Persian Paranoia or Paranoia Across the Board?

Christopher Hitchens probably remembers sitting in that mosque listening to the Ayatollah Khamenei shout his "two-minute hate" with such vividness because it might have been one of the few times CH didn't have a morning hangover, given the dearth of hard liquor in The Islamic Republic. But Christopher has a point about Marg to the English as well as to the Great and Little Satans.

The British were seen as bad guys in the days that British Petroleum ran both Iran and Iraq as corporate subsidiaries back around 1910 and Winston Church as First Lord of the Admiralty was partly responsible for the bad rep that Anglos had in Iran. But Christopher, with whom I shared many a dram of Dewar's with back in the day, also is aware that the chief goal of the Iranian Mullahs is to dominate the "Persian" Gulf [which the Arabs call the "Arabian" Gulf] and that their object, at least in the competing paranoia of the Sunnis, is to push back Sunni interests in neutral places like Bahrain & the Emirates where Shi'ites reside, but Sunnis rule. The Tunbs and other islands in the Persian Gulf are much more important than one thinks, as the gigantic natural gas reserves of Qatar, third in the world after Russia and Iran, would revert to Iran if the Mullahs could dominate both sides of the Gulf.

The biggest paranoia in the Middle East is that of the Sunnis toward the Shi'ite Iranian Mullahcracy.

And Christopher does score a point against Obama by pointing out that Obambi missed his "Martin Luther King moment" by kinda sorta watching while he weasel-worded some uncourageous twaddle about "not meddling."

I guess he's Jimmy Carter all over again, but not brave enough to try to rescue the hostages, badly as that turned out....

But at least Jimmy got rid of a weasel named Cyrus Vance who quit because of the daring it took to decide to do SOMETHING...!

Not exact "Tear Down That Wall, Mr. Gorbachev," but Jimmy did try to man up.