Well, I hate to say I told you so, but...
June 27, 2006: "Of course, Ahmadinejad may be jumping the gun a bit as far as that is concerned, but he is certainly doing all he can to bring into being a Shi'ite client state in Iraq."
September 13, 2006: "Here we see looming in Iraq the Shi'ite client state of Iran that the U.S. has unwittingly helped put into place with its short-sighted democracy project."
October 31, 2006: "Is al-Maliki on the road to creating the Shi'ite client state that the Iranians have been trying to foster in Iraq for quite some time now?"
February 11, 2007: "Iran continues its efforts to create a Shi'ite client state in Iraq."
June 10, 2008: "Or are U.S. troops the main obstacle to Iraq's becoming a full-fledged client state of Iran?"
November 12, 2008: "Very soon now the President of the United States and the President of Iran will sit down, without preconditions, and hash this out, and clear everything up before Iraq turns fully into the Shi'ite client state that the Iranians covet."
July 1, 2009: "Their goal of creating a Shi'ite client state is closer than ever to being realized."
July 30, 2009: "Was this what we have been fighting for in Iraq all these years? An Iranian Shi'ite client state in Baghdad?"
Looks like it. But of course, the learned analysts knew better.
"Behind the Carnage in Baghdad," by David Ignatius in the Washington Post, August 25 (thanks to Kamala):
As security deteriorates in Baghdad, there's a new cause for worry: The head of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) has quit in a long-running quarrel with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- depriving that country of a key leader in the fight against sectarian terrorism.Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, the head of Iraqi intelligence since 2004, resigned this month because of what he viewed as Maliki's attempts to undermine his service and allow Iranian spies to operate freely. The CIA, which has worked closely with Shahwani since he went into exile in the 1990s and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars training the INIS, was apparently caught by surprise by his departure.
The chaotic conditions in Iraq that triggered Shahwani's resignation are illustrated by several recent events -- each of which suggests that without the backstop of U.S. support, Iraqi authorities are now desperately vulnerable to pressure, especially from neighboring Iran....
Iran's links with Maliki are so close, said this Iraqi intelligence source, that the prime minister uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel. The Iranians are said to have sent Maliki an offer to help his Dawa Party win at least 49 seats in January's parliamentary elections if Maliki will make changes in his government that Iran wants....
Should the Americans try to restore order? The top Iraqi intelligence source answered sadly that it was probably wiser to "stay out of it and be safe." When pressed about what his country would look like in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: "Iraq will be a colony of Iran."
Suprising?............not!
Surprising?............not!
Mission accomplished. Thanks W.
OK, but here is another side to the story, where it seems that Ignatius' piece is "rife with disinformation and error":
Carnage in Baghdad? Not quite.
Here's the whole piece:
Ignatius on Shahwani and Iranian Influence in Iraq
For Arab Shi'a, will not the tug of 'Uruba, Arabness, keep them from embracing the Persians? Ideally -- from the point of view of the world's Infidels -- the Iranians will try to help Iraq's Shi'a, who though three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs, are not as ferocious and aggressive, and besides, the Sunnis can count on money and volunteers and other forms of aid from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria (unless the Alawite government does the bidding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and prevents Syrian Sunnis from entering Iraq). There was no mass defection to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, though no doubt the battlefield conditions were such that the Sunni officers were vigilent, and instantly wiped out any perceived sources of Shi'a mutiny (almost nothing is known about the numbers, or kinds, of rebellions in the ranks there might have been -- but it sounds as if there was very little).
And then, ideally from our point of view, even if the Iranians sadly recognize that they cannot somehow enforce their will on the Iraqi Shi'a, at the very least they can help those Shi'a from losing to the Sunnis who, were they to regain the poweer they lost in Iraq, would then be a problem for Iran.
If, after what is almost certain to happen, the biggest shots in the American government still can't figure out where the main theatre of war -- the war of self-defense against the ever-expanding Jihad -- is actually to be found (hint: not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan, but in good old Europe), and if it still doesn't dawn on them that internecine warfare, without let-up, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, is not to be deplored but to be welcomed and exploited, then... well, then we shall have to see what the people of this country, moving inexorably ahead of their leaders, decide about those who claim to be able to instruct and protect them.
