The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran

The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran. Juan Cole has a very good analsis of Ira(Q-N). "...the Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.quote.gif insert blockquotend eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week." The nerve-W risks U.S. lives to bring freedom to Iraq and they then become friends with a member of the "Axis of Evil." Doesn't it sound like a movie or comic book plot?

So whose policy/planning went wrong?

Iraq has a Shiite Muslim majority of some 62 percent. Iran's Shiite majority is thought to be closer to 90 percent. The Shiites of the two countries have had a special relationship for over a millennium. Saddam had sealed the border for more than two decades, but throughout centuries, tens of thousands of Iranians have come on pilgrimage to the holy Shiite shrines of Najaf and Karbala every year. Iraqis likewise go to Iran for pilgrimage, study and trade. Although neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz maintained before the Iraq war that Iraqis are more secular and less interested in an Islamic state than Iranians, in fact the ideas of Khomeini had had a deep impact among Iraqi Shiites. When they could vote in January earlier this year, they put the Khomeini-influenced Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in control of seven of the nine southern provinces, along with Baghdad itself.

That's what we get when we do not understand all dynamics of a culture, a land, a people, a religion... Too late now - but maybe just maybe we can learn for the future.

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

And that last sentence is the scariest - the next hot spot. But could it be Iran itself. I wondered a few days ago if we do go after Iran, will the troops we train in Iraq sit idly by?.

Maybe that is why the attention is now on Syria. We now have reports of border clashes and the Treasury Department identifying "...four nephews of Saddam Hussein who it said had played significant roles from bases in Syria in providing money, weapons, explosives and other support to the anti-American insurgency in Iraq." That's just what we need - a solid excuse to invade Syria.