Is Washington Afraid of Persia?

Writing about his term at the helm of the CIA in the mid-1980s, Robert Gates tells in his memoir that "the downside of an attack on Iran, to everyone's regret, outweighed how much Iran deserved punishment... Thus Iran proved 'too hard'--a limited attack would, as a participant in one meeting delicately put it, 'just piss them off' and make things worse."Quite bluntly, Gates wrote of how "the Reagan Administration's fear of confronting Iran did not prevent it from choosing an alternative, relatively defenseless target on which to display American strength." "The process of elimination brought CIA to Libya. Ironically, Libya had been reluctant to attack the United States directly out of fear of retaliation. But because it was in the poorest position to sustain itself against U.S. actions--military or economic--it became the target for U.S. retaliation against all state-supported terrorism." [1] Read full story