Peter Galbraith

Peter Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, and current critic of the U.S. Iraq policy, has written a great article for the Asia Times Online.

The scale of the US miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neo-conservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shi'ites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shi'ites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the Shi'ite religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western". Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shi'ites are Arabs and the Iranian Shi'ites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality. Iran's bond with the Iraqi Shi'ites goes far beyond the support Iran gave Shi'ite leaders in their struggle with Saddam. Decades of oppression have made their religious identity more important to Iraqi Shi'ites than their Arab ethnic identity. (Also, many Iraqi Shi'ites have Turkoman, Persian or Kurdish ancestors.) While Sunnis identify with the Arab world, Iraqi Shi'ites identify with the Shi'ite world, and for many this means Iran. - Peter Galbraith

(h/t Pat Lang)