Iran and the Bush wars

Bob Dreyfuss in his old TomPaine.com blog used to say that the Bush administration was pursuing a blatantly pro-Shi'a policy in the Middle East, seeing the Shi'a as a major American ally.

I still think he was overstating the case.  But in terms of the actual outcome, it's hard to ignore this:  Gulf actions of U.S. prove boon to Iran by Michael Hill Baltimore Sun 05/29/05.

"It's a very odd outcome," says Shibley Telhami, professor for Peace and Development at the Univeristy of Maryland, College Park. "I don't think the administration ever thought we would be where we are today."

Where we are is not only were Iran's enemies vanquished by the U.S.-led forces, but the government now in power in Baghdad has longstanding ties to Iran, turning those former enemies into potentially strong allies.

"Iraq was the major competitor with Iran in the Persian Gulf," Telhami says. "The intentional strategy of the United States for decades was to maintain that balance of power, not to allow one of them to dominate, to use one against the other.

"What you have now is Iraq really disappearing as a strategic player in the gulf for the foreseeable future," he says. "It will not be able to threaten anyone militarily. And that leaves Iran as the sole power in the gulf, except for the American military presence."

Iran certainly does not dismiss that, especially with Washington's threatening denunciations of Iran's nuclear program. But for now, U.S. forces are tied down by the insurgency in Iraq and probably not able to take on any more military adventures.

That is the fine line Iran must walk: taking steps that will get the U.S. troops out of the region, but not freeing those troops up so they could be used against Iran.

With a friendly government now in Iraq, and with the previously hostile government of the Taliban in Afghanistan out of power for the last three and a half years (though not gone), Iran's security situation on its borders looks considerably better than it did when the Scalia Five first installed Dubya as president.  The Taliban were a hardline Sunni group.  Saddam Hussein's Baathist government was secular, though he had promoted a more Sunni Islamic image for his last decade or so in power.