Iran continues to rot


Afghanistan hit the public radar this past week with the announcement that U.S troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2016.

What will conditions in the country be like? Worse than they are now.

Iran, meanwhile, continues to deteriorate, as Prime Minister Nouri Maliki consolidates power and continues to drive toward a Shiite-dominated monopoly on power. It's no surprise that there is serious Sunni opposition, nor is it shocking that al Qaeda related groups are on the upswing. Meanwhile, the level of corruption is stunning, and the country's economy - despite resurgent oil production - makes the Great Depression look like boom times.

Iran is the beneficiary and to some extent the instigator of all this. In many ways Maliki, who received training there during Saddam's days, is simply a vassal.

Dexter Filkins' report on Iraq in the New Yorker is a few months old now, but as relevant as ever. Here he is referring to the decision in 2011 by the Obama White House to bless Maliki's power grab. (The "meeting" in the sections is a reference to a deal involving corruption and the effective dismissal of U.S. forces from the country, which helped the Iranians extend their influence, and at least arguably assisted Maliki as well.)

The U.S. obtained a transcript of the meeting, and knew the exact terms of the agreement. Yet it decided not to contest Iran’s interference. At a meeting of the National Security Council a month later, the White House signed off on the new regime. Officials who had spent much of the previous decade trying to secure American interests in the country were outraged. “We lost four thousand five hundred Americans only to let the Iranians dictate the outcome of the war? To result in strategic defeat?” the former American diplomat told me. “Fuck that.” At least one U.S. diplomat in Baghdad resigned in protest. And Ayad Allawi, the secular Iraqi leader who captured the most votes, was deeply embittered. “I needed American support,” he told me last summer. “But they wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians. Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony.”

It's no wonder that many Sunni Iraqis hate the present government. The next development will most likely be an active move against the Kurds in the north; that will provoke an even more bitter civil war than the one currently raging there.