Iraq's past is prologue

Great post by Mark Schmitt over at TAPPED, which provides some interesting commentary on US foreign policy on Iraq and Iran in the 1980s and the depressingly predictable consequences of these decisions today.

Referring to a series of articles over at TomDispatch (see here and here by Roger Morris, Schmitt writes: "the rising neocons and the Israel lobby "cynically pushed both for Reagan administration aid to Iraq and for covert arms-dealing with Iran (later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal), viewing the ongoing no-winners carnage of two Islamic states as a boon," and describes the episode as "Washington's furtive arming of one tyranny to bleed another, with untold casualties on each side." At the time Rumsfeld visited Baghdad, Iraq was at risk of losing the war and had already offered peace terms; we propped them back up."

Bringing this double-dealing up to our current war in the Middle East, Seymour Hersh discusses in a new column in The New Yorker an apparent "redirection" of U.S. policy toward a war on Shiites, despite the fact that we are supposedly on the side of the Shi'a government we very recently midwifed in Baghdad.