Iran's Mullahs Covet Bahrain

The oil-rich Persian Gulf island nation of Bahrain has the fastest growing economy of any Arab nation. This has not escaped the covetous eyes of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary regime, writes Daniel Pipes in Jewish World Review.

Pipes notes that Hossein Shariatmadari, an associate of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and editor of the daily newspaper Kayhan, published an op-ed on July 9 in which he claimed: "Bahrain is part of Iran's soil, having been separated from it through an illegal conspiracy [spawned] by ... Shah [Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, along with] the American and British governments." Of course, that language is extremely similar to that used by Saddam Hussein's regime when it invaded and tried to erase the existence of Kuwait in 1990.

This is yet another manisfestation of Iran's quest for hegemony in the Persian Gulf. Fortunately, the U.S. Fifth Fleet probably would have something to say about those plans, to the extent that they threaten Bahrain.

Hopefully, that would remain true even if the next President of the United States is Hillary "I was for the Iraq war before I was against it" Clinton, John "the Haircut" Edwards or Barak "Bomb Pakistan" Obama. Still, I suspect that the good people of Bahrain, if they had the right to vote in U.S. Presidential elections, would vote GOP.