An UnGreat War

While George VII loves analogies of the GWOT with World War II, there are more than a few parallels with World War I. Consider for instance the rising tension with Iran. Despite attempts to paint the dispute as part an inevitable geopolitical clash, there are considerable elements of clumsy rhetoric and strategic miscalculation in the dispute. This article in Spiked Online looks especially at the "axis of evil" designation -- a phrase written on the fly for the King's Speech, but which has been a straitjacket for US policy towards Iran ever since [thanks to reader KH for the link].

And then there's the matter of the proximate cause of the current nuclear crisis -- the fact that it was the US call for a boycott of last year's presidential election in Iran that brought the current radical to power (in Iran). This point is reiterated in an excellent NYT op-ed piece today by Hossein Derakhshan:

That's right: with what appeared to be the endorsement of President Bush and dozens of American-backed satellite television channels that broadcast in Farsi, the disillusioned young people of Iran effectively took one of the world's most closely watched nuclear programs out of the hands of a reformer and placed it into the hands of a hard-line reactionary.

Can anyone now doubt that Iranian elections, however flawed, really do matter? ... But the real problem here is that boycotting semi-democratic elections ultimately will not make such a system more democratic.

The rise of Mr. Ahmadinejad, and the threat he poses to the stability of a volatile region, demonstrates that promoting apathy in a semi-democratic system can only strengthen the radical anti-democracy forces. And it raises a question as to whether that is what hawks in Washington actually wanted.

It's hard to be optimistic when the choices for interpreting the administration's behaviour towards Iran come down to carelessness, miscalculation, or lust for confrontation. Not to mention the grand unified theory of US-Iran relations: that Republican Presidents always, always, seem to do what Iran wants.

UPDATE: Powerline doesn't see the contradition in their analysis of Iran:

The election in Iran was a sham, conducted by the mullahs and largely boycotted by reformist forces. The election didn't cause the "rise of Islamic parties;" the mullahs have controlled Iran since 1979.

So what's their scenario if reformist forces had not boycotted the election?