Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The Iranian war

The French Foreign Minister Phillipe Douste-Blaizy said in Beirut on Monday, when he met the Iranian FM, in an astonishing quote that will hang around his neck and cause him to stink forever, that "Iran [is] a great country, a great civilization -...which plays a stabilizing role in the region." Nothing could be further from the truth! It shows how low the moral status of the French has remained, since they capitulated to the Nazis in 1940.
In 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini, aided by France, returned to Iran, and declared the Islamic Republic, he also proclaimed the Islamic Revolution. They hoped to export their revolution to the Shia areas of south Iraq, and south Lebanon. That was in the heady days when the US Embassy was taken over and the Americans were held hostage for a year. It has been reported that now Pres. Ahmedinejad was one of the student leaders responsible for that atrocious act.
And then there was the Iran-Iraq war, started in 1980 by Saddam Hussein of Iraq, in which Iran lost perhaps a million men and boys. Young men directly out of the religious schools of Qom and elsewhere were sent to the front with only a Koran and a slogan. One of the most common slogans, pasted all over Teheran, at that time was "the road to Jerusalem leads thru Baghdad." Fortunately Iran was unable to defeat Iraq and they never got to Baghdad. But, they never changed their intentions.
In the intervening years Iran was recovering from the losses of the Iran-Iraq war and has had a series of so-called "moderate" leaders. However, now that Pres. Ahmedinejad has been elected, Iran has returned to its extreme revolutionary mode. Now in the present situation, they are manipulating their fellow Shias in southern Iraq and Baghdad into a sectarian revolt against the Sunni Iraqis, using the extremist Shia leader Muktada al Sadr as their proxy. Their main concern is to force the Americans out of Iraq and to try to form a Shia republic there. They are also responsible for the current attack by Hizbollah on Israel. This was initiated by Sheikh Nasrallah on the orders of Ahmedinejad in order to take the heat off Iran at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, that started the same day as the attack.
Hizbollah, safely ensconced and dug-in in south Lebanon, was considered to be essentially immune from Israeli air raids. Ahmedinejad gave them long-range rockets to attack Israel in the event that Iran itself comes under fire from the US over its nuclear facilities. Hizbollah have admitted that they did not expect such a strong and destructive response from the IDF to their attack, they believed their own propaganda that Israel was a "paper tiger," and would not counter-attack as they hade not done so in the past when Hizbollah had periodically bombarded northern Israel and also attacked the IDF and taken hostages (three dead hostages and a former IDF Israeli businessman were exchanged for 1,000 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners only a year ago).
So now we have another round in the Iranian war against the West. Since Iran has limited options it depends on its proxies in south Lebanon, Iraq and of course, Syria. These are the extent of its ability to expand its Shia revolution, since the majority of Sunni Arabs are not interested, except perhaps Hamas, that although it is Sunni is bankrolled by Iran, and being Palestinian is more extreme than anyone else.
Note that Lebanese Christians and many Sunnis and Druse, are totally against Hizbollah. They see it as their enemy, highly armed and the agent of a foreign power, Iran. Beside the pictures of Nasrullah in south Lebanon one sees Ayatollah Khomeini and other Iranian Imams, but not Lebanese politicians. Interviewed on BBC Radio one Christian in a cafe in Beirut said that he hoped Israel would destroy Hizbollah, and his friends all agreed. They know what's going on. This is another stage in the Iranian war, and Israel must win this one. Luckily it seems that Pres. Bush and Condy Rice are aware of the stakes.

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