People Who Have a Better Grasp of Iraq than John McCain
By Everyone in the Middle East, apparently, but particularly the Saudis:
The administration has long tried in vain to build Arab diplomatic and economic support for the Iraqi government. But the Arabs, led by Saudi Arabia, consider Shiite Iran a competitor for regional dominance and have rejected Maliki as “a stooge for Tehran,” as one U.S. official called him.
“The Saudis appear to feel that the current Iraqi government is pretty much in thrall to Iran,” said a State Department official involved in Middle East policy. The administration’s hope, “in the wake of Maliki’s decisions on Basra,” the official said, “is that the Saudis will take a step back and take another look.”
Right; they’ll step back, take another look, and note that Maliki is an inept stooge for Tehran.
In a news conference Thursday, Crocker dismissed Arab concerns about a recent visit to Baghdad by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “It’s not the fact of the Ahmadinejad visit, but the absence of visits by other neighbors that it’s important to focus on. There hasn’t been a single visit, even by an Arab cabinet minister, to Baghdad. As Iraq grapples with the challenges Iran is posing, it could certainly do with some Arab support.”
It was obvious to everyone with two brain cells to rub together that the invasion of Iraq might work to the significant advantage of Iran. It became obvious later that US policy in Iraq reconstruction was making this possibility a reality. The only people who don’t understand this are either willfully blind or catastrophically stupid. The idea that Maliki, tightly connected to Iran, might score points with the Saudis by going after a militia marginally less tightly connected with Iran is pure fantasy.