Fighting Our Allies, Actually

There's really a cross purposes going on with respect to our relations with Iran. On the one hand, the Cheney faction in the White House clearly wants to bomb them. They've been imputing all sorts of negative actions to them inside Iraq, and today we learned that the military has constructed an attack plan and sent a second aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the planning is being driven by what one officer called the "increasingly hostile role" Iran is playing in Iraq - smuggling weapons into Iraq for use against American troops.

"What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq," said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

And yet...

Iran is intervening on the side of the Maliki government that America backs in their fight against Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army. Sadr spokesmen are tying Iran to the United States, saying both want to control Iraq. An Iranian general who commands the Quds Force is a powerful maneuvering force inside Iraq, and he's in cahoots with senior Iraqi leaders and the security forces. Even while Americans are charging the general with malign influence, he's backing the same folks we're backing.

So we're going to go to war with Iran because they're supporting the same politicians that we are in Iraq?

Incidentally, the Iraqis have stepped into this fight on the side of IRAN. And I think this passage shows how much of a tangle this whole thing is.

Baghdad says it agrees with the United States that Iran has continued to supply weapons to anti-government militants in southern Iraq, including arms with markings indicating they were produced this year. On the other hand, the Iraqi government seems eager to send a message to the Bush administration to back off threats of military action and allow Baghdad to pursue diplomatic solutions more quietly with Tehran.

"We are worried about any escalation between the United States and Iran for a simple reason: We are the weakest party in this game," said Sadiq Rikabi, an advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. "Our policy for our neighbors is to go to them, face to face, speak with them in a planned, frank and direct way about any problem."

In recent days, Iraq's government has followed the United States in stepping up claims that new Iranian-made weapons have been found in the southern city of Basra. The allegations appear to come at a convenient time for both the Shiite-led Iraqi government and its ally, the United States.

With Baghdad still suffering the violent aftereffects of Maliki's offensive against Shiite militias last month, Iranian interference would help explain why Iraqi and U.S. forces have been unable to bring the fighting to a standstill. In the latest clashes, four U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in two separate rocket and mortar attacks in Baghdad.

At the same time, Iranian involvement allows U.S. officials to deflect blame for the fighting from radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, whom they are counting on to sustain a frayed but officially intact truce he called in August for his Mahdi Army militia. Though privately many soldiers here say the Mahdi militia is involved in the current fighting, publicly, the allegation is that "special groups" who have broken away from Sadr and receive training and aid from Iran are causing the troubles.

So the US can keep firebombing Sadr City, killing scores of civilians, while blaming it on the Iranians, and the Iraqi government can keep up the fiction to maintain needed US support while double-dealing with Iran at the same time. What a bunch of kabuki theater.

It's be nice if the Democrats running for President remembered there was a world out there and called out these tactics in the Middle East. There is no reason for us to be intervening in the internal political struggles between Shiites inside Iraq. And especially when the goal is to gin up a war with Iran that would be catastrophic in TWO countries, as Iraq would melt down as a consequence as well.