The right has long been hoping for a military confrontation with Iran, which fortunately their leaders have declined to provide thus far. But they've also been extremely critical of Obama's strategy of engagement. In their view, Obama should be doing more saber rattling and offering more public denunciations. Spencer Ackerman reports on what that all that bluster got us during the last administration, according to former Ambassador to Iraq and Pakistan Ryan Crocker:
It did not end the channel. But it certainly changed the tone. And the key Iranian response to the ‘Axis of Evil' was to send Gulbuddin Hekmatyar back into Afghanistan. We had been talking to the Iranians up to that point about the possibility of Hekmatyar, who was under house arrest, being transferred to the Karzai government.
Ackerman explains the significance:
So in response to one rhetorical move — co-authored by David Frum, no less — that created an arbitrary category for Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea, the Iranian leadership hedged its bets on cooperating with with the U.S. on post-Taliban Afghanistan and released a murderer back into the war zone.
Once back in that warzone, al-Qaeda ally Hekmatyar, now one of the main leaders of the insurgency, alongside his Hezb-e-Islami organization proceeded to do what they do best, which is kill--American troops and Afghan civilians.
Words have consequences.
-- A. Serwer
