VEEP CHENEY FORCED IRAN TOWARD AGGRESSION

From the blog of Middle Eastern studies scholar Juan Cole courtesy of AlterNet:

Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state says that Iran in 2003 offered to help stabilize Iraq and to cut off aid to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Hamas. Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of "talking to evil." As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney's lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).

Because Khatami kept promising that his reforms would make Iranians better off, and because the US rejected all his overtures and left him with no achievements to show for them, the Iranian electorate turned against the reform movement and put Mahmud Ahmadinejad into power, a loud-mouthed braggart of a sort that Cheney's Likudniks could then build up into a bogey man to frighten Americans with. Cheney created Iran as a menace.

Click here for the rest.

This comes as absolutely no surprise at all. Indeed, when it became absolutely clear to Saddam Hussein in Iraq just how serious the Bush administration was about its saber-rattling, he gave unprecedented access to weapons inspectors. That is, he caved, but we invaded anyway. These guys just don't care about US security; they've clearly got their own imperial agenda, and pursuing it means turning potential friends into enemies in order to justify it all. Bottom line: the White House lies to everyone about everything. It should just be assumed that everything they say is a lie. I mean, okay, I'll accept that they're going to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq, but I feel pretty sure that even they don't believe it's going to make much of a difference in the way of stability.

Who knows what they're really up to? They're certainly not telling.

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