U.S. military officials finally laid out detailed evidence on Sunday that Iranian-supplied weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq. The issue now is the lesson the Bush Administration and the American political establishment draw about dealing with Iran.
Our guess is that a large part of Washington will pretend the evidence doesn't exist, or suggest the intelligence isn't proven, or claim that it's all the Bush Administration's fault for "bullying" Iran. This was the impulse behind the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendation late last year that the U.S. "engage" Tehran to help us find some honorable diplomatic or political solution in Iraq.
What strikes me about this is the underlying assumption that the fact that Iranian supplied weapons are surfacing in the conflict is somehow not tied intimately to the chaos that we've unleashed in the region. In this powerful Washington Post editorial, William E. Odom, former Reagan NSA director, runs down the reality of the situation in Iraq as it stands right now. He points out the fallacy of treating the destabilizing effects of Iranian elements as somehow independent of our own actions and more interestingly, our stated goals. He debunks a list of assumptions about the our involvement, in particular:
2.We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.
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