This is not going over well on the right:
MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell recalled on Monday some of the most impactful State of the Union addresses in the recent past, focusing primarily on George W. Bush's post-9/11 speech in which he called North Korea, Iraq, and Iran members of an "Axis of Evil." Mitchell ripped into Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell for approving that remark which alienated Iran, a country she said had been "more or less an American ally." ...Bryan Preston of PJ Media says this is not true because slogans:
"State Department, with all due respect, Colin Powell did not focus enough on those words and get them taken out of the State of the Union," she continued. "Up until that moment, Iran was cooperating with the United States on the border of Afghanistan, it was post 9/11, Iran was more or less an American ally." ...
Iran had been an enemy of the United States since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. What part of "Death to America!" and "Death to the Great Satan!" [does] Mitchell ... not understand?Over at Twitchy, Michelle Malkin's Twitter aggregator, the evidence that Mitchell is wrong boils down to a collective "LOLWUT," supplemented by a "WTF" from Mediaite right-winger Noah Rothman, who wrote the story quoted above.
LOLWUT. RT @NoahCRothman Andrea Mitchell: 'Iran was More or Less an American Ally' before Bush's Axis of Evil speech.
— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) January 28, 2014Good lord. WTF Andrea.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) January 28, 2014Hmmm ... if only we could assess the truth value of this by looking into the actual historical record. Is it possible to know, for instance, whether Iran gave the U.S. help on Al Qaeda after 9/11?
Iran Gave U.S. Help On Al Qaeda After 9/11That was from a 2008 CBS story partly based on an AP report. More here, from a Politico Magazine story by Barbara Slavin, which was published last November:
Iran rounded up hundreds of Arabs to help the United States counter al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attack after they crossed the border from Afghanistan, a former Bush administration official said Tuesday. Many were expelled, Hillary Mann Leverett said, and the Iranians made copies of almost 300 of their passports.
The copies were sent to Kofi Annan, then the secretary-general of the United Nations, who passed them to the United States, and U.S. interrogators were given a chance by Iran to question some of the detainees, Leverett said in an Associated Press interview.
Leverett, a Middle East expert who was a career U.S. Foreign Service officer, said she negotiated with Iran for the Bush administration in the 2001-3 period, and Iran sought a broader relationship with the United States. "They thought they had been helpful on al Qaeda, and they were," she said.
For one thing, she said, Iran denied sanctuary to suspected al Qaeda operatives....
James F. Dobbins, the Bush administration's chief negotiator on Afghanistan in late 2001, said Iran was "comprehensively helpful" in the aftermath of the 9-11 attack in 2001 in working to overthrow the Taliban militias' rule and collaborating with the United States to install the Karzai government in Kabul....
It took the 9/11 attacks to break the ice. Iranians, virtually alone among Muslim-majority countries, expressed sympathy for the victims, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even suspended the usual “Death to America” chants at Friday prayers. The United States and Iran also shared the geopolitical aim of removing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.... American and Iranian officials held more than a dozen meetings from the fall of 2001 through May 2003 in Paris and Geneva....Oh, and Iran also turned over at least 15 detainees to Afghan custody in 2002 knowing they'd become part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. If that doesn't constitute love for the Bush-era U.S., what does?
Retired U.S. diplomat Ryan Crocker, who participated in those talks, ... found the Iranians "very positive and forthcoming and really interested in what we could put together in Afghanistan that would be better for both of us," he said. Iran, which had almost gone to war with the Taliban in 1998 after the radical faction murdered eight Iranian diplomats and a journalist in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, was "very anxious for us to get on with the war," Crocker noted, going so far as to provide the United States with accurate maps of Taliban positions (as opposed to the Pakistanis, who tried to get the Americans to bomb the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance)....
The talks ended in May 2003... former Secretary of State Colin Powell ... told me in 2006 that they "should have been restarted." ...
"After the 'axis of evil' [speech], the heart went out of the negotiations," Crocker told me....
So Mitchell may have been engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but not all that much. You could acknowledge that, righties -- oh, but it's so much more fun to put Mitchell's picture right next to your vintage-1979 Khomeini dartboard and let a few darts rip, isn't it?
