Such is America’s strategic disarray in Iraq that the Obama Administration has come up with a new version of an old idea—court Iran as an ally. So in order to defeat Sunni extremists who want to form a potentially terrorist state, we are going to get in bed with a terrorist-sponsoring Shiite regime that wants to dominate the Middle East.
“Let’s see what Iran might or might not be willing to do before we start making any pronouncements,” Secretary of State John Kerry told Yahoo News on Monday in discussing a rapprochement with the mullahs. “I think we are open to any constructive process here that could minimize the violence, hold Iraq together—the integrity of the country—and eliminate the presence of outside terrorist forces that are ripping it apart.”
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The mullahs must be astonished at their strategic good fortune. A year ago they were isolated by global sanctions and scrambling to save their endangered client Bashar Assad in Syria. Then President Obama agreed to spare Assad’s airfields from bombing in return for promising to give up his chemical arms. The chemicals aren’t all gone, but Assad has used the reprieve to retake much of the country.
Now the sanctions on Iran have been eased as part of nuclear talks, and the U.S. is negotiating to be the air force for Iran’s Quds Force that is helping to prop up the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This is the same Quds Force that fashioned the deadly roadside bombs that killed so many Americans after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is the same Quds Force that arms Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel, and the same Quds Force that planned to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. In last year’s report on “state sponsors of terrorism,” Mr. Kerry’s State Department noted that the Quds Force “is the [Iran] regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad.”
America does have an interest in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, that has captured much of Sunni Iraq. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. has shared interests with Iran in the region. The mullahs consider America the “great Satan” for a reason. The U.S. lost 4,489 troops and spent billions of dollars to make Iraq a unitary, Western-leaning and independent state. Iran wants the Shiite portions of Iraq as a satrapy.