Smart Power: Iran Launches Airstrikes on Iraqi Villages

Talk talk.

ranian aircraft attacked three villages inside Iraq over the weekend. The airstrikes — Iran’s first on Iraqi soil since the U.S. invasion — could complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to normalize relations with Tehran.

“The bombardments appeared to have targeted the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an Iranian Kurdish separatist group which has launched attacks on Iran from rear-supply bases in the mountains of northern Iraq,” AFP reports. Iran has attacked the Kurdish group before, with artillery. But this is the first time the Iranians followed up, with assaults from the air.

Iran's justification is that these villages are assisting attacks on Iran. Doesn't that mean they de facto agree they themselves can be attacked?

Not that it matters. It's entirely hypothetical.

The press isn't giving this any play for obvious reasons.*

On the other hand, if Iran refuses to step behind the UAW in bankruptcy proceedings with Chrysler... well, then it's on.

* As I've mentioned before, a cynical president can choose to pretend he's not faced with a foreign policy crisis simply by, well, pretending. If there is no crisis, he's not expected to act or deliver results, right?

The press can sometimes be trusted to highlight the crises a president is ignoring -- Bush could never have pretended that the war in Iraq was going well in 2005-2006, obviously, nor ignored the North Korean's nuke-rattling efforts. If he had tried to do such things, the press would have called him out. (Well, on Iraq, I guess he did try to some extent, and the press did call him out.)

But the press is in Obama's pocket so that check is now absent. Obama can invite us all to live in his fairy-tale world where Iran did not just launch airstrikes against three villages in Iraq, and most will accept the invitation, because they'll never know about it.

The press is determined to assist Obama in his national security malfeasance.

posted by Ace at 01:55 PM

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