Another damaging screw-up by Cheney
It appears the role of the Bush administration in promoting war instead of peace has reached all new levels.
According to Lawrence Wilkerson, former aide to Colin Powell, Iran approached the US in 2003 to offer to help stabilize Iraq and cut off aid to Hizbullah and Hamas. The subsequent rejection of that offer by Dick Cheney might have led to the election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, the current boogeyman of the Bush Administration. I’ll let Juan Cole explain:
Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of “talking to evil.” As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).
Because Khatami kept promising that his reforms would make Iranians better off, and because the US rejected all his overtures and left him with no achievements to show for them, the Iranian electorate turned against the reform movement and put Mahmud Ahmadinejad into power, a loud-mouthed braggart of a sort that Cheney’s Likudniks could then build up into a bogey man to frighten Americans with. Cheney created Iran as a menace.
Please click through to the rest of Juan’s article. These type of nuanced diplomatic screw-ups need to be revealed and remembered.