(2006-02-24) Middle East Blowback

Notes on the history of Blow Back in the Middle East. Iran is what it is today, in part, because of long-term consequences of our intervention to oust Premier Mossedeq in 1952 and replace him with a puppet Shah Of Iran... What is not widely understood is that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan preemptively to prevent the rise of religious extremism in its Central Asia "republics." But that threat was fanned in part by US policies aimed at seducing the Soviet Union into a quagmire. The US fanned the fires of extremism by providing arms and advice in the late 1970s to Afghan Islamist-s based in Pakistan. President Jimmy Carter approved this secret aid in July 1979, before the Soviets invaded. In an little-noticed French language interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (January 15-21, 1998, p. 76), Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Advisor, bragged cynically that these policies had the effect of drawing the Russians into "the Afghan trap."... Among the unintended consequences of the Soviet "VietNam" so gleefully sought by the US was the rise of the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden and the propagation of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Arab world Now we have poured gasoline on the fire we help to light 30 years ago by waging yet another preemptive war in Iraq.