While America bleeds in Iraq, Iran is winning the Middle East

It really is amazing how utterly incompetently the Bush administration and its' NeoCon thinkers have so totally mishandled the Middle East since Bush took office. This is from Georgie Anne Geyer.

To put it simply, the "Iran crisis" of August 2005 is really about how, with American power mired in the quicksand of Iraq, Iran has been moving to become an aggressive, and perhaps the major, power in the Middle East. The unspeakable ignorance of this administration about the history and culture of the region has finally caught up with it.

First, the surface story:

The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a rank conservative who was probably one of the American hostages' captors in 1979, this week made it clear again that Iran wants to generate electricity through nuclear power, which is legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the United States, along with most of the European states, fears that Iran is really after nuclear weapons and has so deceived inspectors for years about its activities that it has forfeited its right to the innocent electricity program.

Then the dangerous subtext:

While America has been so dangerously and wastefully tied down in Iraq, Iran has been moving to form the diplomatic, political and military imprint of a kind of "Shiite Internationale" among the region's Shia populations. This would take in all the followers of the Shia sect of Islam, from the 60 percent of Iraq, to the oil-rich eastern regions of Saudi Arabia, to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrilla/political control of Lebanon.

Two of our most sagacious analysts of the area, Larry Johnson and Patrick Lang, both with years of apt experience in these areas, sent out an e-mail to their colleagues this week outlining the situation. It read:

"Iran, if things continue to go its way, finds itself on the threshold of controlling vast oil resources that stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean ... Iran is well on its way to achieving de facto control of significant portions of Iraq. Teheran is backing Shia cleric the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (a Persian, not an Arab) and the radical Muqtada al-Sadr. The Iranians are funneling money and training to supporters inside Iraq. The Iraqi Shia control the political process and comprise the majority of the security forces ... Iran is in a dominant position in Lebanon. The murder earlier this year of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has left Lebanon under the de facto military guard of Hezbollah. Iran remains the main benefactor, supporter and adviser to Hezbollah ..."

In fact, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way this week to accuse Iran of, at the very least, allowing weapons, especially deadly IEDs, or "improvised explosive devices," to be exported to insurgents in Iraq.

The odd thing is that Iran, not Iraq, was always the primary target of the neocon group that so distorted American policy after 9/11, in part because Iran was seen as the primary enemy of Israel; but Iraq seemed easier to them.

This is an excellent description of how badly the NeoCon obsession with invading Iraq has played into the hands of the Persians.

But this story does one thing I have seen nowhere else. It provides a reasonable explanation of why we preemptively invaded Iraq in the first place. The Bush administration and NeoCons were really after Iran, but Iraq was easier to attack.

Note that I said "explanation", not "justification." They knew that they could never sell an attack on Iraq based on using it to get at Iran. So they ginned up stories of WMD and terrorist connections.

The result is that American and Iraq have lost, Iran has won, and the NeoCons have placed America into a distinctly worse position in the Middle East from which we will not recover for at least a generation.