UPDATE: In an online Q&A, al Qaeda’s Ayman al Zawahiri says of the U.S and Iran Let’s You and Him Fight. Kind of like the Iraqi government.
UPDATE 2: Noah Millman discusses the plausibility that Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia or nefarious corporations got us into Iraq, all the while trashing the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” in comparison to the original. The War Nerd complains about the Times stealing his “Dick Cheney as Iran’s Manchurian Vice President” idea here.
UPDATE 3: Israel’s Tehran connection
VERY LATE UPDATE 4: Convergence of U.S-Iranian interests in intra-Shi’ite struggle in Iraq
A little while back I was drawn into this Samizdata thread on “Human Smoke”. I started out with my Charles Lindbergh spiel, but the subject later shifted to Iran. Iran is a fairly important country to know about that people are extremely ignorant on the subject of (yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition just to stick it to grammar-Nazis). I was thinking of that as I watched a few topics from this diavlog featuring the unbelievably stupid Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. What’s worrying is that John McCain seems about as idiotic on the subject but the press adores him and ignores it lest it impede his ordained path to the White House (which is not to say they’d treat Obama different).
American Goy lets us know that Iran thanks the brave American soldiers! In the comments I point out this from Justin Raimondo on a similar line. A conspiracy theory he floated before is that Iranian agents suckered us into Iraq, which is almost too sensible in retrospect to be plausible (although we have been duped before by the K.L.A, Savimbi and others). It does seem odd that the supposedly crazy suicidal warmongering Iranians coolly shrugged off the fanatically anti-Shi’ite Taliban’s murder of their officials until the U.S found itself raring to do their dirty work for them, at which time they were quite willing to stick the knife in those Pushtun barbarians. I previously discussed the relatively sensible behavior of the mullah regime here. One person who has been promoting the idea that Iran pragmatically pursues its strategic goals and is not dead set on war is Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance, who I suppose you can dismiss since he was born in Iran. Sounds like good stuff for anyone who reads the National Interest. Is a Persian Pink Police State in the future? Probably not, though we can always imagine.
On a completely unrelated note, I was reading this by Keith Preston where among other things he discusses “the primary intellectual framework of a new American radicalism”. I had never heard of Jack Ross or Matthew Raphael Johnson and asked for references. Keith kindly pointed out that though the former has not yet published his work of history, he blogs at Brooklyn Copperhead. Since then Ross has had a bit of a dispute with Daniel Larison. Keith also gave me the heads up on Johnson’s book, The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy, and his website. Now connecting this to someone I discussed above, American Goy promotes the theory that the reason Stalin seemed completely unprepared for Hitler’s offensive into Russia is that he had shifted the military from a defensive posture to a preparation for an offensive into Germany that Hitler noticed and pre-empted.
April 2, 2008 at 1:38 pm
“promotes the theory that the reason Stalin seemed completely unprepared for Hitler’s offensive into Russia is that he had shifted the military from a defensive posture to a preparation for an offensive into Germany that Hitler noticed and pre-empted.”
Anyone who believes that is an idiot. I have no doubt that Stalin would have happily invaded Germany (or anyone else) if he’d been sure that he would win, but in truth the Soviets were scared to death of the Germans at that time, and rightly so.
They had hoped for a long-drawn-out struggle between Germany and France/Britain, but France’s collapse ruined that while increasing their respect/fear of the German Army. They had limited confidence – to put it mildly – in their own army, considering its poor performance in the Winter War with Finland. So they tried to avoid war with Germany – not because they were nice guys, but because they thought they would lose – or at least thought they might lose. They weren’t crazy gamblers. Murderers and tyrants, yes, and bloody fools most of the time, but strategically cautious.
I might also point out that Maginot Lines were past their expiration date in 1941: that strategy hadn’t worked in France and it for sure wasn’t going to work in a huge country like Russia.
