Playing Nuclear Chicken With Bush and Putin

For the first time in nearly sixty-five years, the head of government in Moscow has gone to Tehran. The old Soviet Union and Iran used to share a border — which was why the United States overthrew the government of the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and supported the dictatorial, anti-communist Shah for a quarter-century — and it can’t have been making anyone in the Kremlin happy to have a major US military presence involved in major operations within a few hundred miles of the Russian border.

I’ve been expecting Russia or China stepping in to put their foot down in Iran for a couple of years now. Russia completed an estimated $700 million sale to Iran of air defense systems capable of shooting down bombers and cruise missiles just last winter.

The next step would be for Russia to send in military “advisors” and maybe a squadron of “training” jets based at sensitive Iranian target sites, so that the Bush administration’s whole ramp up to an attack on Iran would be forced to provoke an incident with the Russians (something even Democrats in Congress who shpport an attack on Iran might have to think twice about) or ramp down from the current Iran war fervor, making the US look even more impotent. Heckuva job, Bushie (and all your buddies on both side of the aisle in the Capitol)!