From Axis of Evil to Exit Door for Weasels

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In any case, things have obviously turned out worse than the bleakest initial projections. We are now witnessing the end game. Which brings us to Iran – a former founding member of the axis of evil – now elevated to a partner in designing an exit strategy with the neocon weasels who orchestrated this war of choice.

All the exit signs point to Tehran. The Bush administration is now resigned to the fact that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution is likely to win the elections on January 30. For the record, the SCIRI was established in Tehran two decades ago and continues to be financed by Iran. Along with Hezb al-Daawa al-Islamiyya - the other major Shiite political party - the SCIRI is part of the Iraqi Unified Alliance which will enter the elections with a slate of candidates that includes the famed embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, the resurrected neocon favorite. To his credit, Chalabi was quite gallant in taking the fall for the ‘intelligence failure’ scam.

It wasn’t so long ago that Bush volunteered to ‘piss on Chalabi’. But these days, Chalabi can be found shuttling between Tehran and Baghdad as an intermediary between Iran and the Bush administration. It is now considered polite conversation for the Bushies to talk about constructive engagement and détente with Tehran. As a good will gesture – Halliburton just signed a deal for a giant gas field project in Iran. The Iranian nuclear file has been handed over to the Europeans and the abrasive John Bolton has been ushered out of the State Department. It is worth noting that the Israelis are no longer making noises about launching strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Also worth noting is that the blame for the insurgency has shifted from Iran to Syria.

The Iranians have already proven their ability to deliver. With the insurgency growing in strength, Tehran has played a pivotal role in keeping the Shiites out of the fray. They have also shown flexibility in dealing with the Europeans by accepting international supervision for their nuclear projects.

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This strikes me as the sort of thing likely to happen anyway, whatever the intentions of anyone currently in Washington. It is certainly, in outline, what Iran has been playing for for a long time. With the shattering of the central power locus in Baghdad, the disintigration of Iraq has the same sort of inevitability about it, in the long view, that the dissolution of Yugoslavia did after Tito died. Iran is the strongest power in the region, being the most sizeable by far, and has a natural attraction both to, and for, the sizeable Shi'ite fraction of that land. That area has, throughout history, been ruled much more often than not from Persia than otherwise.

If our current regime is conciously playing along with such a development, it will be the first sign of sense about the world thay have been playing at "Boys' Own Adventure" in yet displayed. It is not really a desireable outcome, at least not in the sense that anyone with a shred of sense would have moved a mighty expeditionary force to bring it about, but by compare to the chaos already created, and the greater chaos clearly looming, it has the charm of being practical and sustainable, and of leaving the dirty work in the hands of someone else: that last being the philosopher's stone of statesmen through the ages.

For there will be dirty work. A Shia dominated Iraq will have to suppress the Sunni, for they will rebel against it, and it will have to contain the Kurds, for they will seek real autonomy for themselves, and other nations in the region are dead set against that development. The Iranians will be happy to do both, having no love for the Sunni, and being one of the nations concerned about the detachment of its own Kurdish region into an independent Kurdistan.

"That place was a pile of crockery balanced on a broomstick, and the right thing to do with that is to walk softly around it, a little outside the length of the broomstick."

I was getting a bit of cognitive disconnect from listening to all the
blather about how we are going to attack Iran, and yet finding that this
argument makes a good deal of sense and coincides with certain facts.

Of course making sense and coinciding with facts are not among the
Shrubites strong points, but it's nice of you to confirm I'm not nuts.

I guess we'll have to watch the show to see how it comes out.

Regards.

One of the central tenets of old Chinese thought on governance is that the character of the ruler spreads throughout the world beneath him, and cognitive dissonance seems to be the central trait of this one....