Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Drop by the Whiskey Bar

Billmon:

"On Sunday, I looked at the institutional and psychological pressures that may be leading the Cheney administration to view regime change in Iran as the only way of out of an increasingly intolerable situation created by the failure of the neocons' Iraq gambit.

Today, I want to consider whether similar pressures might apply on the Iranian side of this crisis, pressures which could lead Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his fellow revolutionary hardliners to seek their own flight forward in a confrontation with Global Arrogance, a.k.a. The Great Satan, a.k.a. the United States of America.

I'm not an Iran expert, I don't speak Farsi and I've never even set foot in the country. So you can certainly take what I say here with several heaping shovels of salt, and I wouldn't blame you for ignoring it all together. I'm not offering expert wisdom, merely probing for an explanation for why Ahmadinejad seems determined to fan the flames of confrontation when a more cautious policy might actually serve Iran's purposes better, even if those purposes include building nuclear weapons."

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