Who Won Iraq? Everyone that stayed out

[BurtWorm]

But mostly Iran. From The War Nerd:

http://www.exile.ru/2007-May-04/war_nerd.html


By Gary Brecher ( [e-mail] )

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FRESNO, CA -- A funny thing happened on the floor of the Senate last week. Somebody asked a serious question: "If the war in Iraq is lost, then who won?"

Of course Sen. Lindsay Graham, the guy who asked the question, didn't mean it to be serious. He was just scoring points off Harry Reid, the world's only Democratic Mormon. Reid had made a "gaffe" by saying in public what everybody already knows: "The war in Iraq is lost." When you say something obviously true in politics, it's called a "gaffe."

...

But let's take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I've already said that Dick Cheney's DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole. My theory is that they took a fiery young Revolutionary Guard from the slums of Tehran, dipped him in a vat of lye to get that pale, pasty Anglo skin, zapped his scalp for that authentic bald CEO look, squirted a quart of cholesterol into his arteries so he'd develop classic American cardiac disease, and parachuted him into the outskirts of some Wyoming town. And that's how our VP was born again, a half-frozen zombie with sagebrush twigs in his jumpsuit, stumbling into the first all-night coffee shop in Casper talking American with a Persian accent: "Hello my friends! Er, I mean, hello my fellow Americans! Coffee? I will have coffee at once, indeed, and is not free enterprise a glorious thing? Say, O brethren of the frosty tundra, what do you say we finish our donuts and march on Baghdad now, this very moment, to remove the Baathist abomination Saddam?"

...


The situation in Iraq right now is optimum for Iran. Iraq is like a nuclear reactor that they can control by inserting and removing control rods. If Shia/Sunni violence looks like cooling off, Tehran's agents, who've penetrated both sides of the fight, play the hothead in their assigned Sunni or Shia gangs and lobby for a spectacular attack on enemy civvies or shrines - whatever gets the locals' blood up. Then, if things get too hot, which would mean the U.S. getting fed up and leaving, they drop a control rod into the reactor core by telling Sadr to call off his militia or letting the Maliki regime stage some ceremony for the TV crews, the kind that keeps the Bushies back in Ohio convinced it's all going to come out fine.

They need to keep us there, because - makes me sick to say it but it's true - our troops are now the biggest, strongest control rod the Persians are using to set the temperature of this war. They want us there as long as possible, stoking the feuds and making sure nobody wins. That's what we just did under Petraeus: switched sides, Shia to Sunni, because the Shia were getting too strong. Yeah, God forbid we should be unfair to the Sunnis, God forbid we should do anything to let somebody win. Let's just make Tehran happy by keeping the feud going another few centuries.

....


<A lot more interesting points at the link>

[Kelly Rupert]

1. Certainly Iran, but they hardly "stayed out."

[BurtWorm]

2. Where are the Iranian Republic Guard members risking their necks?

Iran may be in, but they're in in a less self-destructive way than the US is in.

[Kelly Rupert]

3. There's quite a few IRGC in Iraq,

mostly training and advising Shi'a militias. They're using a softer, more intelligent type of power, but they're still quite involved.

[BurtWorm]

4. Are you sure about that?

I haven't seen any definitive statements about their presence in Iraq. If they're there, they're not present in the numbers Americans are there. They're not sitting ducks, for sure.


PS: This article doesn't argue that Iran is not in Iraq anyway. His argument is that Iran is able to play Iraq (and the US) by using what they have at their disposal. The subtitle to the article, however, is an ironic tip of the hat to all parties that knew enough to steer clear of Iraq in 2003 and since.

[Kelly Rupert]

5. Yes.

Though of course they're not several-hundred-thousand-strong. The Quds force only numbers a couple thousands, and they're also involved in Lebanon and Chechnya. But Iran is certainly playing the same game we are; they're just playing it smarter.

[BurtWorm]

6. Then they're not paying the same game we are.

We don't know what the rules or objective are. I'm betting they have their own rules and objective.

[Bucky]

7. I tend to believe this, but do you have a citation?

They'd be idiots not to protect their allies. The army war gaming of the Iraq invasion that took place in 1999 pretty much predicted that a regime change invasion of Iraq would lead to civil war, rising terrorism, and proxy fights by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Syria trying to control the oily portions of Iraq.

Of course the 1999 war game assumed 400,000 coalition troops and a broad NATO coalition supporting the invasion.

[BurtWorm]

9. Rumsfeld made the claim two years ago, and the Bushists have continued claiming it.

I've never seen anyone showing it definitively. The raid on the Iranian building in Arbil in February was supposedly to capture one of the top members of the Quds brigade in Iraq (guess how top :eyes: ) but it failed.

I think it's just assumed their operating in Iraq. Unless Kelly has something more concrete to share?

[alstephenson]

8. Who won the war in Iraq??? NOBODY!!! eom

[TahitiNut]

13. Exactly. It's not a zero-sum game; it's a negative-sum game. It's lose-lose.

There is no "win-lose" in war ... everybody loses. Only the war profiteers see a "win" when others die and lose limbs to enrich a few.

Halliburton "won." Exxon-Mobil "won." Human beings lost.

[BurtWorm]

10. kick

[mdmc]

11. thanks for the link / OP

:kick:

[LynnTheDem]

12. The really BIG winner is

Osama bin Laden.

Just as so many experts warned.