Why Iran Is America’s Best New Partner in the Middle East

Sometimes we must form alliances with unpleasant nations to prevent something worse.

By Fred Kaplan


Iraqi security forces patrol an area near the borders between Karbala and Anbar provinces on June 16, 2014.
Photo by stringer/Reuters


It’s stunning that, as we witness the spectacle of a crumbling Iraq and wonder what to do about it, the media turn for wisdom to the junkyard oracles who helped spawn the mess to begin with.

Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer—no one should care a whit what they think, they’ve been so consistently wrong about everything. (As the first U.S. proconsul in post-Saddam Iraq, Bremer issued two directives—abolishing the Iraqi army and ousting all Baathists from government jobs—that had the effect of fueling the Sunni insurgency, prolonging the war, and siring the jihadist movement that’s causing trouble today.) Yet there they are, granted airtime not on Fox News but the three major networks, spouting advice to President Obama on how to fix things.

In Monday’s New York Times, Jason Horowitz has a jaw-droppingly fawning profile of historian Robert Kagan, author of a long essay in the New Republic that criticizes Obama for abandoning what he sees as America’s mission to spread democracy around the world. Horowitz suggests that the crisis in Iraq vindicates Kagan’s critique. Alternative views are barely acknowledged. Incisive reviews of Kagan’s New Republic piece, by serious foreign-policy analysts, go unmentioned. Nor does the article (and this is an article in the news section of the paper) recite Kagan’s record as a front-line cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq (and for the use of military force in nearly every crisis) or his assurances, throughout the war, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Certainly this new crisis in Iraq is serious. It is not in U.S. interests for a well-armed, well-funded jihadist group like the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria to fulfill its self-proclaimed destiny, i.e., to create an Islamist state that spans Iraq and Syria. The question is how to stop this from happening and what role, if any, the United States should play in the stopping.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/06/iran_is_america_s_new_partner_in_iraq_the_united_states_must_make_alliances.html