Our goal of bringing democracy to Iraq, while worthy, is unattainable. The Shiite clerics won't stand for it.
The clerics, who have taken on the same titles as those used by the Iranian Shiite clerics when they toppled the Shah, have won the elections.
The grand titles being used in Iraq right after the elections, "Ayatollah of the Revolutionary Islamic Council," for example, should have some people in Washington sitting up and taking notice. The Iranians already have visited the newly elected clerics, and it will be but a short time before some agreements between the two countries are formalized.
Washington persists in seeing Iraq as, well, full of just Iraqis.
Washington doesn't differentiate between the religious sects in Iraq, nor does it understand that the concept of a state called "Iraq" was arbitrarily devised by the British and the French in the Balfour Declaration at the end of World War I as those two victors divided the spoils of war.
People in Iraq and Iran are Shiite first, and Iraqis and Iranians second.
Again we get the straight story from a man who actually knows the region of which he speaks instead of some simple-minded yahoo that thinks it's as easy as (to paraphrase George Carlin), "Here's some democracy, now cool it for awhile, will ya?!"
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