Hugh: America, since 1989 under Bush 1st, has been a puppet state of Saudi Arabia. USA- United w/Saudi Arabia. Bush 1st and 2d and now Obama send American boys to be killed by the Saudis in Iraq and by their Taliban soldiers. When a marine or prison guard imprisons or shoots a Saudi national, they are court martialed and drummed out of the service. When a CIA agent gets secrets through interrogation from a saudi terrorist (which is redundant in and of itself), their new ward, Obama, must prosecute the CIA agents in order to make sure Saudis are allowed to kill more Americans with more terrorist attacks in the future. The Bush family, the Clintons, and now Obama will always make Americans subservient to the whims of the primitive murderous Saudis.
Therefore, when Saudi feels threatened, US boys and girls will be sent to die for Saudi. Europe and USA leaders will only send their troops to protect Saudi in order to keep their treason laced blood tribute from Saudis.
Iran will continue it's influence throught politics in Iraq - Iraq falls to the islamic theocracy.
Iran funds Hamas and Hizbollah - a coordinated attack from the occupied territories occurs;Lebannaon by the Hizbos, Syria, because they don't want to be left out ofthe Soviet arms sale race, Jorden opts out at first, but joins in because it always has, Yemmeni is no help; Tripoli still needs to do business and opts out.; Arabia remians silent and offers it's air strips, at a cost; Egypt joins the nuclear caliphate and triumvates the leauge. The Islamic bomb goes off, and with any accuracy, Isreal is destroyed, along with the cumbersom PA question exising Arab nations have created to get rid of it.
What happens next? Uh, Iran gets the new radioactive parking lot for free.
Well, the Israeli apparatus survices the strike and initiates MAD on Islam. Billions are killed, millions are affected by the fallout. In the end, we can't pump radioactive oil through our cars and those new energy scources can't come fast enough.
Having lived through the forced peak production of Oil and watching the market dwindle, Western communities are forced to interacat and realize thy have nothing in commom with the muslims in their midtst because they demand rather than contribute to the community.
They need to kill us all or have a majority before they nuke Israel. Any premature detonation will only result in a Achmed the Terrorist joke. The exploitive nature of Islam on all who are are not the followers of Mow would fair less successful in a post-apocoliptic world caused by Islamic nuclear misuse than any other tool in their peaceful armory.
The same folk who control Iran, control Hizbollah, control Hamas, and will soon contorl the next elected party to Iraq. Betchya they absorb Yemen while they're at it, and betchya a Yemeni is involved in setting off the bomb that proves teh point.
All Hypothetical as I put my screech bottle of predictions away...
Kaffir_Kanuck...wow...great stuff!
restive West Asians
All in all, I think it is preferable to have a Shia Irak than a Sunni Irak. I know that the political doctrine is almost identical but I must acknowledge that Shiism doesn't seem to blow away the minds of the iranian people as much as sunni islam does to its followers everywhere.
Even in the midst of a full theocratical society governed by the most primitive barbarism as exemplified in the little green book of Khomenei, a large portion of the iranians seem to have retained their rationality and even their humanism.
It seems that Shiism, by considering the sunna flawed isn't as impervious to reason and eventually, perhaps reform.
I have been telling this here, too ... . And now, everyone can see that. More than 4,300 American soldiers killed, the United States of America has gone totally broke and is now totally dependent on Chinese creditors to keep it afloat. And all this to give Iraq on a silver platter as a Grand Prize to Iran, the very worst enemy of the United States of America in the world. What a disaster.
The great hero Ariel Sharon foresaw all this. On that fateful day, February 7, 2002, he begged, and begged, and passionally pleaded with Bush: "Please don't go into Iraq, Mr. President. Please bomb Iran from the air instead". To no avail. Instead of listening to the old Zion Lion (Ariel means "lion of God), he listened to his puny, neurotic neocons who thought Iraq was an easier target:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35510-2002Feb6?language=printer
Ironically, if the US bombed the much stronger Iran, far fewer Americans would have died, because the mission would be more clear-cut and would not involve an "occupation" of which the mightiest military in the world has once again proved to be totally incapable of, and a real, intolerable threat would have been removed.
Whenever the world let Sharon be Sharon, great things happened, such as Israel's glorious victory of 1967. But whenever they opposed Sharon, a calamity happened, a chain reaction of calamities. This is what we have in Iraq.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.