The Obama Administration apparently wants to cut off gasoline supplies to Iran if the Iranians don’t come to the table to negotiate on the nuclear issue.
How this is supposed to happen, when the Russians, a very large Iranian gas supplier, have never indicated the slightest support for “tougher” sanctions is well beyond comprehension.
We seem to be stuck in a post-9/11 trap of our own making: Countries that 10 years ago would have been seen as fifth-rate, marginal regional threats have been conflated into America’s existential nightmares. How else to justify the massive expenditure of lives and treasure on such total failures as Iraq (slowly descending back into civil war) and Afghanistan (never left civil war) while not actually catching the very terrorists who attacked us?
The real winners in this have been Islamic extremists (no difficulty attracting new recruits or undertaking bombings worldwide), Pentagon budgeteers (now spending 10 times what any other country does) and several right-wing Israeli governments (why be good?).
The working policy principle is: “We don’t talk, so they must scare us”.
Gorilla thinks: “One day we’ll decide to sit down and cut a deal with Iran and North Korea. They know it, the Russians and Chinese know it, and one day so will we”.
Tags: Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Pentagon, Russia, terrorism