I found this comment on Iran's launch of a missile into space funny and interesting.
By Mike Richards
Posted Tuesday 5th February 2008 16:16 GMT
Why is Washington so obsessed with Iran?
Easy - it used to be theirs. They once had a tame dictator with impeccable fashion sense and a ready love of torture to act as a balwark against the Soviet Union. Sadly the people of Iran were less enamoured of the Shah than those in the West (even after many of them had been tortured to love him all the more) and got rid of him in a revolution. This had the nasty side-effect of putting some religious nutters with an even more free-loving addiction to torture and terror in charge of one of the largest oil reserves in the World.
All in all, not a good thing.
So it was time for plan B. America (and its faithful sidekick Britain) found another accommodating Middle Eastern dictator who if anything was even more stylish and torture happy than the erstwhile Shah. They promised him lots and lots of weapons (including some of the grown up toys) if he'd just pop next door and hold an impromptu invasion on our behalf.
Sadly, the Iranians didn't play ball, and despite our new best friend getting lots of satellite info cribs and gee-whizz poison gas, they didn't roll over and die (well not all of them at least).
After ten years of murder, mayhem and merriment, things were pretty much where they started; Iraq said 'sorry' to the mullahs and did the silliest thing imaginable by invading an even bigger oil field.
They weren't our friends any more! We were especially angry when we found out the Iraqis weren't as silly as we'd thought and had actually read the instruction leaflets on all those nuclear thingumjigs, biological doohickies and chemical wadjamacallits we'd sold them - and been building grown-up weapons.
This was not only bad, it was wrong, which is where the current Middle Eastern hilarity all began.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05 ... /#c_148202