Are US bases in Iraq keeping Israel from attacking Iran?

A Choice Between Peace and Peril
By Chris Hedges
Feb 23, 2009

I've never thought that there might be a good reason for those bases in Iraq, but this article made me wonder. Click on the title link and read it or the rest of this post won't make any sense.

Okay, we good? Well alright, let's continue.

I know that the Iranian people and the American people do not want to go to war with each other, and certainly not by being led into it by paranoid Israeli warhawks.

Note that I did not say that Israel doesn't have a right to be paranoid. Most of their neighbors hate them. That's a whole nother blog post and I'm not going there now.

I don't claim to understand the history and the byzantine politics of the Middle East , however, this book by Trita Parsi was somewhat helpful.

Over all the history, the religions, the politics, the peoples , whew, I could read non-stop for years and still not have a clue.

Just the history and peoples of Iran and how she interacts with her neighbors is complicated.

Like the writer of the "Choice Between Peace and Peril" article, I'm cautiously optimistic that Obama will make the right choice. Hopefully he hasn't been in Washington long enough to have his common sense clouded by the ridiculous arrogance in a bubble that resides there.