When President Barak Obama decided on an early withdrawal from Iraq, neither he, nor other members of his Administration seemed to have realized that they would be creating another client state for Iran. Even the Iranians are not Arabs, they and the Iraqis are Shia, a small island in the middle of a Sunni ocean. An alliance of Iran and Iraq would render the United States investment in Iraq, including many American lives, a wasted venture, since rather than a democracy, Iraq, like Iran, will emerge as an Islamic regime. Al Maliki last visit to Iran can be summed up in the following manner:
Iran’s first vice president Mohammed Ridha Rihaimi said that if Tehran and Baghdad were to create an alliance, they will “form a great international power,” the Iranian Mehr News Agency reported on Sunday.
Rihaimi’s comments came after a meeting with Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki during his two-day visit to Tehran.
As the Syrian revolt is progressing, an overthrow of Assad would leave a vacuum in Iran’s arsenal of client states that allows it to control the Mediterranean part of the Arab Middle East. With Assad in power Iran was able to use Syria as a conduit to its Hezbollah, and Hamas surrogates, and to have a great deal of influence on future development in the region. If, or rather when, Assad falls, Iran would have a vacuum in the area which it trying to fill by recruiting Iraq. Additionally, Iraq offers N additional advantage of Syria due to religious compatibility.
President George W. Bush, with the primary intention of disposing of Saddam Hussein, and with a second goal of democratization of Iraq, seemed to have neglected to consider the fact that in order to remove Islamic fundamentalism, much larger commitment to the Iraqi effort should have been made at the onset. The flawed approach which was contrary to the advice from the then Chief of the Army staff, General Eric Shineski, left Iraq vulnerable, causing the Obama Administration that followed President Bush, which was unable, or unwilling, to save the effort that would have been required in order to keep Iraq from becoming a religious-autocracy replacing the Saddam Hussein political-autocracy.
In Iraq United States ill-conceived effort would cause a reshaping of the Middle East in a way that it was never intended, nor desired. It is likely that the one country of the Arab world that the United States left on its own, Syria, is the Arab nation to become democratic, a new Syria could very possibly become the hub to stabilizing the region with a viable peace treaty with Israel, the only other regional democracy.
