In the last few months, Bush has subtly hinted that he made a mistake the first time, and went after the wrong country. A change of one letter from Iran to Iraq is understandable; I got on the Q train once when I should have waited for the N instead.
The problem is that Bush can’t just say “I was wrong.” He’ll blow whatever support for more wars he has left. So instead, he raids an Iranian consulate in Arbil, and then plays along with the new designation of the building as a proto-consulate. That on the one hand signals to everyone who’s paying attention that he’s going to get even more aggressive with Iran, and on the other gives him plausible deniability with the voters.
Iran is an even greater tragedy of American foreign policy under Bush than Iraq. Iraq changed from a dictatorship where the regime murdered about 10,000 people every year to a proto-dictatorship where the proto-dictators and the US murder 200,000 people every year. Iran remained a theocratic dictatorship, where it could’ve become a democracy by now.
Lindsay explains how Iran stopped supporting the US’s war on terror only after Bush branded it part of the Axis of Evil. It’s important to note that that happened years before Ahmadinejad was elected; Iran’s drift away from pro-Americanism happened under Khatami’s watch.
If the US loses its mind and invades Iran, the situation will be completely different from the one with Iraq. First, Iraq had sectarian bitterness going back 15 years; Iran doesn’t. Second, Iraq was defenseless and relatively undeveloped; Iran is neither. Third, Iran has vibrant domestic politics that US pressure is stunting. Fourth, Israel has a far greater interest in seeing Iran destroyed than it did in seeing Iraq destroyed. And fifth, Iran backs terrorists to levels Saddam’s Iraq never did.
Abstract Nonsense 
The death count is what gets me. You quote numbers 10 thousand versus 200 thousand. Sounds pretty simple which has been the worse situation.
I had the exact same feeling when Israel went into southern Lebabon. Two soldiers, or a million refugees? Pretty damned partisan. We’ve got to get over this countries being divided. There is one humanity, and one earth that needs saving.
ggw
~Iran is an even greater tragedy of American foreign policy under Bush than Iraq. Iraq changed from a dictatorship where the regime murdered about 10,000 people every year to a proto-dictatorship where the proto-dictators and the US murder 200,000 people every year. Iran remained a theocratic dictatorship, where it could’ve become a democracy by now.~
Iran was a democracy until the US overthrew its democratically elected Govt. back in 1953. In fact, it was the first democracy in the area. It was tossed out because it had the shocking temerity to nationalise it’s oil resources which, up until then, was the domain of the US oil companies. The repercussions are still making waves throughout the region to this day. The democracy was replaced with a “Monarch Dictator” that made Sadd look like an amateur.
Alon, everything that happens in this world has a cause and an effect and often the effect will explode to the surface many years later!
Examples of this are:- the issues of Israel/Palestine where a state was carved out of some-one else’s territiory without any agreement from the locals.
al Quaida; set up firstly to stirr up trouble in the old Yugoslavia (based in Bosnia). Khalilzad was the one who supplied the new arms.
Geo. sr. then got his good friend Obie bin L. to run it in Afganistan and collect up all the extremists from all over to join the cause. After they had driven the pesky Russkies out they were told to go back to their farms and be fine upstanding citizens again.
It was the 11/9 in the making.
US foreign policy has caused more bloodshed in the world since WW II than the Brits and French managed to do in 100yrs!