TAPPED: December 2004 Archives: DON'T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED. The Washington Post's David Ignatius writes "How Iran is Winning in Iraq":
If you had asked an intelligence analyst two years ago to describe the worst possible political outcome following an American invasion of Iraq, he might well have answered that it would be a regime dominated by conservative Shiite Muslim clerics with links to neighboring Iran. But just such a regime now seems likely to emerge after Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. . . . [F]uture historians will wonder how it happened that the United States came halfway around the world, suffered more than 1,200 dead and spent $200 billion to help install an Iraqi government whose key leaders were trained in Iran. Our Iraq policy may be full of good intentions, but in terms of strategy, it is a riderless horse.
I would never hold a single columnist responsible for the situation, but writings like "Possibilities of a New Iraq" by David Ignatius on October 7, 2002 surely played a role here:
Many analysts warn of the disasters that await in this postwar Iraq, but frankly I'm not convinced. . . . And the talk of Iraq's internecine strife is overblown, too. The long-repressed Shiite community forms a majority of its population, which leads some analysts to fear Shiites will create a radical Muslim regime. But the Shiites of Iraq are Arabs who stayed loyal to Hussein through nearly a decade of war against the Persians of Iran. Iraq's Shiite elite has been the country's leading modernizers, supplying more than their share of scientists and engineers.
This notwithstandig, Ignatius chooses to blame "ethicists in San Francisco" for the current situation. Somehow, I'm not buying it.
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