I was disturbed yesterday to hear about Iraq's Prime Minister Maliki signing "security agreements" with Iran. There hasn't been much in the news about it, so I'm forced to link to a China Central Television article on the topic. Has this been much blogged about? Is there less to the story than it seems? On the surface these agreements seem to be grave insults to the thousands of Americans and Coalition soldiers who have shed their blood to free Iraq from Islamofascism.
Iran and Iraq have signed some historic security and economic agreements that point to a gradual warming in their relationship. On his first visit to Iran since taking office, Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, met with Iran's Supreme Leader - who promised to support al-Maliki's government. Nathan Mauger has more.As al-Maliki met with Iranian leaders for a second day, there was no public mention of the issue of Iranian interference in Iraq.
Instead, the Iraqi Prime Minister and his Iranian hosts expressed their growing friendship. ...
The Iranian officials also indicated that the way to end instability in Iraq was for American forces to withdraw.
Well sure, Iran can't wait for us to leave because they figure they can dominate the Shi'a Muslims in Iraq and create another client state for themselves, one with lots of oil. It seems obvious that such an arrangement would be terrible for American interests, and it's bitterly disturbing to me that the American government is allowing it. The Iranian regime is our enemy, and the enemy of all free people, and the Iraqis shouldn't be enabled by our passivity to move in that direction.
The "to Hell with them" hawks are looking better by the day. ( http://tinyurl.com/np8kf )
With all of the news of Jim Baker's rising influence in the administration, I wonder if it's true that we're going to be installing a new Iraqi dictator soon. ( http://tinyurl.com/e8kx9 )
r80: I just don't get how the Brits could control almost the whole world with a few thousand soldiers, and we can't control a single country with tens of thousands.
This book review should summarize most of our blunders during the early years of the war: ( http://tinyurl.com/l2av7 )
Even if we hadn't bungled the early post-invasion occupation, our efforts could fail anyway. Remember that Iraq is an artificial post-colonial nation composed of mutually hostile constituencies. American-imposed social engineering probably won't succeed in stopping the Sunnis and Shia from killing each other or sating the Kurds' yearning for independence. Without some dictator to keep everything together, Iraq may turn into Yugoslavia. Finally, democracy alone probably won't bring about the reformation of the Iraqis' (and the region's) illiberal religion. In the future, the Iraqi gov't might fund Hamas, Hezbollah, and other jihadists anyway.
I'm hoping that we can keep Iraq intact without partitioning the place into multiple nation-states. Unfortunately, in order to stabilize the country, it will probably require the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni Arabs and a Peshmerga-imposed mini-apartheid against Arabs in Kurdistan.
While we're at it, here's some British counter-insurgency lessons for Iraq: ( http://tinyurl.com/fxhfo )
I guess I'll mention another one of Andrew Sullivan's conspiracy theories about Rumsfeld while I'm at it: ( http://tinyurl.com/r8rar
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