To: Win Smith who wrote (153306 ) 12/4/2004 2:10:39 AM From: wonk Read Replies (1) | Respond to Win, the more important points were not about the CIA but rather, I believe, contained herein:…Bush ran for reelection as a man who means what he says, and he says he will not tolerate governments that sponsor terror, or the prospect of Iran with a bomb.but no foreign government will long trust to that. Consider the map. The United States already occupies Afghanistan and Iraq; imagine for a moment that American armies entered Iran as well. Every nation would see immediately that this would constitute a great geopolitical fact—something very much resembling the radical map change feared by the Carter administration in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Shah of Iran was overthrown by a radical fundamentalist cleric. Twenty-five years ago it was not the Americans alone who feared that one more step would put Russian armies on the shore of the Persian Gulf after a century of trying. Only a dozen years ago, when Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, the whole world joined a grand coalition led by the United States to evict him. Would the governments of France, Germany, Russia, and China, trusting to American good intentions, take a more relaxed view of long-term American military domination of the oil-producing states of the Middle East? I'm guessing not, and once joined such a conflict might last fifty years. The toughest challenge for anyone trying to pay attention to the world is to grasp the large shape of events—not the details of warming or cooling relations as routine issues come and go, but the sea change when everything begins to shift. In the world at the moment the big unknown is what America is up to. Following Bush's reelection we must expect the question of American intentions to enter the discussion in the foreign chanceries of the entire world. These intentions are not transparent....
