I was reading an old Atlantic Monthly from November 2007 and came across this quote:
We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask… We’ve got to talk about Iran – Iran is more dangerous than Iraq – and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
That was Rudolph Giuliani, speaking as a Republican presidential candidate in July 2007.
Back then, the saying was that everyone wants to go to Baghdad but that real men want to go to Tehran. Weirdly, neither Iran nor Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. What those countries did have was oil – and lots of it.
The Iran obsession persists, of course, and it’s shared by both political parties. When she ran for president in 2024, Kamala Harris identified Iran as the greatest adversary the United States faced in the world.
The truth is that neither Iran nor Iraq posed a direct or imminent threat to the USA. What each country possessed was an enormous amount of oil and political leaders who didn’t want to kowtow to U.S. economic imperatives.
Hellbound and Down 