I see that Iran, Iraq and Syria are planning to hold a summit before Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki meets with President Bush in Jordan next week. More power to them!
Yesterday one radio announcer, reporting the "news" (which, when we're talking international news, has always been at least as much opinion as neutrally presented, unopinionated news), reminded her listeners that we should never forget that Iran has its own "selfish" agenda in the Middle East, and we should be on the lookout for it.
Well, duh!
Would someone be so kind as to point to a nation — any nation — in the world that does anything without having its own selfish agenda?
Please don't point to the United States. We have a lovely myth that our foreign policy is largely based on altruism. That is obviously not true today (it would be difficult to argue that we kicked Iraq into painful little pieces out of a pure spirit of altruism), and it wasn't even true for the prototypical example on which we base the myth, the Marshall Plan of the late forties, which was implemented in order to prevent the Soviet Union from taking over Western Europe by fair means or foul (the Communists were, at that time, expected to win major national elections in Italy and France; visits of American warships, guns run out, to major Italian and French ports were, of course, purely coincidental).
In any case, I would hope that no one reading this would expect the governments of Iran and Syria — and Iraq, for that matter — to do something out of the kindness of their hearts. Governments have no kindness in their hearts. For that matter, they have no hearts.