Iraq's new friend

The Bush administration has lost the war in Iraq. We reported here and over at Running Scared how Iraq's Shiite controlled government was signing pacts and making friends with Shiite Iran. Yes the Axis of Evil Iran. The coverage of this has at best been sparse in the corporate media but Robert Scheer discusses it today in the LA Times.

On Sunday, George W. Bush's war against terror was turned upside down -- and this time the president might even notice. That's because when "our guys" in Iraq start firmly allying with an "axis of evil" nation, its got to ring some warning bells, no?

I am referring to the joint declaration issued in Tehran by the leaders of Iraq and Iran: "Today, we need a double and common effort to confront terrorism that may spread in the region and the world," said Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, visiting Iran along with 10 of his ministers, following a similar visit from his defense minister. The statement he and his Iranian counterparts produced heralds mutual cooperation between the two neighbors, which will include a cross-border oil pipeline, joint security proposals and shared intelligence information.

[.....]

Now, thanks to the U.S. invasion, a new alliance is being formed between Iran and Iraq that threatens to further destabilize the politics of the Mideast. It wasn't supposed to work out this way.

So how was it supposed to work?

Forced democratization of Iraq, according to its neocon architects, was supposed to secure oil for the U.S., protect Israel, open markets to Western corporations and, oh yeah, maybe even decrease terrorism. After the invasion, however, the U.S., faced with decidedly more hostility and fewer flowers than expected, was loath to allow elections, because their outcome would probably not produce a pliant government.

Then Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite religious leader, threatened to take his followers into the streets against the foreign occupation if one-person-one-vote elections were not allowed. And when it became clear the "wrong" guys might win the elections the U.S. was forced to hold, the Bush White House, according to an investigative article by Seymour Hersh in the current New Yorker, tried to buy the vote for former CIA asset Iyad Allawi.

When Allawi's slate was soundly defeated, what was Bush to do? With absolutely nothing having gone right in Iraq between the successful military invasion and the inspiring election nearly two years later, he had no choice but to embrace the winners -- mostly Shiite, mostly fundamentalists -- as the saviors of a free and democratic Iraq.

The neocon's dreams for Iraq have turned out to be just that, delusional dreams. Uncounted thousands Iraqis have died, close to 2000 of America's finest have died and the treasury of the US has been looted, all to expand George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil".

This new Shiite Axis represents not only a threat to the United States and the West but will be seen as a threat by the non Shiia neighbors of Iraq and Iran. In addition it has guaranteed a continued insurgency by Iraq's Sunni minority.

The fact that the US did not have the resources to stop the insurgency contributed to the creation of this alliance.

Over the weekend, more than 100 people were killed by suicide bombers. Sistani himself denounced what he ominously said was now a "genocidal war."

Facing that hideous possibility, is it surprising to find the Iraqi government looking for help from powerful Iran? No, but it certainly poses a problem for the White House, which now finds itself putting American soldiers' lives on the line every day to prop up an active ally of the country that we claim, with some plausibility, funds anti-Israeli and other terror groups and is bent on making its own nuclear bomb.

Can there be any doubt that the Bush administration lost the war? I don't think so and it's time to admit as much and bring our troops home now. Even sensible hawks will have to admit as much.

Update
Bill in DC just sent me this from the New York Review of Books, Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic. Check it out. I will comment on it later.