Once noted writer George Bernard Shaw happened to pass by a cemetery and saw these words inscribed on a grave, “Here lies an honest politician.” He immediately said, “I wonder, how could honesty and politics meet.”
The recent flirtation between Washington and Tehran suddenly reminded me of Shaw’s remarks.
If media reports are to be believed the United States does not want Iraq to be a party in the coalition against the self-ascribed Islamic State (IS). The same media reported participation of Iranian warplanes in the ongoing airstrikes targeting IS positions in Iraq. Initially, Iran denied this, and many analysts said that Iranian warplanes could not fly over Iraq without the consent and knowledge of the United States. After a while, Iran confirmed the raids and said they were carried out in response to a request by the Iraqi government, and then, US Secretary of State John Kerry gave his blessing to those raids.
Isn’t it surprising? We are talking about the same country whose nuclear program has been under discussion for the past couple of years and apparently a bone of contention between the West and the Iranian regime. According to insiders, this dispute is just a farce designed to give Iran time to produce an atomic bomb, if it has not developed it already.
This dispute that has cause us a lot of headache, cannot convince any rational person, because the history of American administrations testifies to double standards, not the least is the Watergate scandal, which revealed that the United States was supplying Iran with weapons during the eight-year war with Iraq, despite the crisis over American hostages who were held in Tehran soon after the 1979 revolution.
If the US administration is really sincere in opposing Iran’s nuclear program, which comes at the expense of the poor people of Iran, it could destroy it in an hour, or allow its ally “Israel” to do the job just as it did with the Iraq’s Osirak reactor.
The United States does not want it because it knows that the Iranian bomb will serve as a scarecrow to frighten neighboring countries and will never be used completely against Israel.
What is more serious than the atomic bomb is the sectarian bomb that Iran has detonated in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, with the complicity of successive US administrations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003?
The other thing is the hypocrisy of the US in its war on terror. For example, the Houthi rebellion backed by Iran is no less dangerous than ISIS or Al-Qaeda but nobody is talking about it.
This is only a game of interests and exchanging roles.
