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Younghusband
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Younghusband

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July 24th, 2006

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“Ahmad Chalabi 2.0″

via bardic on mefi

“God’s Army Has Plans to Run the Middle East” is an article that argues that Hezbollah is Iran’s “spearhead” towards controlling the entire region. The author? Amir Taheri. You might remember him as the guy who fabricated the story about Iran imposing "yellow star" regulations on religious minorities (previously on mefi). James Wolcott connects the deceitful dots.

Also, from the same thread, and interesting graphic depicting how the Iraq war is causing Middle Eastern power positions to unravel with Iran coming out on top.

Comments to this entry

alec
July 24, 2006
5:40 pm
The NYTimes graphic was really good, even if it is a lot of information to compute (I feel like it deserves a big venn diagram). I'm always astounded how frequently intelligent people are ill-informed or willfully ignorant of the situation in the Middle East.
Dan tdaxp
July 24, 2006
8:37 pm
The graphic glosses over a major reason for the Shia-Sunni rivalry: Oil. Iraq was a Sunni-dominated state whose oil lies largely on Shia lands. Saudi Arabi s is a Sunni-dominated state whose oil lies largely on Shia lands.

Iran coming out on top is not a horrible thing. Their government is more rational than Saddam's, and less cooky than the Wahabis in the KSA. Perhaps the least of regional evils.
J.Kende
July 24, 2006
10:04 pm
It's not so clear that story was "fabricated". Disputed yes. But if you read what Taheri actually said in the original and in follow ups it seems more likely that legislation of an unpleasant sort was discussed by Iranian MP's. If anything it could be said Taheri jumped the gun by not making clear enough which stage of deliberation such legislation was at and what exactly it involved. Considering the terrible nature of the regime in question I think it's understandable that he would do so. It's no easy task to decipher exactly what Iran is doing or planning to do at any given moment.