Wonder if the WH/NSC fully understands just what the Kerry comment is actually supporting--the belief that Khomeinism will die in 10 or less years is a figment of imagination:
Published: 16/03/2015 03:12 PM
“Throw off Arabism,” Iran
news agency tells Iraq
An op-ed from the semi-official Mehr news agency follows on the heals of Iranian officials' rhetoric on Tehran's expansionary role in the region.The controversial op-ed comes amid Tehran’s increasingly confident proclamations of its influence in the Middle East, after Iranian-backed Houthis took control of Yemen’s government in February while Iran has helped coordinate the Iraqi government’s new offensives against ISIS.BEIRUT – One of Iran’s leading news agencies has called on the Iraqi people to “throw off Arabism,” in a vitriolic editorial calling for the war-torn country to move into Iran's orbit.
“The time has come for the Iraqi people to say their final word. [They must] choose between false Arabism and true Islam, and brush the dust of Arab humiliation off their clothes,” the semi-official Mehr news agency wrote over the weekend.
“The Iraqi people—the Iraqi parliament to be precise—must move towards unity with their true friends [Iran] and throw off the garments of false Arabism.”
The news agency also argued that “there can be no doubt that Iranians and Iraqis share religious and historical bonds that connect the two peoples over history.”
Last week, one of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s advisors said that “all of the Middle East is Iranian,” while a top Revolutionary Guards officer touted that Iran was playing the leading military role to prop up the Syrian regime.
The op-ed also flattered Revolutionary Guards Qods Force chief Qassem Soleimani, who has been the subject of a media campaign as he visits the front lines near Tikrit, where Iraqi forces in the past two weeks have waged a battle to seize the city from ISIS.The Mehr news agency editorial echoed these comments, saying that “Iranian commanders have rushed to save the Iraqi people” while “Arab generals are in the cabarets of Las Vegas not caring what happens in Iraq.”
“A well-known Iranian general has [risked his own] life and gone to the most dangerous place in the world to put his combat experience at the service of the Iraqi army and the Popular Mobilization [forces] in Tikrit.”
Mehr also called on the Iraqi leaders to adopt a political solution “close to the demographic and confessional reality in Iraq,” in reference to the Shiite majority in the country.
After replacing Nouri al-Maliki as premier, Haidar al-Abadi has worked toward enlisting disaffected Sunni tribes to help the government in its fight to reclaim lost territory from ISIS.
Instead of supporting such efforts, Mehr slammed the tribal culture in Iraq, implicitly calling it “racist.”
“Iraq needs a new solution, far from ‘the kufiya, the agal and the dishdasha’, [traditional tribal Arab garments] that heads for a new culture,” it said.
“All the sorrows of Iraq are caused by the presence of the Araban [desert Bedouin tribes] who stalk the Iraqi people and wish them no good.”
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