Suddenly Folks Taking Iran SeriouslySeriously
as a threat that is.
The most dangerous enemy faced by the British is not Iraqi insurgents, but well-organised Iranian brigades such as Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, believed to be controlled by the Revolutionary Guard in Tehran.
The mob attack on the Royal Military Police two years ago, in which six died, is believed to have been the work of the Mujahedin for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, another group which Tehran's Revolutionary Council has the power to call off.
Blair knows this but cannot openly admit it. To say in public that British forces are being killed by government-controlled cells in Iran would be a far greater step towards war than simply telling its president not to be rude about Israel.
The tragedy is that Iran has shown such promise for the last five years. The generation born after its 1979 revolution seemed ill at ease with its clerical establishment: it seemed ripe for reform and modernisation.
But the Iraq war appears to have thwarted this. Rather than undermine an authoritarian theocracy, it has fuelled a conservative backlash. This greatly helped President Ahmadinejad's landslide victory at the rigged April elections.
Pro-war columnists (like this one) can cheer the orange revolution in Ukraine and applaud Colonel Gaddafi's surrender of illegal weapons. But, in Iran, the freedom agenda has been sent into reverse by the botched Iraqi occupation.The guy raises a very interesting argument:
Weakness is more provocative than strength, as Donald Rumsfeld pointed out: the Bay of Pigs disaster made John F Kennedy look so weak that the Soviets sent nuclear missiles to Cuba because they spotted such weakness in their enemy.
Clinton's humiliating retreat from Somalia in 1994 is now credited with inspiring Osama Bin Laden to start striking America. With America and Britain now stuck in the quagmire of Iraq, we may be entering weakness again.
Little wonder that Iran is testing the ground. Its ayatollahs survey the globe, and see their way of life is on the ascendant, partly thanks to an Iraq war which has helped globalise Islam and ruin America's appetite for more fighting.Terrific column. I'm not sure I accept his argument entirely, but it's not some reflexive mumbo-jumbo from the antiwar left.
