Iran, Syria to form 'united front'

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - Middle East

Regardless of one's political persuasion, we can all agree that Iran and Syria's announcement of the formation of an alliance explicitly to stand united against the US is a negative development.

What will be interesting is if anyone on the conservative side of the spectrum - politicians, pundits, bloggers or "talking-point trolls" will be able to muster up the courage to link this new development to its causes - in a broad sense, irresponsible Bush Administration foreign policy or more specifically, the ill-conceived, ill-defined Iraq war effort and the recent crazy/beligerent neoconservative rhetoric out of Washington engineered to tweak Damascus and Tehran.

Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon is a genuine cause for concern and one ought not begrudge the Pentagon and CIA for evaluating the situation and planning for whatever, god help us, might lay ahead.

I don't want to see Iran with a nuclear weapon, however I can understand where they are coming from. The Bush Administration's reckless demonstration of brute stupidity in Iraq has forced them to seek the one ultimate deterrent. International law, justification for war, diplomacy, logic and cost in both financial and human terms do not seem to have registered within the Administration from long before the invasion to date. Why should Iran expect anything different from Washington in their case?

9/11 should have focused our foreign policy on a concrete set of goals. Capturing the people responsible for 9/11 would have been an excellent start. Addressing the root causes of the hated some people in the Muslim world have for us should have received the bulk of our attention. The war in Iraq has not only been a distraction, it has taken us in the opposite direction from the "winning of the hearts and minds" in the region that really is so important for us to do. Had we diverted the resources we have squandered in Iraq into leaning on Israel and the Palestinians to fix their problems, is it possible that the region could be better off than it is today? Could we have followed a different path than the one that led us to a shattered Iraq? Was today's Syrian-Iranian alliance inevitable?

I guess we'll never know.

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