Greatest foreign policy blunder – ever

Some excerpts from an insightful article by Prof. Juan Cole about the fiasco in Iraq. We have lost, as we cannot win. The Bushies can spin all they want – but the facts remain evident. The winners are Shiite Muslims and the Islamic theocracy they embody. Rather than creating a democracy, we created another Iran.

“The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq, however, was a witches’ brew of dynamic social and religious movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he blew off the lid.”
“The real winners of the January 2005 elections were the Shiite religious parties. This was bad news for Bush... Sunni Arabs from the rival branch of Islam were largely excluded from the new government, insofar as they had either boycotted the election or had been unable to vote for security reasons.”
“The dominance of the central legislature and the executive by religious Shiites gave Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani great moral authority over the drafting of the permanent constitution... The Shiites inserted a provision that no legislation could be passed by parliament that contravened the established laws of Islam, and made provisions for Muslim clerics to be appointed to the judiciary.”
“The Bush administration trumpeted its bestowal of democracy in the region, but most Middle Eastern observers saw only the installation of a new Shiite power.”
“The hawks in the Bush administration had initially hoped that a conquered Iraq would form the launching pad for a further American war on Iran.”
“An Iraq dominated by religious Shiites who had often lived in exile in Iran for decades is inevitably an Iraq with warm relations with Tehran. The U.S., bogged down in a military quagmire in the Sunni Arab regions, cannot afford to provoke massive demonstrations and uprisings in the Shiite areas of Iraq by attacking Iran. Bush has inadvertently strengthened Iran, giving it a new, religious Shiite ally in the Gulf region... Far from weakening or overthrowing the ayatollahs, Bush has ensconced and strengthened them. Indeed, by chasing after imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he may have lost any real opportunity to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon should it decide to do so.”
“The real winners of the Iraq war are the Shiites.”
Posted on The Human Stain