required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran’s ruling clerics have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. …
If the neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can be physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared, disruptive forces in Iranian politics–Western-oriented Iranian youth and pro-democracy dissident clerics–can be further weakened. … In Iraq, the U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni insurgency before it can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry Shiite political identity willing to do to the Arab Sunnis what the Baath once did to the Shia. If such an identity is born, it is most unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must thus ensure that the democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence, keeps on rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain much traction inside the country.
The really fascinating aspect of both men’s analysis is the idea that freedom and politics are really going to be the agents of destruction for the “ancient regime of tyrant and terrorist”, not as a figure of speech but as literal truth. The role of the US military would be strategically indirect and subtle: to ensure that the old regimes cannot contain the forces that would naturally spring up against them.
Read it all
Austin Bay, returned from Iraq begins with this provocative leader:
Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt. …
Put a circle around Jan. 9. That’s the day Palestinians go to the polls to elect a president. … Draw another circle around Jan. 30. That’s Iraq’s first election day. Underline the two weeks prior to Jan. 30. That will be a savage fortnight in which terror campaigns and political campaigns collide. Democratic candidates will be assassinated and polling stations will be blown to bits, as Saddamite and Al Qaeda reactionaries – the Middle East’s ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist – attempt to force an oppressed people to submit one more time to the yoke of fear.
But they are going to fail.
And earlier **Belmont Club **post linked to a Marc Ruel Gerecht article which argues much the same thing in principle: that a new Iraqi state represents a real threat to the Mullahs in Iran. He explains why.
Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran’s primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran’s clerical dictatorship. … What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. … The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran’s ruling mullahs view as their greatest–only–foreign success, required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran’s ruling clerics have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. …
If the neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can be physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared, disruptive forces in Iranian politics–Western-oriented Iranian youth and pro-democracy dissident clerics–can be further weakened. … In Iraq, the U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni insurgency before it can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry Shiite political identity willing to do to the Arab Sunnis what the Baath once did to the Shia. If such an identity is born, it is most unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must thus ensure that the democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence, keeps on rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain much traction inside the country.
The really fascinating aspect of both men’s analysis is the idea that freedom and politics are really going to be the agents of destruction for the “ancient regime of tyrant and terrorist”, not as a figure of speech but as literal truth. The role of the US military would be strategically indirect and subtle: to ensure that the old regimes cannot contain the forces that would naturally spring up against them.
Read it all