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Sat 01 Jan 2009Gaza conflict a template for US policy on Iran
WORLD VIEW:EVERYONE WANTS to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” The neo-conservative nostrum from 2002-2003 is worth recalling in discussing Israel’s war objectives in Gaza. As Richard Perle told an audience not long after the Iraq invasion: “We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: ‘You’re next.’”
The Gaza operation, quite aside from its immediate lethal brutality, is part of a larger and longer Israeli strategy: to convince the incoming United States administration that engaging Iran directly in a possible grand bargain about the future of the Middle East and Afghanistan would be a dangerous mistake.
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