It Only Gets Worse
On the 11th I wrote about the response of a senior Iranian security official to US threats, and today Juan Cole talks about the Iranian response to the bombing of the al-Askariya Shrine:
Iran’s Supreme Jurisprudent,Ali Khamenei, managed to blame the Iraqi Baath Party, the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the Salafi Jihadi radicals among Sunnis, and the United States, jointly for the blowing up of the minarets at the al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra.
…it is my impression that in recent months he has tended to leave the wilder talk to his rival Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi and his protege, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. I don’t think Khamenei’s remarks on this matter are a good sign.
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The biggest tragedy is that any sane person would have recognized after 9/11 that the US and the Shiites had a common enemy in Bin Laden and his ilk, and the US could have made up with Khatami’s Iran. If the Iraq War had not happened, and the hardliners had not won the summer 2005 Iranian elections, the US position in the Muslim world would have been potentially strong by now. Instead, those great Islam scholars and political geniuses, Richard Perle and David Frum, managed to get Bush to put Iran in a cockeyed ‘axis of evil.’ It has been downhill ever since.
The downhill slide seems to be speeding up every time a US official make a belligerent remark concerning Iran. Iran is next door to both Afghanistan and Iraq, and you can’t fool them about what is going on with those wars. They know that an air strike is the only credible threat the US can make and they have been preparing to respond for some time.