Everyone in sight warned the Sovs that Germans were going to attack in 1941, some giving complete orders of battle and an accurate kickoff date. Shoot, the _German Ambassador_ told the Russians about the attack ! Stalin ignored all those warnings (more than 20) because the idea was just too horrible to contemplate. Guys at the top often insist on being told only what they want to hear – maybe you’ve noticed?
Commanders near the border saw it coming
(troops, sapper operations, constant overflights, dozens of defecting Germans who told them the exact day and hour of attack)
and pleaded for permission to make _some_ kind of defensive preparations, but Stalin was afraid that doing anything would give the Germans an _excuse_ for war- like Hitler needed one.
Now, if the Germans had refrained from attacking the Soviet Union, might the Reds have eventually attacked them? Sure: but not until Germany had been worn down by years of war, not until the Red Army had recovered from the officer purges and demonstrated some competence, not until the current armaments push had hit its stride. Not until they had a sure and easy win. That’s the way to really win a war: we should know !
April 2, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I didn’t find the theory especially plausible either. AG has touted a number of goofy ones, like the Second Jewish Holocaust the Coincidence Theorist’s Guide to 9/11.
It’s always struck me as pretty ironic that one of the most paranoid people on earth was willing to put so much trust in Hitler despite all his anti-Bolshevik history and plan to Drang Nach Osten in Mein Kampf.
One of the things Rezun claims is that the purges in the military were mostly of Trotskyite political commisars and in all likelihood improved the military (though I would think Trotsky had more military expertise than Stalin did and would have had a good deal of support among veterans and the institution of political commisars itself was the problem). I had previously heard that the officers purged were largely ones from the aristocratic officer class under the Tsar and were suspected of being right-counterrevolutionaries. Similarly, after the Iranian revolution officers under the Shah were removed, but hastily withdrawn from jail and put back in uniform when Iraq attacked.
April 3, 2008 at 1:23 am
I heard Stalin got warnings from his own people, but I didn’t know the German ambassador notified him beforehand.
April 27, 2008 at 4:45 am
Operation Barbarossa Revisionism is all anti-Semitic lies, figure it out, Albert.
Nazi lies, Nazis lies, Nazi lies, how many more times can we say this?
Stalin was warned, he was being warned every single day for almost a year now by the US and the UK mostly, all trying to fake him out on the day of the German invasion. There was no Hitler-Stalin Pact in the way that your average idiot understands it. There was an agreement by Stalin to keep Hitler from attacking for two years so Stalin could build up his army for the invasion. Stalin got warned so many times by fakers and liars that he requested to stop all the BS intelligence. His own KGB even did not know the score. No one did, really. Stalin retreated to a dacha in the woods and turned into a wooden man. He seemed depressed and would not respond. He was a human being, Goddamn it, not a monster, and all this Nazi invasion crap was making him nuts. As well it should have, after all, he only lost 27 million countrymen in the genocidal Nazi war with his best friends. LOL! Funny! What’s funny about this is that everyone else insists that they would have done it better than that idiot Stalin. Sure they would have. Let’s see them try.
Think about stuff sometimes. You know, like that the Hitler-Stalin Pact is an anti-Semitic or anti-Commie lie? Most sensible historians know these things. Pity the revisionists. They know not how they lie.
February 1, 2009 at 11:46 am
“Operation Barbarossa Revisionism is all anti-Semitic lies, figure it out, Albert.
Nazi lies, Nazis lies, Nazi lies, how many more times can we say this?”
Wow.
I have a question for you.
When actual professional historians dispute the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust, are they anti-semitic? Please note that I am not talking about the neonazi ones who say it never happened – I am speaking of pros who do research, dig into old documents, and then come up with their number that they believe is correct.
February 2, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Funny, I was just re-reading A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War which mentioned the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, in passing.
Can remember being impressed Zhukov’s early demonstration of blitzkreig, which hardly anyone ever noticed, but of course he was out of favor for most of 1941.
In any case, what’s interesting to note is Stalin’s shifting of focus from east to west. After Khalkhin Gol, it was only a matter of days until the Soviets started moving into Poland and Stalin began eyeing much of what was lost in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.