{"id":8350,"date":"2010-10-18T17:21:48","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T01:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=8350"},"modified":"2010-10-18T17:21:48","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T01:21:48","slug":"monday-iran-talking-points-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/18\/monday-iran-talking-points-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Iran Talking Points"},"content":{"rendered":"

from LobeLog<\/a>: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 18th, 2010:<\/em><\/p>\n

New York Post<\/a><\/em>: Disgraced <\/a>Iranian journalist Amir Taheri writes that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki \u00e2\u20ac\u0153seems set to strike a Faustian bargain to cling to power: He is ready to dine with the devil.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Judging from the headline, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Iraq: Letting Iran Call the Shots,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153devil\u00e2\u20ac\u009d here is clearly Iran. Taheri, known to have fabricated <\/a>stories <\/a>in the past, makes errors in his Post <\/em>article as well. He writes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tehran helped the deal by ordering its oldest Shiite clients, the so-called Supreme Islamic Assembly of Iraq [ISCI] (and its armed wing, the Badr Brigades), to back Maliki.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Historian Juan Cole noted<\/a> that Badr \u00e2\u20ac\u0153peeled away from it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s parent,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and that ISCI stayed out of Maliki\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coalition.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a><\/em>: Michael Knights, a fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy<\/a>, writes that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tehran [has] become the most influential outside power in Iraq.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He says, however, that the issue is not closed: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Iran, like the United States, will have to continue to vie for influence in Iraq.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He assesses Iranian interests in Iraq and concludes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tehran seeks to prevent Iraq from recovering as a military threat or as a launchpad for an American attack.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He sees the Islamic Republic accomplishing this through trade, particularly energy, and influencing Iraq\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153 fragmented and unregulated\u00e2\u20ac\u009d politics.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a><\/em>: A neoconservative editorial writer at the Post <\/em>make a thinly-veiled call for regime change in Iran, writing that the Islamic Republic has \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no interest in a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgrand bargain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 with the United States or an accommodation with the Security Council\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 [A]s long as these rulers are in power, Iran will not give up its ambition to exercise hegemony over the Middle East.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s visit to Southern Lebanon is seen to demonstrate that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tehran can use its client to trigger a new war in the Middle East at any time; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lesser form of the intimidation that it hopes to exercise around the region with an arsenal of nuclear weapons.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This show of force is viewed as a deterrence against an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em>: Senior Claremont Institute<\/a> Fellow Mark Halperin writes that Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unique experience as a country \u00e2\u20ac\u0153repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile shield, and most importantly their mass,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d pose a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mortal threat\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s existence. Halperin observes that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the military strategy of Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enemies is now to alter the conventional balance while either equipping themselves with nuclear weapons or denying them to Israel, or both.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Saving a discussion of Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own nuclear capabilities until the last sentence, Halperin concludes that the only source of security for a Jewish state under \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a continual state of siege is the nuclear arsenal devoted solely to preserving its existence.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for October 18th, 2010: New York Post: Disgraced Iranian journalist Amir Taheri writes that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki \u00e2\u20ac\u0153seems set to strike a Faustian bargain to cling to power: He is ready to dine with the devil.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Judging from the headline, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Iraq: Letting Iran Call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-8350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8351,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8350\/revisions\/8351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8350"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}