Iranian agents are in Iraq to inflict as much damage as possible on their chief enemy, the Americans. It is false to say that they help both sides — Sunni and Shi’a — equally, but it would hardly be surprising if Iranian agents, like most of the Shi’a, would welcome the Americans suffering at the hands of the Sunnis, and vice-versa.
The Islamic Republic of Iran calculates that the Americans have removed their most potent local enemy, Saddam Hussein (who after a dozen years of sanctions was no longer so potent) and the organized Sunni forces. Now Iran can afford to help, indirectly, perhaps not whatever remnants of Al-Zarqawi’s “Al Qaeda in Iraq” may exist (because those who call Shi’a “Rafidite dogs” and regard them as worse Infidels than are the Americans), but Sunnis whose main attacks are on the Americans.
What does this show? That Iran wishes to inflict as much damage on the Americans and tie them down for as long as possible. They take advantage of the fact that American leaders are hopelessly insistent that they must stay, lest “America lose face.” Or as Brent Scowcroft, the egregious hireling of Muslims, who refuses to reveal the names of his foreign clients, put it, America won’t “to betray its friends in the region” — which, unsurprisingly, turn out to be Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, in the view of Brent Scowcroft. Those “friends in the region,” unsurprisingly, in Brent Scowcroft’s view do not include Israel, a non-Muslim member of the West, whose loss to Islam would have untellable consequences both on Western morale, and on Muslim morale. For Israel, Scowcroft presents his usual prescription: pressure from America on our only true ally there, in order “once and for all” to “solve” the Arab-Israeli conflict. This tells you all you need to know about Brent Scowcroft’s knowledge of Islam and of the endless, world-without-end nature of the opposition it inculcates against all Infidel states, and certainly against the state of Israel — since Israel, like Spain and Sicily and the Balkans, Greece and other areas, was once considered part of Dar al-Islam. And that means it is especially offensive to Muslims that it should not be under Muslim rule, though in the end, of course, it is the whole world which “Islam must dominate” and where Islam “is not to be dominated.”
In Iraq, the Sunnis are not to be easily tamed, if at all, by the Shi’a or by Iran. Some commentators appear to suggest, without any evidence, that “Iran will take over” as soon as we leave. Nonsense. The headache of the determined Sunni resistance will now be entirely the headache of Iran. And furthermore, the Iraqi Shi’a, or many of them, are not prepared to necessarily turn Iraq, or the part they control, over to the “Persians.” The assumption that there are necessarily smooth relations between Arab Shi’a and Persian Shi’a, especially when there are all kinds of potential points of dispute, is false. How exactly would “Iranian” influence, for example, be used to stifle possible sympathies by the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq for the Shi’a Arabs of Khuzistan? And is it inconceivable that the Shi’a Arabs of Khuzistan might wish to be free of Iran in order to unite with the Shi’a of Iraq?
There are all kinds of possibilities, of shifts and shape-shifting, that those who tell us we must stay because “otherwise Iran will take over” refuse to consider. They also appear to think that the American public will remain endlessly patient, and that American soldiers will remain unaffected by this fool’s errand. Those soldiers are themselves are being asked to bear the entire burden of a foolish policy. They know better than anyone the meretriciousness, the lack of national feeling, and the hostility hidden or revealed toward them as Infidels by virtually the entire ungrateful population of Arabs in Iraq. The Kurds are a different matter, and for reasons that go beyond their regarding the Americans as their protector — reasons that include their other non-Arab identity, which plays against Islam, while the Arab identity reinforces Islam. That is what such people as McCain (whose disastrous choice of an adviser, Robert Kagan, is a mistake on the level with John Edwards’s disastrous choice of Bonior for his campaign) appear to think, swallowing the Party Line of the Bush Administration whole.
Iraq can work to the benefit of the Camp of Infidels. It contains a mix of hostilities, rivalries, hatreds among different groups of Muslims. It is madness for the Americans to worry about “Iran taking over.” It cannot happen. Or rather, Iran has already taken over, in a sense, what it can, and now it is time to let the Sunni Arabs inside Iraq, but supported by the Sunni Arabs outside, do whatever they intend to do in order to preserve their position, and to allow the Shi’a Arabs to do whatever it is they will do in turn.
It is not time to follow the siren song of Brent Scowcroft, as he tells us we, the Americans, cannot “leave Iraq” now, because that is what the Sunni Arabs have been telling him and so many others who are perhaps just as eager — if such is possible — to serve, like Scowcroft, as an unfailing mouthpiece for those Sunni Arabs, “our friends in the region.”