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i don't think you need to go in this direction to explain the bush squad's irrational posture relative to iran, host---i think alot of what's in the above is acccurate in itself, but doesn't necessarily point in this direction.
remember the centrality that the iranian "hostage crisis" and its "nightline" DAY 400 opening played in generating opening the way to the reagan "landslide" (27% of the registered voters, but whatever)...the fumbling and bumbling of the reagan period is really quite funny--there's a book that details it by the former head of savak no less, but i can't remember the title at the moment...but iran is an old populist right bogeyman. by extension, there would be, and apparently is, a republican-specific Problem with chi'a islam--i don't really understand it except as a function of their interpretation of the iranian revolution by looking only at its outcome (not its dynamics) and by extension not thinking about why it is that the revolution was as it was--so basically, it seems that the neo-cons can be understood as still being a bit pissy about the overthrow of that lovely american lap-dog and really quite brutal dictator the shah.
the motivations behind iraq in 2003 seem to me to follow from the neo-con's update of that hoary old "stabbed in the back" theory to "explain" why the americans didn't johnwayne their way into baghdad during the first gulf war--shanked by the evil united nations, you see, and prevented thereby from fulfilling their manly destiny blah blah blah.
so you can see i think that the bush people's irrational attitude toward iran is a direct imprint of the history of the contemporary neo-con right, which is the foreign-policy adjunct to the populist conservative-as-perpetual-victim right that we know and love so well o yes.
this at the level of general narrative, naturlich.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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